Languishing: Do You Know What It Is?
This year I found myself in a position of languishing. What do I mean by that?
Most of you will know me as a pretty positive person. I enjoy looking on the bright side, and if I can find ways to have fun along the way, I will. But this year has been a particularly tricky one. And I found that the things that usually bring enjoyment have lost their fun; things have been a struggle. So, to be honest, I’ve lacked motivation, and it’s like my get-up and go, got up and left.
And it seems I’m not alone; I’ve spoken to many people recently who say that they lack their usual focus. Where they are typically productive, they now are not making progress. And there’s a sense of them being restless.
Our wellbeing is not a black or white, all or nothing experience. A continuum better describes our wellbeing. We could say that we’ve got depression at one end of the continuum and flourishing at the other.
Depression and Flourishing are well-researched and studied concepts. What’s lesser talked about is that space in the middle. The middle of the wellbeing continuum is a place termed languishing. That middle ground is where we’re not quite depressed, yet we’re not quite flourishing either. And I believe a lot of us, with the uncertainty of last year, have slipped from flourishing into the middle ground and are now languishing.
If we look at psychology, this comes from a concept known as “Learned Helplessness”.
So to understand more about learned helplessness, let’s imagine we want to train a Circus elephant. We take a baby elephant and fasten it to a rope staked in the ground. The elephant learns to walk in a tiny circle. As it grows into an enormous elephant but remains tethered, it is prevented from experiencing walking free. Despite now being two-tonnes and capable of destroying the rainforest, the elephant never tries to escape or wander off, perfect for Circus work, right? But not so great for its wellbeing. So this is an example of learned helplessness. And it has been well studied in mice, dogs and even humans.
When we find ourselves subjected to circumstances we cannot control the outcome of, we eventually give up trying—believing that our attempts are in vain. This is called “Learned Helplessness”. In such cases, we lack the ability to have hope or imagine a brighter future. There is a strong correlation between those who experience helplessness and go on to develop depression.
And certainly, for myself, I experienced circumstances last year that were outside of my control. For example, I lost some big contracts & worked for at least four months pro bono with no income coming in whatsoever.
Those were very uncertain times for me when there seemed not much I could do to change my circumstances. And 18 months on, we are still told in daily reporting that we are living in uncertain times, where we may lose our everyday freedoms and ability to work. We live with the reality of isolation from our families and communities.
I spoke to a couple earlier this week, they both lost their jobs during COVID, and between them, they applied for over a hundred jobs and weren’t able to secure even one. Fortunately, they found reemployment by moving back to where they lived before the pandemic, it’s worked out well in the end, but it was a very, very stressful time. And the aftermath of that stress and upheaval is still living with them.
There’s another part to languishing too, and it’s this, as humans, we are way better at imagining the worst, being pessimistic than imagining the best outcome.
Why Is It Then That Humans Default to Pessimism?
We find the answer to this when we consider how we grew up as a species. Our pessimism served us well. In fact, it helped us really, really well to think,
“My Gosh! Look at that! It’s a beautiful day, but ice is coming.”
Our ancestors’ pessimistic outlook helped them to prepare for the ice age, and that’s how they survived and why humans are still on the planet today. Unfortunately, we still have the bad weather brain that we inherited from our ancestors, even though we now live in an abundant world without an impending ice age, a prosperous world, where the majority of people, have options and ways forward.
What Can You Do to Overcome Your Inherited Bad Weather Brain and Respond More Appropriately to Our Circumstances?
So here’s a proven exercise from research into human happiness that will help to take you from languishing to flourishing again. It’s really simple.
For the next seven days each evening before you go to sleep, think of three things that went well today. And why?
It doesn’t need to be anything mega significant; it could be as simple as I got to take a walk in the sunshine today, and what went well about that was that the bird song sounded cheery.
Simple as that, just three things that went well in your day and why.
Sometimes, when people haven’t tried this kind of exercise before, they struggle with working out the ‘why’ part -why it went well for them. If this happens to you, then try focusing on what was important about what went well for you. What was it about that particular experience that was meaningful or of value for you?
By being intentional with this simple exercise, you will move your “bad weather thinking” towards learned optimism. Remember, pessimism is the human default; it’s more instinctive and comes from the more primitive part of your brain, so you’ll need to be intentional by using the smartest part of your brain to learn to be optimistic. And by doing this, you will begin to shift the needle away from languishing and back towards flourishing.
