I'm Rachel Martin. After hosting Morning Edition for years, I know that the news can wear you down.

So we made a new podcast called Wild Card, where a special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful.

It's part game show, part existential deep dive, and it is seriously fun.

Join me on Wild Card, wherever you get your podcast, only from NPR. Pushkin.

As a happiness expert, I'm used to speaking pretty openly about my own well-being. I often feel questions about my mental health from journalists, fellow

podcast hosts, and fans just like you. I'm happy to share the things that I

use to improve my well-being, but there is one comment I sometimes get in conversations like these that does bother me a bit.

Laurie, some interviewer will say, I bet you never struggle when it comes to improving your own well-being.

Um, I guess is my usual answer, but that's not strictly

true. So it's time to come clean on this one. You see I am an expert in

positive psychology and over the last few years I have made a lot of behavioral and mindset changes to improve my own happiness.

But there are still many, many things that I struggle with.

Just ask the people who know me best. I think it's a really

bad idea to talk about this stuff. Why? Because you think I'm really bad at happiness?

No, I think it's, think you put yourself under under so much

more pressure and feel so much worse about it than other people. This is

happiness lab co-writer and producer Ryan Dilly. You don't get to hear Ryan's

voice a lot on the show but he's the brains behind a lot of the stuff you hear on this podcast.

I've learned so much about happiness from doing this show, and I've tried to put it into practice, but like I'm much nicer to myself about it than you are. I mean, you know, you think that you have to be better than anybody else of this because you're the teacher and it's just a high bar for yourself.

But Ryan's not just my partner in all things happiness lab. He's also one of my oldest and dearest

friends. Isn't how we met quite a boring story? We met through a friend of a friend.

I know but we've known each other for like 26 years more than half my life and that's

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