How to Protect Your Mental Health When Your Body Breaks Down He was cruising at 25.9 miles per hour, the fastest he had ever ridden. Perfect road. Slight tailwind. A hundred fifty mile charity ride behind him and a triathlon ahead. And then there was a brown blur in front of his tire. Two and a half weeks later, Dr. Daniel Franz sat down across from Dave Rodriguez on The Vitality Journey Podcast with a...Continue reading...
Why So Many Pastors Are Surrounded By People and Still Profoundly Alone In 1938, Harvard started a study that has never stopped running. It has followed individual lives for almost a century, asking one question across generations: what actually makes a human life go well? The answer, captured in the book The Good Life, is not income, status, or career trajectory. It is the quality of your relationships. That single factor predicts happiness more reliably...Continue reading...
Why Your Pastor Is Probably Not Okay (And What That Means For You) Forty percent of pastors have seriously considered leaving their congregation since 2020. The Axios headline puts it bluntly: America’s pastor pipeline is collapsing. The role has become low-paid, higher-risk, and less trusted than it has been in a generation. Behind those numbers are real people quietly running out of air, often inside their own sanctuaries. This post is inspired by our latest...Continue reading...
The Admission Most People Will Not Make We are all quietly looking for the secret. The one habit, the one supplement, the one system that overrides everything else and finally makes life work. In this short reflection from The Vitality Journey Podcast, Gary Mayes admits he looks for it too. He wants the hack as much as anyone. And then he says the thing that makes the searching stop: there is no secret. This post...Continue reading...
A Question Worth Asking Out Loud Most men can name their college roommate, a couple of work friends, and a brother-in-law they tolerate. Far fewer can name three men who know the messiness of their lives and have stayed close for decades. In this segment of The Vitality Journey Podcast, Dave Rodriguez and Dimitri Snowden sit with three friends, Steve Hudson, Gary Mayes, and Bob Thomas, who have done exactly that for 35 years, never...Continue reading...
Four Friends, Thirty Five Years, and a Question Most People Avoid When they started golfing together, they would play two rounds a day for three straight days. Thirty five years later, they get together once a year and plan to golf twice. The drop is not a story about golf. It is a story about what changes when work ends, the calendar empties, and you discover that nobody handed you a plan for what comes...Continue reading...
The Game Designer Who Detoxed From His Own Industry Joel Bergman has ADHD. He runs an indie game studio in Indianapolis called Grizzhoot. He designs the loops that pull you in and make it hard to put the controller down. And he just walked us through how he ran a 30-day digital detox using Cal Newport’s method, and made it stick. Most people who attempt a 30-day break fail in week one. The framework is...Continue reading...
When the Game Designer Tells You to Put the Phone Down Joel Bergman makes video games for a living. He runs an indie game studio in Indianapolis called Grizzhoot. He has spent his entire adult life designing the very loops that pull people in, keep them engaged, and make it harder to put the controller down. And he is the one who told Dave Rodriguez to read Digital Minimalism. That tension is the entire episode....Continue reading...
How a Wellness Coach Finds the Time and Motivation You Swear You Don’t Have Most people who walk into a wellness conversation start the same way. I want to feel better. I want to lose the weight. I want to have energy again. Then almost immediately the second sentence: but I do not have time. Laura Burdick has heard that second sentence in every coaching meeting she has ever run. And she has a simple,...Continue reading...
