#[1]alternate [2]There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s
  Called Languishing

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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.
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  Credit...Manshen Lo
  [11]Adam Grant

  By [12]Adam Grant
  Published April 19, 2021Updated April 20, 2021, 2:19 p.m. ET

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  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: [13]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 [14]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 [15]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 [16]triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It
  appears to be [17]more common than major depression — and in some ways
  it may be a bigger risk factor for [18]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
  [19]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 [20]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 [21]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 [22]article describing our collective discomfort as grief. Along
  with [23]the loss of loved ones, we were mourning [24]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 [25]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 [26]tweeted about a Chinese
  expression that translates to “[27]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 [28]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
  [29]flow. People who became more immersed in their projects managed to
  avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.

  An early-morning word game catapults me into [30]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 [31]problem long before the pandemic, when
  people were habitually [32]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 [33]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 [34]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 [35]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 [36]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 [37]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
  “[38]Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” and the
  host of the TED podcast [39]WorkLife.

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