This is the 10% happier podcast.

I'm Dan Harris.

Hey, everybody, depression, as we know, is a huge and debilitating problem, both on an

individual and on a societal level.

And it's gotten way worse during the pandemic.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is now one of the leading causes

of disability on the planet.

Today, we're going to talk about what my guest calls the opposite of depression.

She is a highly trained physician who was, by her own telling, quite suspicious at first

of a notion that she now embraces wholeheartedly, something called positive psychiatry.

I'll let her define it, but roughly speaking, it means focusing on the positive stuff in

the lives of her patients, rather than on just the pathologies.

And so what is the opposite of depression?

Her term is vitality.

She argues it's not the major life crises that wear us down.

It's the daily grind.

So in this interview, she's going to lay out a bunch of strategies for handling the daily

grind more effectively or to use her term how to ward off the vampires of vitality.

Dr. Samantha Bordman is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Wild Cornel Medical

College, which is also where she went to medical school and did her four-year residency

program. She later went back and got a master's degree in applied positive psychology at

the University of Pennsylvania.

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