There’s a Name for the Blah You’re
Feeling: It’s Called Languishing
The neglected middle child of mental
health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion
of 2021.
At first, I didn’t recognize the
symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having
trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the
horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late
to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie
by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until
7, playing Words with Friends.
It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy.
It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless
and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.
Languishing is a sense of stagnation
and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at
your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of
2021.
As scientists and physicians work to
treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are
struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us
unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded.
In the early, uncertain days of the
pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the
amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks
helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed
routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and
the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish.
In psychology, we think about mental
health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of
well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to
others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and
worthless.
Languishing is the neglected middle
child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing —
the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental
illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not
functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your
ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back
on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in
some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.
The term was coined by a sociologist
named Corey Keyes, who was struck that many people who weren’t depressed also
weren’t thriving. His research suggests that the people most
likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders in the next decade
aren’t the ones with those symptoms today. They’re the people who are
languishing right now. And new evidence from pandemic health care
workers in Italy shows that those who were languishing in the spring of 2020
were three times more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with
post-traumatic stress disorder.
Part of the danger is that when
you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the
dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude;
you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering,
you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.
Even if you’re not languishing, you
probably know people who are. Understanding it better can help you help them.
A name for what you’re feeling
Psychologists find that one of the best strategies
for managing emotions is to name them. Last spring, during the acute anguish of
the pandemic, the most viral post in the history of Harvard Business Review was
an article describing our collective
discomfort as grief. Along with the loss of loved ones, we were mourning the loss of normalcy. “Grief.” It gave us a familiar
vocabulary to understand what had felt like an unfamiliar experience. Although
we hadn’t faced a pandemic before, most of us had faced loss. It helped us
crystallize lessons from our own past resilience — and gain confidence in our
ability to face present adversity.
We still have a lot to learn about
what causes languishing and how to cure it, but naming it might be a first
step. It could help to defog our vision, giving us a clearer window into what
had been a blurry experience. It could remind us that we aren’t alone:
languishing is common and shared.
And it could give us a socially
acceptable response to “How are you?”
Instead of saying “Great!” or “Fine,”
imagine if we answered, “Honestly, I’m languishing.” It would be a refreshing
foil for toxic positivity — that quintessentially American pressure to be
upbeat at all times.
When you add languishing to your
lexicon, you start to notice it all around you. It shows up when you feel let
down by your short
afternoon walk. It’s in your kids’ voices when you ask how online school
went. It’s in “The Simpsons” every time a character says, “Meh.”
Last summer, the journalist Daphne K.
Lee tweeted about a Chinese expression that
translates to “revenge
bedtime procrastination.” She described it as staying up late at night to
reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day. I’ve started to wonder if it’s
not so much retaliation against a loss of control as an act of quiet defiance
against languishing. It’s a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a
lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.
An antidote to languishing
So what can we do about it? A concept
called “flow” may be an antidote to languishing. Flow is that elusive state
of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a
momentary bond, where your sense of time, place and self melts away. During the
early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well-being wasn’t optimism or
mindfulness — it was flow. People who became more immersed in
their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic
happiness.
Let Us Help You Manage Your Pandemic
Burnout
It’s been more than a year of this
strange coronavirus world, and it’s OK if you haven’t adjusted yet. We hope we can help:
An early-morning word game catapults
me into flow. A late-night Netflix binge
sometimes does the trick too — it transports you into a story where you feel
attached to the characters and concerned for their welfare.
While finding new challenges,
enjoyable experiences and meaningful work are all possible remedies to languishing,
it’s hard to find flow when you can’t focus. This was a problem long before the pandemic, when
people were habitually checking email 74 times a day and switching tasks every 10
minutes. In the past year, many of us also have been struggling with
interruptions from kids around the house, colleagues around the world, and
bosses around the clock. Meh.
Fragmented attention is an enemy of
engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will
even be capable of driving and memorizing
information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both
tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off
serial processing.
Give yourself some uninterrupted time
That means we need to set boundaries.
Years ago, a Fortune 500 software company in India tested a simple policy: no
interruptions Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. When engineers managed
the boundary themselves, 47 percent had above-average productivity. But when
the company set quiet time as official policy, 65 percent achieved
above-average productivity. Getting more done wasn’t just good for performance
at work: We now know that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation
is a sense of progress.
I don’t think there’s anything
magical about Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. The lesson of this
simple idea is to treat uninterrupted blocks of time as treasures to guard. It
clears out constant distractions and gives us the freedom to focus. We can find
solace in experiences that capture our full attention.
Focus on a small goal
The pandemic was a big loss. To
transcend languishing, try starting with small wins, like the tiny triumph of figuring
out a whodunit or the rush of playing a seven-letter word. One of the clearest
paths to flow is a just-manageable
difficulty: a challenge that stretches your skills and heightens your
resolve. That means carving out daily time to focus on a challenge that matters
to you — an interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation.
Sometimes it’s a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and
enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.
Languishing is not merely in our
heads — it’s in our circumstances. You can’t heal a sick culture with personal
bandages. We still live in a world that normalizes physical health challenges
but stigmatizes mental health challenges. As we head into a new post-pandemic
reality, it’s time to rethink our understanding of mental health and
well-being. “Not depressed” doesn’t mean you’re not struggling. “Not burned out” doesn’t mean you’re fired up. By
acknowledging that so many of us are languishing, we can start giving voice to
quiet despair and lighting a path out of the void.
Adam Grant is an organizational
psychologist at Wharton, the author of “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You
Don’t Know” and the host of the TED podcast WorkLife.
The New York Times
