I had the honor of being the keynote speaker at the 6th annual Wellbeing Think Tank conference in Portland, Oregon in February, 2026.  WTT is a nonprofit that shows organizations across all sectors how to create heathy, happy, and sustainable workplaces.  

I started my talk with a provocative statement: I don't believe in wellness.  

People leaned forward.  I was, after all, at a "wellness" conference.  

If you are "well" you can accomplish your activities of daily living: feeding, bathing, appointments.  "Well" means you are surviving. 

I do not think people should focus on being "well" because it sets the bar too low.  One misstep and you are unwell, and that's not good.  

In contrast to "wellness," my keynote described the biological foundation of thriving.  

People who are thriving are fully engaged in life, exceeding goals, and performing tasks with joy.  They socialize, exercise, and live with purpose.  If they hit a metaphorical road bump, as happens to all of us occasionally, they have sufficient capacity to avoid being "unwell" because of it.  Rather, they draw on social, emotional, and physical resources to resolve the problem and return to thriving.

In order to establish the biological slack to sustain one's health, I explained, people have to build up their physical and emotional fitness.  The physical foundation for thriving is well-known and I have written about these before: Eat a moderate amount of healthy food, get 7-8 hours sleep a night, and regularly perform moderately challenging exercise.  All this is well known.

But, there is a much new in that has been discovered in the science of thriving.  For exampl, my research has focused on measuring and giving people goals to build up their emotional fitness. Here's the key take-away: it's all biology. There is no physical/emotional division in your body.  There's just your body.  Your brain is an integrated part of your body, not an independent organ controlled by a "homunculus" pulling levers.  Rather, emotional states flow from brain to body and back without conscious control or even conscious awareness, proving the brain is embodied.  Butterflies in your stomach before a first date: that's the brain-to-body neurophysiologic flow we call emotion.  Dry mouth before your presentation on the big stage: that's the neurologic manifestation of the emotion of fear. It is all biology.

I am not rejecting psychology (hey, I even have friends who are psychologists), but in order to identify how to measure and improve emotional fitness, we need to get to the source of emotions which are deep in the evolutionarily old parts of the brain, well outside of conscious awareness.  This is why psychological surveys fail to show a particular and unique individual how he or she can improve thriving.  No matter how hard you try, you cannot make the unconscious conscious.  As a result, we are only faintly aware of our actual emotional states.  That's just not a thing the brain does.

Most readers of this blog know that over 15 years of scientific research, my lab discovered the brain network that values social-emotional experiences.  We named this network "Immersion" because people appear to get lost in peak Immersion experiences.  The human brain evolved to save energy by staying in "idle" mode much of the time, only devoting metabolic resources to experiences that are assessed as valuable.  Peak Immersion experiences are so important to humans that they provoke actions and create a desire to repeat these experiences.  This is why neurologic Immersion accurately predicts individual and market responses to ads, customer experiences and training, and why peak Immersion experiences drive up customer lifetime value.

Several years ago we asked another question: Do peak Immersion experiences improve people's ability to thrive?  People thrive when they have consistently high energy and positive mood so we knew which outcomes to measure.  We then ran studies measuring neurologic Immersion continuously every second for 8-10 hours a day for a sample of adults. Each morning we asked participants to assess the previous day's mood and energy.  Second-by-second neurologic Immersion identified positive moods and high energy with 99% and 98% accuracy.  This shows that Immersion is a neurologic marker of thriving. 

We then did more analysis to quantify how many peak Immersion experiences people need to increase positive moods and energy.  If successful, this analysis would give people a clear goal to increase thriving.  My former graduate student Sean Merritt used sophisticated statistical tools to discover the magic number of Key Moments needed to thrive was six.  We call these extraordinarily valuable experiences of persistent peak Immersion "Key Moments."   People who had six or more Key Moments day had increasing energy and positive moods.  Those who had four Key Moments maintained these thriving indicators, and people with three or few Key Moments had negative moods and low energy.  Their emotional fitness was falling and with it, their ability to thrive. Of course, we named the free app we released that continuously measures thriving SIX.

The short answer to how to thrive is six: People who are engaged with people, projects, and experiences that produce high neurologic value are building their capacity to thrive.  But, the lazy brain is not satisfied with the same old same old; we acclimate to what was once highly valued. What produced a Key Moment last month or last year become old hat, so to continue thrive, we need to do new things, meet new people, and go to new places.  We need challenges to grow.  

And, we need people to thrive.  The SIX data show about 80% of Key Moments are social.  The SIX app encourages users to share the number of Key Moments with friends and family.  It is an easy way to ensure that those we love are thriving along with us.  The easiest way to get a Key Moment is to do an activity with someone you care about.  A fun adventure alone might produce a Key Moment, but add a friend to an experience and the fun and the neural value surge.  

Thriving, it’s the next generation of wellness.  The basic version of SIX is free so try it today.  And, invite a friend to be on your journey to thriving today.