This article has your name written all over it if you find yourself in one of these camps:

A) You’re feeling a little bedraggled in the life department. You’ve lost that lively feeling (one might say your life is on life support?) and now find yourself bored, humdrum, and spiritless, just going through the motions in your life. No one has accused you of being “fun” lately.

B) You’re the “suck all the marrow out of life” kind of person, and while you’re annoying inspiring everyone in the wake of your new recipes and travels and articles and hard-to-pronounce new workouts, you’re always clamoring for more ways to feel alive.

C) You’re somewhere in between flatlining and all-hopped-up-toddler-in-a-candy-store. Some days are more vivacious than others, and you’re curious about the “rapture of being alive.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve captured all of us? That was my intention because everyone’s invited to the Vitality Bonfire Party! Yes, we are gathered around the brightly burning flame called vitality in this article. We’re here to metaphorically widen your life at this campfire full of sparks, starting with an awareness boost about what it really means to feel vitally alive and why it matters.

Widening your life with zestiness

You make your life wider when you stuff it with vitality and zest—expanding the breadth of the fun, the pleasure, all the experiences that life has to offer. Think of this on a horizontal scale that ranges from being in a Netflix coma on one end (blasé, listless, and eerily zombie-like), all the way over to winning the “A+ Participant in Life” ribbon on the other end (exuberant, playing all out, sampling the full smorgasbord of life’s pleasures, every-day-is-a-freaking-carnival!).

Vitality is officially defined as a positive sense of aliveness and energy. Some call it our “health of spirit,” which has an undeniably nice ring to it. Who doesn’t want a healthy spirit? Vitality has also been described as:

• Zest (a resounding interest in and experience of vitality),
• Psychological energy (a resource we can harness for valuable action),
• Vigor (the interconnected feelings of cognitive liveliness, emotional energy, and physical strength),
• Engagement (the potent cocktail of vigor, dedication, and absorption),
• Exuberance (joy’s more energetic cousin),
• Thriving (the marriage made in heaven of vitality and learning), and
• Passion (which some say is a survival mechanism that keeps us interested in life).

East Asians refer to vital force or spirit as “chi,” and the Japanese describe ki as a “fervor of vitality” . . . also known as the energy it takes to boil the lid off the top of a pot of cooking rice. Do you have enough ki to boil the lid off your proverbial pot? Our mission is to generate a lid popping fervor for life in you.

While there are no shortages of ways to describe this construct of feeling alive, Dr. Martin Seligman (yes, the Godfather of Positive Psychology) highlighted the need for a “rigorous psychology of positive energy and zest” in light of the integral role that zest plays in creating lives worth living. Cultivating the strength of zest—housed within a family of VIA character strengths and virtues called courage—helps us to approach our mortality with the energy and bravery required to connect to the versions of our lives that are greater than the one’s we’re currently living.

Hang on a hot sec; I don’t want you to miss that point.

It takes courage to live with zest.

As Seneca once said, “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.” 

Participating in life, with zest, sometimes requires us to bust out of our cozy comfort zones.

Why vitality is worth caring about, a lot

Why do we need to prioritize vitality and zest in our lives? Why prioritize vitality over any other noble “live the good life” thing to do, like making meaning or fastidiously filling out a gratitude journal every night? Because vitality plays a massive role in boosting our well-being, in creating a life worth living.

Embarking upon life wholeheartedly with anticipation and excitement, as though it was an adventure . . . this approach to living with zesty enthusiasm and energy predicts overall life satisfaction, work satisfaction, and the belief that our work is a calling.

Turkish researchers went through the statistical gymnastics to confirm that subjective vitality acts as the tide that lifts the boats of our subjective happiness: raise your sense of aliveness, and rise with the tides of happiness; ignore your vitality, and get shipwrecked in a low tide of unhappiness and misery. This subjective feeling of aliveness is a big deal for our personal well-being, because the polar opposite sure ain’t good . . . that subjective feeling of deadness.

Zest-filled people are also more likely to believe their lives are meaningful. When we’re operating in high-vitality mode, we’re more productive, more active, and perform better and with more persistence. Israeli graduate students were surveyed over two different time intervals about creative work involvement and feelings of vitality, revealing that employees with high vitality generate more creative thoughts and contribute more innovative solutions to problems.

Marty Seligman (the OG) has a strong opinion about zest. He’s clear from his research that zest is one of the character strengths most highly linked to life satisfaction. (Character strengths are positive traits associated with our personalities that influence how we think, feel, and act.) Having recently turned eighty, he’s also self-aware enough to know he’s not as zesty as he once was. “I just don’t have the same kind of vitality and stamina for intellectual things that I did thirty years ago,” he told me in a recent Zoom catch-up and then added that his antidote was a hobby that sparks vital aliveness in him: international bridge.

Of course I had to ask what that was about, why bridge brought the youthful zest out of him. He explained, “I’m still improving at bridge. [I’m] at the bottom of the one thousand best bridge players in the world, and I’m moving up and learning more.” In other words, participating in activities that challenge us can spark zest and then lead to happiness.

Sounds like vitality is a winning hand if we’re after lives worth living.

Research indicates that fewer than one in five US adults reports high levels of vitality. How do you measure your vitality? Are you living the full width of your life?

In my book I expand on nine of my very favorite research-backed and client-tested ideas to widen your life with vitality, but because I am not a (total) asshole I won’t leave you hanging. Here’s #8:

Assertively—bordering on aggressively—pursue life.

I mean actively, not passively. Vitality requires—demands—us to get up, get out, try things on for size. The flames of passion don’t set themselves: they require kindling, and you’re going to have to light that fire yourself, camper.

I learned this one the hard way, years ago, when I felt stuck in that job I wanted to leave but was afraid to figure out how. I kept hoping for something to happen, for another magical job to land in my lap, and for some reason no one swooped in to pluck me from my office and plop me in a mystical land of career happiness. I had to take action myself, which in my case meant doing some serious work on investigating new careers. I took the long route but ultimately proved that vitality can be cultivated. It’s in the risk of being willing to fail and flounder that we so often find the thing that lights us up.

Where do you need to shift from passive to active mode in your life? Where might you need to stoke the fires of passion? Where might you need to acknowledge fear and make a decision to move forward anyway? Where do you need to summon the courage to do something initially uncomfortable but ultimately alivenating?

Okay let’s wrap this up…

Memento mori interventions (you know: REMEMBERING WE ARE GOING TO POOF! DIE) can help put our psychological energy and sense of aliveness in perspective. That’s where I come in, as your fellow memento mori enthusiast. Reminding yourself that you’re a short-term delicacy just might trigger choices to live with more exuberance and ki.

Go blow the lid of your pot, babe. Let’s let that rice scatter all over the place.