That lockdown slump is common
‘Languishing’ may dominate emotions
How are you feeling today? A bit anxious, but not actually depressed? A bit listless, but not completely exhausted?
Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, suggested in a recent article that “languishing” is the best word to describe this feeling, and that it’s so common it may become the dominant emotion of 2021.
To languish means to “be kept in an unpleasant place or situation.” This definitely describes what’s happened to us all this past year. I would add, however, languishing is more than that — it’s what happens when we’re kept in that unpleasant place or situation for so long that we use up our usual store of coping tactics and can no longer think what to do next.
Although languishing isn’t an official psychiatric diagnosis, it has been used to assess mind state. Marta Bassi and colleagues at the Universita degli Studi di Milano surveyed 653 mental health workers — doctors, nurses, technicians and rehabilitation experts — in Lombardy last spring when the area suffered particularly badly at the outset of the pandemic. Those who were categorized as languishing were most likely to receive a provisional diagnosis of PTSD. A decade earlier, Corey Keyes at Emory University surveyed 1,723 U.S. adults and concluded that languishing is a strong predictor of future mental illness.
If you, like so many, are languishing, how might you go about defeating the feelings of listlessness?
Middle childhood is when you were most in touch with your true passions. Rediscovering your enthusiasms offers you the chance to replace languishing with time spent in what positive psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” which he describes as: “When a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
But preserve your sleep pattern. When you follow the same daily routine, you can easily feel trapped and/or bored. Liven up your routine and you’ll feel more energized. For example, instead of the same daily walk try a new route, or at breakfast eat what you’d normally eat for supper.
Don’t, however, change your waking and rising times if they suit you. Till Roenneberg, a chronobiologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, has been studying the sleeping patterns of 10,000 people worldwide during lockdown. He’s found that those who’ve been working from home and could set their own schedule have tended toward a pattern that mirrors their weekend rising and bed times pre-lockdown. He argues this pattern is probably closer to our natural chronotype (our wake/ sleep cycle), and will result in greater productivity and alertness.