Feel Good. Live Longer. (?!)

I read a research review today with an unsurprising, though very encouraging, finding: “how healthy we feel is often a surprisingly good predictor of how long we’ll live — sometimes even better than clinical tests” (Craig, 2025). Just take a moment to let that sink in. There’s a lot of wisdom and communication going on in the way you feel.

The same review also expressed, “Doctors have long focused on what goes wrong in the body, because dysfunction is easier to describe and quantify than well-being.” I find this to be so often the case with how we consider mental/emotional health, as well. It’s often much easier for people to describe states of dis-ease than it is to share about what it’s like to be feeling “good.”

I think of it like I think about the news media: bad news sells. Good news stories get buried or relegated to page A-14 or the last 60 seconds of the program. We have learned to hone our skills for bad news headlines and to fill those expressions with lots of descriptive words and images. (It’s an understandable, if often unfortunate, trauma response.)

But feeling good? This takes practice! It takes practice to feel into the experience of feeling good, and it takes practice to stay with it. Oftentimes, sustaining pleasure is more challenging than sustaining pain. One theory suggests this is because we have less control in a pleasure state than in a pain state. Pleasure, by its very nature, requires us to surrender to one extent or another; pain doesn’t!

Core Energetics, the primary modality I use in my work, helps us reduce and release blocks to our wellbeing. These blocks live in our bodies and express themselves through our moods, relationships, and impacts on the world (as well as our physiology). We can proactively clear blocks and support the flow of our vitality through practices that integrate body, mind and spirit. We literally shift the way our life feels by shifting how our body feels. As one author expresses it in the subtitle of a book, it’s “the hard work miracle” (Johnson, 1985).

One option to explore this further is at an upcoming workshop I’m hosting here in Metro Detroit on Sep. 12-13: “Everybody Hurts: Your Pain as Pathway to a Meaningful Life.” As we shift how we relate to pain, we open up pathways to wellbeing, regardless of the presence of pain (and sometimes actually because of it!). We’ll also review and practice contemporary research findings for preventing and reducing pain. Sound good? Learn much more, if interested, at Workshops/Retreats | wbw4.

Works Cited:

Craig, David. J. (2025). The Secret Science Behind Feeling Great. Retrieve at The Secret Science Behind Feeling Great | Columbia Magazine

Johnson, Stephen M. (1985). Characterological Transformation: The Hard Work Miracle.