Edition 8 — Languishing: The middle child of mental health
If you're not feeling depressed or anxious, just a bit 'blah', you could be languishing.
This week we are featuring a piece spurred by Adam Grant’s NYT article on the subject of languishing. Heard of it before? You might have felt it but never quite known how to term it.
Retaliation against languishing, as Grant describes it, is “a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.”
We can’t have a conversation about mental health without also talking to the communities we live in. In this case, our global community. We’ve included a roundup of charities working in India to fight Covid. If you have the financial means to support the great work they are doing, please consider making a donation. I donated funds to UNICEF recently and will donate again in the coming weeks.
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A round-up of charities.
It’s easy to feel helpless in a crisis. All contributions make an impact in their own way. If you have the financial means to do so, please consider supporting one of the charities below to help drive the work they are doing.
Rapid Response are delivering dry goods and basic food essentials to families and frontline workers in need.
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Care India are working to provide emergency relief, oxygen supplies, health worker resources, and hospital beds.
Oxfam India is working with local policymakers to help with vaccine distribution, send funds directly to households in need, supply PPE, medical supplies, and safety kits to health care centers and hospitals.
Languishing.
The middle-child of mental health.
I like to punctuate my day with a scroll through LinkedIn. Sometimes I stumble across an inspirational nugget of gold that turns an average afternoon into something a little more special. Other times, I am left feeling a sense of dread and professional inadequacy. But on this particular day, I was delighted to scroll across Adam Grant’s insightful feature on the impact of languishing for The New York Times. Grant is a writer and professor of management and psychology at The University of Pennsylvania. His article labelled and explained a feeling I was familiar with and was sure others would be, too. The article, There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing poignantly illustrates the experience of what it feels like to languish and the expected long-term mental health effects of 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.”
It’s a feeling that anyone who has made it through 2020 to 2021 will identify with. I’ve had countless conversations with people who lament their ‘lockdown brain’ and attribute it to forgetfulness, distraction, and brain fog. Retaliation against languishing, as Grant describes it, is “a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.” We have given up trying to control outcomes as we did in the early days of the pandemic. Languishing has imbued itself to this strange period between the beginning and the elusive end.
“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.”
Grant suggests adding languishing to our collective lexicon will provide a kind of relief. Instead of feeling pressure to be ‘fine!’ and ‘so great!’ when we are affronted with the question ‘how are you?’ we can instead find a kind of freedom in saying ‘I’m languishing right now.’
Reading Grant’s words made me realise not only that I am an occasional sufferer of languishing, but that others I know and love are likely suffering, too. Where do we go from here? Flow, apparently. Also known as escapism, mindfulness, being-in-the-moment. Grant states:
“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.”
Leaning into tasks and hobbies that eject us out of our minds and transport us to an alternate state of being sounds straightforward enough. It also explains a lot about why so many of us were addicted to Tiger King this time last year. What makes this remedy challenging is that so many of us are overwhelmed with distractions; habitually checking emails, managing home-schooling and task switching every 10-minutes. It doesn’t give us much time to fall into uninterrupted states of flow. Grant explains that above all else we need to set boundaries to give ourselves the gift of uninterrupted blocks of time.
“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.”
He suggests starting small and growing from there. Small, daily wins can increase levels of enthusiasm and energy that continue to build over time, releasing you from the hold of languishing. Grant says the easiest path to a flow state is one that is paved with “just manageable-difficulty.” It should be a challenge that stretches your skills in some way and feels important to you. A meaningful project, goal, or conversation.
It should also feel exciting. So, what is it that excites you? What is an interesting project you have been putting off? Is there a goal you have dreamed up, but are yet to chase? Grant closes his article in the same way as I will close this: “Sometimes it’s a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.”
Lead image: Manshen Lo via NYT
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