Feeling worn out? You might be Languishing.

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and today I’m coming to you from chilly Winnipeg, Manitoba. I left Las Vegas yesterday. It was in the mid 80s Fahrenheit, which is like 27 degrees, or maybe even higher, 29 degrees Celsius, and got to Winnipeg, and it was like 28 or -4, and it’s cold here. But I’m at a lovely place, the Fort Garry Hotel. I’ve got an interesting audience to speak to today, and I wanted to share with you this interesting finding that’s coming out of the pandemic. That’s that we knew mental health suffered a lot. People were isolated and dealing with all the stress and uncertainty that came with the pandemic, and the expectation was that there’d be massive increases in clinically debilitating depression and anxiety. That turned out to not be very true. There is a little uptick in those kind of pathological, disabling conditions, but what’s more, the reality of the current mental health circumstances of most people around the world is a state of what we call languishing. This is not really debilitating mental health issues, but it sure as heck isn’t happy. So let’s explore that topic of languishing in this video. Stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so the pandemic brought tremendous pressures on all of us. Lots of difficult emotions, isolation, stress, uncertainty, and fear, and all that kind of stuff. And we expected it to bring a bunch of negative mental health pathology. But as it turns out, most people, the vast, vast, vast majority, did not become, did not suffer disabling mental health or pathological conditions. They instead had what we called, what we call languishing. And you probably heard me talk about in the past this idea that if we called negative pathological mental health negative five, and thriving, absolutely abundant happiness plus five, we always think that most humans are somewhere in the middle. Well, this trend that occurred through the pandemic is to move people towards that negative five, but not all the way there. So I’m arbitrarily making it up and saying languishing is sort of a negative two to negative four space where life just isn’t good. It isn’t fun, it isn’t joyful, and the things that we used to find joyful, we’re no longer getting much pleasure from. Where it’s flat, and there’s this inability to focus, and a sense of emptiness. It reminds me a little bit of some of the symptoms of burnout, but it is distinct. And this is obviously a really horrible place for us to be. And yet it makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? We coped, we got through these many, many months of the pandemic, and it’s looking like there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s hope that that’s in fact exactly how it plays out. But there’s a lot of suffering, and if you recognize some of these ideas of languishing, just not feeling like you’re anywhere close to your best self, but not curled up in the fetal position in bed either, then there’s things that you can do to kind of try to get out of this funky space. And as I always say, one of the first things is to recognize it. And sometimes language is helpful because then we can assign a concept to it. We can say, okay, this is not, I’m not depressed, I’m not clinically anxious, but I sure as heck I’m not happy. Well, maybe this title of languish will say, yeah, that’s how I am. I’m just flat. Things that I want to feel good about aren’t impacting me the way they used to. And if that’s true, and you’ve got that handle now on it, there’s things that you can do.

And obviously, the first suggestion almost always is self-care. Get exercise, get enough sleep, take a warm bath, go to the spa, whatever those things are for you that can help you make, make you feel good. And one of the main ones, especially coming through this period, is to combat isolation. You know, reach out. Even though sometimes when we’re feeling bad, often when we’re feeling bad, we choose to withdraw. And the pandemic was isolating by its very nature and the public health guidelines. So we actually have to go extra far to make sure we’re not isolated. Reach out to friends and family, make dates, even if they’re online, with people that you love and know. Join a class, do some kind of thing, join a volunteer group, something that gets you engaged with lots and lots of people. And then this one, maybe is difficult for a lot of us, but the idea of play. Can we find ways to just be silly and fun? And if you’ve got kids around, young kids especially, that you know, get down on the floor and play with them. They know how to play instinctively. But it might be, you know, have the dance party in the kitchen. Go outside and shoot pucks against the garage door, some kind of ways of just being involved in playful activities that are done for the sake of the activity instead of the have to and the task to get you to some end goal. Get out in nature. We know it’s got huge therapeutic value, so go for a walk in a park, find a forest, get on a mountain. And now that spring is coming, maybe we can have much more opportunity to do that. And then finally, I want to suggest this, can we lean into the emotion of hope? Hope is one of the most beautiful positive emotions. It’s got this negative aspect to it that says there’s something I’m trying to overcome, there’s something that’s not great. But hope is this kind of silver lining that says, how can this get better? When we nurture hope, when we play with it in our imaginations, it builds optimism. And so, imagine your future happier self. You know, what are the circumstances? What does it look like? What are you doing? How do you feel? And if you genuinely spend time visualizing these future circumstances when you’re going to feel better, you in fact will feel better. You’re borrowing future imagined happiness into your present day moment in time. And so there’s some suggestions to deal with languishing. And I love this term because it gives us a handle on something that previously, maybe we didn’t really know what we were going through. And so if this appeals to you, this idea that this is what the emotion is, if not in you and then lots of people around you, well now you’ve got this handle, and you can think of some ways that you can combat it. Hope this was helpful. If you like this kind of content, click the like button, share with your friends and family, maybe the HR director place you work, and thanks for watching. We will see you next time. Bye for now.