Languishing in midtable mediocrity

 

Adam Grant, an inspiring American psychologist wrote a very interesting article recently in the New York Times.  He called the article “There’s a name for the blah you're feeling: It’s called languishing”.  In the article Grant defines languishing as “a sense of stagnation and emptiness - it feels like you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield”. In football terms people often talk about teams languishing in mid table mediocrity where despite their best efforts they can’t seem to move themselves to the flourishing heights of the next league. 

And actually, this feels really familiar.  How many of you are feeling fed up and although you are managing on a day-to-day basis there is a distinct lack of joy and progress. Grant suggests that many of us are not only struggling with long COVID but also the emotional long haul of the pandemic. 

In psychology we often talk about the mental health curve which was originally conceived by Huppert 2006.  

The beauty of this curve is that it recognises that, just like physical health, we all have mental health.  And some days we are winning and life is going well and other days … not so much.  We all slide up and down this continuum to a greater or lesser degree.  And perhaps it’s not surprising given what we have all experienced over the past 18 months that many more of us are feeling the unease of surviving rather than thriving.  

And this unease is not necessarily a bad thing because while languishing means you can still complete your work, do the shopping, clean the bathroom  - prolonged periods of languishing put you in danger of gradually slipping further down this curve.  Your ongoing lack of motivation makes progress at work or home much more difficult, your low or perhaps numb mood makes connection with others easy to ignore, your lack of energy makes it harder to do the things you know are good for your wellbeing. 

So, what do we do about this? In his article Grant made a number of helpful suggestions:

Name it

One of the things Kristen Neff talks about in the compassion literature is the importance of common humanity.  She suggests that when we are in touch with our common humanity this reminds us that the pain we feel in difficult times is the same pain that others feel in difficult times, maybe different circumstances and different triggers but the basic experience is the same.  

But this is not something we are very good at doing.  We generally tend to focus on how our suffering is different from other people rather than the same which increases the sense of isolation and aloneness we feel when we are struggling.  By labelling what we are currently experiencing as languishing this allows us to clear some of the fog and also to wrap some words of understanding around what we are experiencing.  In order to make changes we need to be able to notice and recognise what is happening in the first instance.

Find your FLOW activities

Have you ever had that experience where you have been absorbed in something so fully that you have lost track of time and when you look up you notice it’s gone dark outside?   This is what psychologists call FLOW  - a mental state where a person is doing some kind of activity that creates an energised focus and total absorption.  And this has now being identified as one of the most important predictors of wellbeing during the pandemic.  Flow is different for different people – some people find flow in writing, some people find flow watching a gripping boxset that pulls them into another world, some people find flow in trying to perfect the perfect 360 on their skateboard.  It doesn’t matter what it is but it does matter that we spent time doing it. Because these flow activities are natural remedies to languishing but sadly are often the first thing to go when we feel blah!

Stop multi-tasking

When is the last time you just washed the dishes – without the radio or television, or listening to that latest podcast or trying to support your oldest child with their maths homework over your shoulder?  We are a nation of multitaskers and this is before we even begin to contemplate the level of multi-tasking, we do with our devices on a daily basis - checking emails while on a zoom call, scrolling social media while talking to our kids.  And despite the accolades people acquire due to their apparent multitasking ability this is not helpful.  

Our brains, unlike computers which can run parallel programmes at the same time, are designed to focus on one task.  What multitasking actually is, is “task switching” which means you are going back and forth, back and forth between any two tasks.  And this by its very nature creates difficulties, apart from the obvious fact that it takes us much longer to get anything completed it also leaves us with a diminished sense of progress.  Grant suggests creating uninterrupted blocks of time to give us more freedom to focus. This means putting our phones away and asking people not to interrupt us.  This will increase our experience of both flow and accomplishment, both of which are like booster packs up the wellbeing continuum.

Start small

What we are all experiencing at the moment is real, the uncertainty, the continued lack of social contact, the trepidation about the school year starting again so soon ….. and what this might potentially mean in terms of our newly found freedom.  Being slightly further down the mental health curve is normal even expected at the current time.  The last thing we need is more pressure so let’s start small.  Let’s start looking for what Grant calls the small wins, solving the tricky sudoku puzzle, finishing a good book, staying committed to the activities that both matter and absorb you.  The small lift that accompanies these small wins will pull you towards other small wins and eventually you will look up and see the next league beckoning you in. 

https://www.nytimes.com/.../well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html