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.’”