Introducing Head Out
Flourishing Friday is back!
I took the month of May off to work on some big projects, and I am super stoked to share one of them with you today. Our team at the Archbridge Institute’s Human Flourishing Lab has launched a new mental health public education initiative called Head Out.
Head Out is based on the idea that getting out of our heads and into the world is one of the most powerful but overlooked paths to better mental health. It is also grounded in the belief that people have more power to help themselves than our culture is giving them credit for. Individuals who need professional help should get it, and we should continue working to remove barriers to accessing mental health services. But we also need a culture that empowers people to take an active role in their own psychological wellbeing, and to do so by spending less time fixated on their mental states and more time engaged with the world around them.
I have been making this case for a long time and in a lot of places, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, and Profectus.
Here is the basic argument. Human beings have a remarkable ability no other species shares. We can turn our attention inward, reflect on our own thoughts and feelings, run mental simulations, learn from the past, and plan for the future. This capacity for self-consciousness is one of our greatest cognitive assets. It is what makes human progress possible. And it is what makes us an existential species driven to find meaning in life. But it also makes us uniquely vulnerable to psychological distress.
We can replay our failures on a loop, catastrophize about a future that hasn’t happened, and get stuck in cycles of self-doubt and despair.
This vulnerability is not new, but modern life has introduced new challenges. Technological progress has delivered enormous benefits, but the way our digital devices have come to dominate daily life has meant more time alone, more time passively consuming content, and more time in our own heads. And into this environment came a well-intentioned cultural movement to raise mental health awareness.
In important ways it worked. Stigma around mental illness has declined and more people feel comfortable seeking help. But the movement also encouraged people to spend more time monitoring their emotional states and to interpret normal stress, anxiety, or sadness as signs of mental illness. That pushes people further inward, fueling the rumination and passive self-preoccupation that makes psychological distress worse.
If you have been reading this newsletter for a while, the alternative I propose will probably be familiar. I call it the outward action approach, and Head Out builds a public education initiative around it. The initiative is organized around five domains of outward engagement that research connects to psychological health: physical movement, purposeful work, creative expression, social connection, and self-transcendence.
Many of the ideas are timeless, the kinds of things humans have always needed to thrive. Modern behavioral science now gives us strong empirical evidence that they work.
You can explore the initiative at headoutworld.org. We are currently working on our first Head Out mental health toolkit, which we plan to release in the coming weeks. If you are new to these ideas or want to go deeper, there is a lot to explore both here in the Flourishing Friday archives and over at headoutworld.org.
I want to close by connecting Head Out to another theme I have been researching and writing about a lot lately. Young people are driving a real-world renaissance, rediscovering physical media, analog technology, hands-on hobbies, and in-person gathering spaces.
In our research at the Human Flourishing Lab, we find that large majorities of Gen Z report feeling nostalgic for eras before their lifetime and say they are drawn to media, styles, hobbies, or traditions from earlier periods.
This is a topic I have covered extensively in this newsletter, in outlets like the New York Times, in several appearances on NBC Today and NBC News, and in podcasts like Apple News In Conversation. And I will also be speaking on it later this month at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
I started researching Gen Z nostalgia and developing the outward action framework behind Head Out as separate projects, but I increasingly see them as deeply interconnected. Gen Z is the generation most affected by our current mental health crisis and the primary target of our culture’s well-intentioned but counterproductive approach to psychological wellbeing. And yet many of them seem to sense something is off, and they are doing something about it. By seeking out more tangible, in-person, and meaningful ways of engaging with the world, they are instinctively pushing back against an inward-focused culture.
What Gen Z is nostalgically reaching for is ultimately what Head Out is built on. This is a hopeful sign. It tells me that this generation is ready for a more outward-oriented approach, and I believe Head Out can help them get there.
Have a great weekend!
Clay