Feeling empty inside, one sociologist found answers by exploring his own traumatic childhood

Not out of the woods yet: Corey Keys says that until you deal with things from the past which trigger you, you will never flourish for long enough. Photograph: Audra Melton/The Observer

When he was 16, Corey Keyes was finally doing well after a brutal childhood. He got high grades at school, played quarterback on the football team, and was living with his loving grandmother in Wisconsin, USA.

But, the sociologist and professor emeritus of Emory University writes in his new book, Languishing: How To Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down, he was living on autopilot, throwing himself into every activity going. Whenever he slowed down, everything felt “drained of colour”. A feeling of “restless emptiness” gnawed at his insides. Terrified this feeling might haunt him all his life, he determined to become a sociologist to find out if other people had this same sense of “running on empty”, eventually coining the terms “languishing” and its antidote “flourishing”, or good mental health.