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The Well Festival: 4 Takeaways for a Happier Life
The Times hosted a day of conversations dedicated to a singular theme: maximizing your happiness.
Published May 7, 2025Updated May 8, 2025, 11:31 a.m. ET Pinned
Here are 4 takeaways from the Well Festival.
Tracee Ellis Ross, the former “black-ish” actor, left, speaking with Lori Leibovich, the editor of Well, in one of 13 panels at the Well Festival in Brooklyn on Wednesday. Laila Stevens for The New York Times
A vast ecosystem of scientific and unscientific health information bombards readers every day. At the Well desk of The New York Times, we work to cut through that noise, and that was our goal at our first major public event, the Well Festival on Wednesday.
We brought together doctors, relationship experts, athletes, authors and celebrities — you may not know every name, but they included Charlamagne Tha God, Sara Bareilles, Suleika Jaouad, Terry Real, Samin Nosrat and Dwyane Wade — to speak with Times reporters and editors about topics related to maximizing happiness.
Here are some of the takeaways from the day.
Perfection isn’t necessary.
Healthy habits can make you feel good. But that doesn’t mean they come easy.
Suleika Jaouad, the author of “The Book of Alchemy” and “Between Two Kingdoms,” is known for her creativity in the face of adversity: a leukemia diagnosis in her 20s and two recurrences. But she emphasized the tremendous effort involved.
“No part of me felt inspired or creatively motivated” after her diagnosis, Ms. Jaouad said, adding: “I was scared. I was angry. I felt profoundly stuck and isolated.”
A friend suggested a challenge: Take one small creative act each day for 100 days. She began journaling and found, to her surprise, that when she wrote down the things she didn’t feel she could say out loud, she became able to share them “with my friends and my family and the world.”
Trying even when it’s hard was also a theme in a panel featuring Lisa Damour, a psychologist, and Gabriela Nguyen, the founder of a student organization at Harvard that encourages people to quit social media.
“If you do what you planned to do seven out of 10 days, you’re going to have a better experience,” Dr. Damour said. “It doesn’t have to be perfect for it to make your life better.”
The same principle applies to relationships, the couples therapist Terry Real said.
“We all want gods or goddesses that are going to complete us and heal us,” Dr. Real said. “The reality is we’re stuck with a person just as imperfect as, guess who, you are.” What matters most, he said, is “how you manage each other’s imperfection.”
Exercise looks different for everyone.
Robin Arzón, the head instructor for Peloton, once ran five marathons in five days. Dr. Peter Attia has a health practice that charges tens of thousands of dollars a year for intensive exercise programs (along with diet and lifestyle regimens) that he argues will maximize fitness in people’s last decade of life.
These are levels of effort that might intimidate most people. But exercise doesn’t have to be that challenging.
Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, said she was so bad at traditional sports as a child that she was placed in a remedial physical education class. But later, she discovered aerobics, and then dance. Now she revels in leading group dance classes.
The former “black-ish” star Tracee Ellis Ross said she enjoyed intense full-body workouts — but tempered by an understanding of her body’s limitations, especially as she gets older. It’s about “knowing how to listen to my body, but also how hard I can push my body,” Ms. Ross said. “And I’ll be honest, that has changed. I’m 52, and there is a difference in how I can push my body.”
Jameela Jamil, a star of “The Good Place” who has been vocal about her past struggle with anorexia, said she often simply walks her dog in a park — moving her body without aiming for a concerted workout. She said she wanted to encourage people “to move just for the neurological and mental health benefits and for their long-term happiness,” not for weight loss.
It’s good to get out of your head.
Everyone has different ways of quieting the din of news, obligations, anxiety and self-criticism, if only for a few minutes. Exercise is a common route, but not the only one.
For Samin Nosrat, the clearest way involves food — cooking it, and eating it with others.
“Even if it’s just something as simple as I’ve sliced a whole bunch of celery on a diagonal, and I put it in the bowl and it’s floating, and it’s just making these beautiful shapes,” she said. “And I could just marvel for a second about those shapes and the geometry.”
For five years, Ms. Nosrat said, she has had a weekly meal with friends, and it has “become the heart of our lives in a lot of ways.”
There is evidence backing the idea that such tending of relationships matters greatly. Dr. Robert Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of human happiness. The study found that meaningful relationships were the most important factor in wellness as people aged, he said, perhaps because without strong relationships, people are more stressed, which has physiological effects.
And Charlamagne Tha God, the co-host of the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” said that preparing himself for the day could involve prayer, meditation, and even just taking his shoes off and feeling the grass under his bare feet in the backyard.
“People say that as a joke, like, ‘Man, go touch grass,’” he said. “Go touch grass! And watch what happens.”
People should show more vulnerability. Especially men.
The Broadway star Sara Bareilles said that when she began to grapple more openly with her anxiety, she discovered just how much support was available to her from doctors as well as friends.
Charlamagne Tha God recalled a transformation when he began speaking about his mental health struggles and suffered through the death of a cousin by suicide. His father responded by acknowledging for the first time that he, too, had experienced depression and attempted suicide.
“I remember just thinking to myself: ‘Wow, if you would have told me this years ago, then I would have known what that anxiety was I was experiencing. I would have known what those bouts of depression was I was experiencing,’” he said.
If people simply “tell each other what it is that we’re going through, and even better, the things that we did to get through,” he added, then “we would all do ourselves a big favor.”
Several speakers spoke about the difficulty men in particular face with being so open, because they are often taught that vulnerability is weakness.
The former N.B.A. star Dwyane Wade said he had learned otherwise. He recently held a wellness retreat for men as he was going through cancer treatment.
Once one man began to open up, everyone wanted to, he said, adding: “I think a lot of times we feel that we’re the only ones going through something or walking with something or dealing with something, and I walked out of the room like, ‘Oh no, there’s 50 other dudes just like me.’”
Chronic disease reporter
How to train for the last decade of your life, according to Peter Attia.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images For The New York Times
By the last decade of our lives, many of us are already in ill health. But Dr. Peter Attia, a physician and longevity influencer, doesn’t believe it has to be that way.
Our later years, he argues, are something we can start training for now.
At the New York Times Well Festival on Wednesday, Dr. Attia said that the way to increase your odds of enjoying that decade as much as possible was “to be very deliberate about how you would prepare for it.”
Dr. Attia said he talked with his patients about training for “a centenarian decathlon.” The idea is to make a list of the 10 most important — and most difficult — physical activities or movements you want to be able to do in the last decade of life.
For him, these include being able to walk easily, drive a racecar (Dr. Attia is an avid Formula 1 fan) and sit on the floor to play with children without needing help getting back up.
For many of his patients, he said, sex, dancing, and living independently are often high on the list. “To be able to dance is actually a very complicated physical and cognitive task as you age,” Dr. Attia said.
Depending on where they are starting out, he said, people in their 40s might need to do certain types of training now — jumping exercises, for example, or balance-building activities — to be able to still dance in their 80s.
Many widely recommended health habits, such as exercising often, eating well, getting enough sleep and managing your emotional health, can help people achieve their decathlon goals and enjoy their last decade.
But it can be difficult to do all of that in a busy life, he acknowledged. To prioritize the activities that will deliver the greatest benefit, he said, “take stock of how you’re doing on each of those things.”
A person who is sleeping only five hours a night is likely to get the greatest benefit from increasing that to seven hours a night. Going from no exercise to 90 minutes per week, he added, could significantly reduce a person’s risk of death.
“There are very few things you can point to that will have that much of an effect,” he said. “Whereas if somebody is exercising seven hours a week, going to nine hours a week is very marginal in its gain.”
Dr. Attia emphasized the benefits of strength or resistance training with heavy weights, which he said were just as important as cardiovascular or aerobic exercise. He highlighted its importance for women in particular. Women’s bodies produce less estrogen with age, which leaves them more susceptible to osteoporosis, injury and ultimately, death.
Not only can this kind of training reduce your risk of death later in life, he said, but it can also improve your quality of life.
“I mean, have you ever met a person at the end of their life that said, ‘God, I wish I had less muscle, I just wish I wasn’t so strong’?” Dr. Attia asked.
“It makes an enormous difference,” he added.
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That’s a wrap! After a day of conversations on mental health, aging and relationships, the first-ever Well Festival has come to an end.
Dwyane Wade spoke about raising a trans child, his daughter Zaya, in the public eye. He said that his main job as a parent was to make sure his children were loved and kept safe amid “the loudness on the outside.”“Even in the world today, the temperature of the world, we know what we’re dealing with,” Wade said. “Our job is to make sure within our village that we cover each other.”
The last guest is Dwyane Wade, an N.B.A. Hall of Fame basketball player. He’s talking with Marc Lacey, a managing editor at The Times, about masculinity, fatherhood and how he looks after his health after an incredible athletic career.
3 secrets to falling in love with exercise.
Robin ArzónDavid Dee Delgado/Getty Images For The New York Times
Getting into a workout routine is rarely easy. It can be hard to find the motivation. Sometimes, it can even feel uncomfortable or embarrassing.
Just ask Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University and the author of the book “The Joy of Movement.”
“Not being an athlete growing up, my experience with movement was mostly humiliation,” Dr. McGonigal said onstage at The New York Times’s Well Festival on Wednesday.
Dr. McGonigal was speaking with Danielle Friedman, a Well contributor, and Robin Arzón, the head instructor at Peloton, about the challenge of enjoying exercise.
To help people struggling to get going, Dr. McGonigal and Ms. Arzón shared three specific strategies to turn exercise into a vehicle to experience joy.
Don’t try to love every moment.
Many people think they should reach a point where they love each and every second of exercise.
But Dr. McGonigal said that is not realistic. Even during the most rewarding workouts, there can be moments of pain, difficulty or frustration.
So shift your expectations. Dr. McGonigal shared that her sister, a runner, had come to view the hardest moments of her runs as her favorite parts, since those were the moments when she felt toughest.
Ms. Arzón said she had come to find joy in the simple act of showing up to a workout, rather than focusing on how her body felt during it. Dr. McGonigal agreed: “Sometimes the ‘feeling good’ is how you feel about yourself afterward because you persisted — and you’re exhausted.”
Strive for momentum, not motivation.
Ms. Arzón said she makes her living by motivating people to work out. But consistency and routine are more important, she added.
“Motivation is fleeting,” Ms. Arzón said. “It’s ephemeral.” Instead, she said, try to focus on gaining “momentum.”
“It’s habit,” Ms. Arzón said. “It’s process. It’s schedule.”
And don’t worry if you’re not an expert in whatever exercise you’re doing. Just give it your best shot, and then give it a shot again.
“I would rather be bad at running than good at couch,” she said.
Find a community.
One reason that exercise makes us happy is that it can help foster connection to others. So try joining a run club or attending a Zumba class, even if the idea makes you self-conscious.
“When we move in sync with other people, our bodies enter a state — our brains enter a state that neuroscientists call ‘we mode,’” Dr. McGonigal said. “We enter a state of togetherness that is biologically real, and we can sense it as a kind of trust and closeness and belonging.”
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On stage now is Orna Guralnik, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who gives the world a peek into her practice in the docu-series “Couples Therapy,” which features her appointments with real couples. Guralnik is sharing what she’s learned about love and relationships with Caitlin Roper, the executive producer for scripted film and television at The Times.
Dr. Peter Attia and Jameela Jamil have both spoken about the importance of looking after your future, older self — now. Attia said he was training to make sure he is able to enjoy the final decade of his life as much as possible. Jamil said that as she approaches her 40th birthday, “I want my 85 year old self to look back on me and feel pride and so everything I do is for her, now.”
Dr. Peter Attia, the popular podcaster and author of the book “Outlive,” is here to talk about aging, fitness and nutrition with Kate Lowenstein, the deputy editor of Well.
Few celebrities have been as open about their struggles with body image as Jameela Jamil, who played Tahani Al-Jamil in “The Good Place.” She’s talking with Lisa Miller, a Well reporter, about the road to self-acceptance.
Sara Bareilles said she took the psychedelic drug MDMA to try to cope with her anxiety before using medication to treat it. “That was the worst night of my life but also one of the most helpful experiences I’ve ever had because I sat with this experience of fear for like eight hours,” she said. “And the relief that I felt when I sort of came back to my consciousness was so tremendous and I got one piece of wisdom out of that trip that has stayed with me so much.” That insight, she said, was that “there is so much support.”
How should we live in an anxious world? Sara Bareilles, the singer, songwriter and Broadway star, and Dan Harris, author of “10% Happier,” are on stage to discuss how they manage, and sometimes use, anxiety. Dacher Keltner is back to join the conversation.
This book helped Samin Nosrat find her way back to cooking.
David Dee Delgado/Getty Images For The New York Times
Most authors dream of the kind of success that Samin Nosrat had when she released her debut cookbook, “Salt Fat Acid Heat,” in 2017. Netflix made a television series based on the book, and Ms. Nosrat started a popular podcast.
But Ms. Nosrat said Wednesday at the Well Festival that depression followed.
“I rose to all of the highest heights and achieved all the things and many things beyond what I’d ever hoped to achieve,” Ms. Nosrat said. “And then I still felt really lonely and empty and sad, and sort of one by one, these large pieces of my life started to fall apart and very old, repressed grief surfaced.”
How she felt was at odds with the joyful personality the public had come to see, Ms. Nosrat said. “I did not feel any joy or happiness,” she said.
“I was surviving on, like, frozen pizza and Barbara’s cheese puffs and watermelon and I was like, ‘How am I supposed to write a book about cooking?’” Ms. Nosrat added.
Part of what got her through that dark period, Ms. Nosrat said, was reading books that had nothing to do with food. One of them — “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life,” by the psychologist Dacher Keltner — explored how people can embrace awe and wonder to improve their lives. Dr. Keltner was also part of the Well Festival panel, which was about finding community, nourishment and happiness in food.
After reading it, Ms. Nosrat decided to focus some of her time and energy each day on feeling awe. In her cooking, that meant connecting the process to something bigger than herself.
“If it’s, like, remembering that this olive oil came from this beautiful hillside on, you know, the hills of Tuscany where I visited, or just sort of connecting to something and getting out of my own way,” Ms. Nosrat said, “that’s where I can feel that.”
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Kelly McGonigal literally wrote the book on “The Joy of Movement.” A few years ago, she designed a “Joy Workout” for The Times.
It’s just after 2:30 p.m. in New York, a great time to fight mid-afternoon malaise with some movement. Robin Arzón, the head instructor at Peloton, and Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, are here to talk about the joy of working out. They are speaking with Danielle Friedman, a frequent Well contributor.
Dr. Robert Waldinger is talking about how central relationships are to our health and happiness. A couple years ago, he helped us design a quiz to test yours: “How Strong Are Your Relationships?”
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest-running study of human happiness. On stage now is Dr. Robert Waldinger, its current director, to speak about what his team has learned from 80 years of research. Susan Dominus, a staff writer for the Times Magazine who wrote a recent profile of Waldinger, is interviewing him.
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Samin Nosrat is making the case for having a regular weekly meal with the same group of friends. If that intrigues you, check out her recipes for NYT Cooking for inspiration.
We’re back! Next up, we get to hear about how food can provide nourishment and create happiness from Samin Nosrat, the chef and author, and Dacher Keltner, a psychologist. The food reporter Kim Severson is interviewing them.
Charlamagne Tha God’s mental health tip: Touch grass. Literally.
Charlamagne Tha God, who is best known as a host of the popular radio show “The Breakfast Club,” says men do themselves and their loved ones no favors by keeping their struggles with anxiety and depression secret.Laila Stevens for The New York Times
Millions of boys are raised to view vulnerability as a sign of weakness.
Charlamagne Tha God, speaking with the New York Times national politics reporter Astead Herndon at the Well Festival on Wednesday, had a message for the people who were raised like that: Throw out that way of thinking.
Charlamagne, who was born Lenard McKelvey and is best known as a host of the popular radio show “The Breakfast Club,” has become outspoken about his experiences with depression and anxiety.
He said one of the most effective ways he had found to cope was meditation. Another is simple: He goes out to his lawn, takes his shoes off and walks through the grass.
“People say that as a joke, like, ‘Man, go touch grass,’” he said. “Go touch grass! And watch what happens.”
It hasn’t been easy to be open, he said, but it has been worth it. Sometimes, he added, strangers approach him to say that because he talked about going to therapy, their husband or brother decided to do the same.
That led to a realization, he said, that “when you live your truth, nobody can use your truth against you — when you live your truth, you kind of just find a tribe that gives you more strength to continue doing the work.”
Charlamagne said men, and especially Black men, did themselves and their loved ones no favors by keeping their struggles secret. The point is personal for Charlamagne. Only in 2018, when a cousin killed himself after attempting suicide several times before, did his own father tell him he had once attempted suicide.
“I remember just thinking to myself, ‘Wow, if you would have told me this years ago, then I would have known what that anxiety was I was experiencing. I would have known what those bouts of depression was I was experiencing,’” he said. “And I remember asking my mom, I said, ‘Yo, you know Dad was going through all of this?’ And she said to me, ‘Yeah, I thought he was just playing crazy to get a check.’”
“My point is,” he continued, “there’s no need for any of us to keep secrets from each other. If we was to tell each other what it is that we’re going through — and even better, the things that we did to get through what we was going through — we would all do ourselves a big favor.”
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What a couples therapist wants you to do to fix your relationship.
The couples therapist Terry Real spoke about the importance of being honest with your partner about your needs at the Well Festival.David Dee Delgado/Getty Images For The New York Times
In his work as a couples therapist, Terry Real sees people asking more from their romantic relationships than ever before. They want deep intimacy. Romantic walks on the beach. Great sex well into their 70s.
“We all want gods or goddesses that are going to complete us and heal us,” Mr. Real, the author of “Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship,” said onstage Wednesday at the New York Times Well Festival in Brooklyn. “The reality is, we’re stuck with a person who is just as imperfect as we are.”
The good news? Learning a few simple relationship skills can help couples navigate the ups and downs of long-term intimacy.
Give up on being right.
It’s easy to think that one of you is inherently on the winning side of an argument and that the other has it all wrong.
But Mr. Real often tells his clients: “Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who cares?”
Instead of fixating on sides, Mr. Real recommended thinking of your relationship as a “biosphere.” You live inside of it, and it is in your interest to keep it healthy. When you’re in the thick of a tiff, remind yourself it may ultimately be in your own best interest to prioritize protecting that biosphere over proving a point.
And if you still find yourself stubbornly clinging to the idea of being right, ask yourself: How do I want to use my time? Do I want to spend the evening arguing? You might quickly realize that finding common ground with your partner is more appealing than winning the fight.
Ask for what you want.
The top mistake people when they’re fighting with a partner is not being clear about what they actually want, Mr. Real said. He often sees clients who are stuck in a vicious cycle where one partner is griping about the same things over and over again, while the other pulls away.
But don’t confuse asking for what you want with grumbling about what you think your partner is doing wrong, he cautioned.
“Complaining about how distant your partner is is not going to evoke a generous response,” Mr. Real explained. Complaining is not a vulnerable act, he said, but being honest about what you need is — and that openness can help elicit a more compassionate response from your partner.
Take on your partner.
That kind of honesty is particularly important as time goes on. Mr. Real often preaches about the importance of having what he calls a “relational reckoning.” Essentially, that means asking yourself whether you are getting enough from the relationship to be OK with what you’re not getting.
In long-term relationships, “couples stop dealing with each other,” Mr. Real said — often simply because it feels easier. “We say we’re compromising, but really, we’re settling,” he cautioned. “Resentment builds up. Generosity dies.”
But it is important to “take each other on” — particularly in long-term relationships. Dare to tell your partner what you want and need, and to be vulnerable, he said.
He did not sugarcoat how difficult those conversations can be. If you and your partner are struggling to take each other on with compassion, Mr. Real advised, “drag your partner to a therapist.”
Time for a lunch break. There’s a lot to reflect on! Like Terry Real’s advice that we give up on “being right” in our relationships. And Gabriela Nguyen, who was born in the 2000s, recommending flip phones — because you can’t doomscroll on one.
People need to prioritize going on a healing journey to help themselves, Charlamagne Tha God said: “As you get older, what you’re going to realize is every day of your life as an adult is just a battle with your inner child.”
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Time for some honest talk about anxiety and mental health with Charlamagne Tha God, co-host of the radio show “The Breakfast Club.” Usually, he’s the one asking tough questions, but he’ll be on the receiving end in this conversation with Astead Herndon, a national politics reporter for The Times.
Terry Real coined the phrase “normal marital hatred,” which is hilarious — and a helpful concept for surviving in a long-haul relationship. He spoke to Well about it back in 2022.
What’s the best way to navigate modern relationships? Terry Real, a couples and family therapist, is chatting with Jancee Dunn, the author of Well’s newsletter, about common stumbling blocks and how to avoid them.
We are now going to hear from Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist and expert on navigating adolescence. She is speaking with Gabriela Nguyen, a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the founder of a student group, APPstinence, that encourages people in Gen Z to give up social media. Dani Blum, a Well reporter, is moderating the conversation.
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Chronic disease reporter
Jaouad, who recently published “The Book of Alchemy,” said that keeping a daily journal where she could be her most “unedited, unvarnished self” was a transformational and “life-saving” experience. She added that no matter what comes up in a journal entry, she always feels lighter after writing.
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