(2021-04-19) Grant There's A Name For The Blah You're Feeling It's Called Languishing

Adam Grant: There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing. 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 like you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

The covid-19 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. (do we?) 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.

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.

Last summer, journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted about a Chinese expression that translates to “revenge bedtime procrastination.”

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

So what can we do about it? A concept called “flow state” may be an antidote to languishing.

People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.

it’s hard to find flow when you can’t focus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m not languishing, I’m dormant - Austin Kleon

Psychologists,” says Grant, “find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” But one has to remember that naming doesn’t just describe the world, it creates the world, too. As Brian Eno says, “Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it.”

I disliked the term “languishing” the minute I heard it.

I’m not languishing, I’m dormant. Like a plant. Or a volcano. I am waiting to be activated.

I feel very lucky to be married to a gardener, because gardening gives us rich metaphors for creative work that we don’t get from our business-focused productivity-obsessed culture

It seems to me that the reason that so many of us feel like we’re languishing is that we are trying to flourish in terrible conditions. It is spring outside — or the “unlocking” season — but it is still “Winter in America,” and, as any gardener knows, if you try to wake a plant out of dormancy too soon, it will wither, and maybe die.

I’m not languishing because I’m not trying to flourish

My friend Alan Jacobs recently wrote about his exhaustion

For example, Michelangelo, who lost four years of work to a lawsuit

Or Isaac Newton, who people have held up as an example of what you can get done during a plague: didn’t have library access, and while he was testing the theory he didn’t have some of the constants he needed (sizes, masses), so he tried to work from memory, got one wrong, did all the math, and concluded that he was wrong and the gravity + ellipses thing didn’t work. He stuck it in a drawer. It was only years later when a friend asked him about Kepler’s ellipses that he pulled the old notes back out of the drawer to show the friend, and the friend spotted the error, they redid the math, and then developed the theory of gravity

You may, indeed, be languishing, and I won’t try to take that word away from you.

Me, I’m dormant. I may even look dead, but like Corita Kent once described one of her own dormant periods, “new things are happening very quietly inside of me.”