It appears to be more common than major depression - and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. It’s the void between depression and flourishing - the absence of well-being. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish. As you learned that masks helped protect us - but package-scrubbing didn’t - you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system - called the amygdala - was on high alert for fight-or-flight. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.Īs scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic.
It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness.
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