Psychological Vigor = Physical Energy + Mental Acuity + Emotional Well-Being

Ajouté : 2026-05-23

[00:00:01]Hey everybody, Dr. Shawn Talbott. Hey, I'm just sitting out here on my little patio looking at the Atlantic Ocean. I'm here in Lisbon, Portugal to start off the first day of the World Happiness Summit, WoHaSu, here in Lisbon for the next couple of days. Just having a cup of coffee, checking my notes, checking my emails.

[00:00:18]Nice that the that the coffee cup in my hotel room says, "Have a nice day."

[00:00:21]That's a great way to start off the day, especially when you're at a happiness summit. The other thing that was interesting is that the milk that I'm using in my coffee here in Portugal is called vigor. That's the brand name of the milk. And that's actually what I study. You know, when I say mental fitness, which is the title of my last book, or I say mental wellness, which is what we call [clears throat] our coaches, certified mental wellness coaches, mental wellness was actually the tagline of my last company. Um, what we're really talking about is is vigor.

[00:00:49]In positive psychology research, vigor is a very specific thing. It's a It's a It's a mood state that we can measure objectively, you know, with a lot of different lot of different kinds of surveys. So, what is vigor? Vigor is the combination of physical energy, mental acuity, and emotional well-being all wrapped up into one.

[00:01:10]In some ways, it's the opposite of burnout. So, you don't want to be burned out, you want to have vigor. And unfortunately, vigor is one of those things that a lot of people have just not felt in a long time. You know, if you're feeling blah, if you're feeling just kind of like in the mud, if you feel like you're stuck, you're probably experiencing low vigor. And it's not, you know, bringing back your energy, bringing back your focus, bringing back happiness is a piece of that, but it's not the whole idea. And that's really what I've been studying for the last 30 or so years is how can we improve vigor.

[00:01:44]And what I've found over those years is that it's biochemical. It's your cortisol, it's your inflammation, it's your neurotransmitters, it's your cytokines, and all of that are signals that go across your gut-brain axis. So, that's why I talk so much about the microbiome.

[00:02:00]It's why I talk about the gut as a second brain. It's why I talk about the heart as a third brain. It's why everything that we do in my course, in the products that I develop, in the education that I put out there, and what I'm going to do this weekend is really get people to understand that vigor comes from a multitude of different signaling pathways. And if we can think of the human body as this overall system and get that system to communicate more efficiently, that's what's what's going to lead us from burnout back to vigor.

[00:02:30]And if we can bring all those pieces together, what you end up getting people to experience is they feel like their old self. They feel younger again. They feel like things are going in the right direction, you know? And they they they feel like they want to feel. People want to have high vigor, and too many of us have not felt it for so long. So, that's what I'm here for. I'm going to be giving you updates over the next couple of days, okay? Tune in. Bye-bye.