There’s a name for the blah you’re feeling: It’s called languishing

It isn’t burnout and it isn’t depression. It feels somewhat joyless and aimless and there’s a name for it, writes Adam Grant

The pandemic has dragged on and the acute state of anguish has given way to chronic languish (Getty Images)

At first, I didn’t recognise the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating and colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021.

A family member stayed up late to watch ashe knows the film by heart and instead of bouncing out of bed at 6am, I was lying there until 7, playing Words With Friends on my phone.

It wasn’t burnout and wasn’t depression. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. There’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re looking at your life through a foggy windshield and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.

As scientists and physicians work to treat the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid-19, 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 very likely that your brain’s threat detection system – 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.

Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you may not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive

In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being where you have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being in which 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 sociologist 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 now. New evidence from pandemic health care workers in Italy shows that those who were languishing last spring were three times as likely than their peers to have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you may not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping 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.

We now know that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation is a sense of progress (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Expanding your lexicon

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 normality: 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 crystallise 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 may 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, Daphne K Lee, a journalist, 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.

People more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their pre-pandemic happiness (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

An antidote to languishing

So what can we do about it? A concept called flow may be an antidote. 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 pre-pandemic happiness.

An early morning word game catapults me into flow. A late-night box-set binge sometimes does the trick, too. It transports you into a story.

While finding new challenges, enjoyable experiences and meaningful work are possible remedies to languishing, it’s hard to find flow when you can’t focus. This was a problem before the pandemic, when people were habitually checking email and switching tasks. In the past year, many of us also have been struggling with interruptions from children, colleagues and bosses. 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 memorising 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.

It seems that the people most likely to experience major depression and anxiety in the next decade aren’t with those symptoms today (Getty Images)

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 every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. When engineers managed the boundary themselves, 47 per cent had above-average productivity but when the company set quiet time as official policy, 65 per cent 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 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, such as 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 such as an interesting project, a worthwhile goal or a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it’s a small step towards rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.

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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 normalises physical health challenges but stigmatises mental health challenges. As we head into a new post-pandemic reality, it’s time to rethink our understanding of mental health and wellbeing.

Being not depressed doesn’t mean you’re not struggling. Being 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.

© The New York Times