Earlier this year, the Wharton School organizational psychologist, Adam Grant wrote an article for The New York Times that was as timely and important as it was interesting ("There's a name for the blah you're feeling: It's called languishing"). Corey Keyes, a sociologist and psychologist at Emory University initially described the concept that mental health lies along a continuum from languishing to flourishing. I particularly like this model, as I think it perfectly describes what I think everyone would agree with - mental wellness cannot be measured using a binary (yes/no, present/absent) approach. Mental wellbeing is not simply the absence of mental illness, just as it is not simply the presence of high levels of wellbeing. As Keyes describes the two opposite ends of the mental health continuum, individuals with complete mental health are "flourishing" - they have high levels of physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. Some psychologists call it "flow". Conversely, those individuals who are not flourishing have lower levels of physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
Languishing is not the same as burn-out or depression, but individuals who are languishing are at risk for both. These individuals are not functioning at full capacity. Languishing is characterized by apathy, as well as a feeling of being unsettled or unfulfilled. Individuals who are languishing aren't necessarily interested in the things that typically bring them joy. They are simply "going through the motions" - the complete opposite of "being in the zone" or "firing on all cylinders" (both commonly used idioms for "flourishing").
While the COVID-19 pandemic certainly increased the number of individuals who were languishing, this is not a new phenomenon. For example, The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard developed a Flourishing Index (also published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) to measure the degree of flourishing. The index consists of two questions from each of five domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. While there is no single threshold score to indicate whether someone is flourishing or not, higher scores are better. Of interest, the national average for this score (it's been used in a number of large studies and by a number of organizations, including Harvard) was 70 before the pandemic. By June, 2020, the national average had decreased to 65. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a specific "Languishing Index" (though there are a number of tools to assess burn-out, including the Maslach Burnout Inventory.
So, now that we have at least defined "flourishing" and "languishing" (and we've even provided a way to objectively measure "flourishing"), what can we do to shift our mental state so that we are flourishing instead of languishing? Dani Blum, writing for The New York Times ("The Other Side of Languishing is Flourishing. Here's How to Get There."), provides some suggestions. Adam Grant also has a TED talk on how to stop languishing.
First, assess yourself. Determine where you are on the Flourishing Index scale. Knowing and recognizing where you are and where you need to go is the first, but most important step. Second, make sure that you take the time to celebrate and savor the small things in life. Appreciate even the tiniest of victories. Notice all of the good things happening in your life. My wife used to have us all give one example of something positive that happened to us during the day at the family dinner table. It worked wonders and helped us all focus more on the positives and less on the negatives that particular day. As it turns out, there is some really great evidence for this technique (see "Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life"). Third, do five good deeds a day. Call them good deeds, random acts of kindness, or "paying it forward" - it doesn't matter what you call them, the evidence (see one study here) strongly suggests that doing a good deed increases our own wellbeing! Fourth, look for communities or connection. Finding connections again, particularly after the pandemic, is something we should all be doing both in our personal and professional lives. Finally, find purpose in your everyday routines. Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and author of Man's Search for Meaning (literally, one of the best books that I have ever read) said, "The quest for meaning is the key to mental health and human flourishing." For many of us, we lost some of that sense of purpose during the pandemic. Finding it again will help us flourish again.
The ancient Greeks had a name for flourishing - Eudaimonia. In his Nicomachean Ethics, the philosopher Aristotle defined Eudaimonia as "the condition of human flourishing or living well." Importantly - and this is absolutely crucial - the Ancient Greeks did not believe that the purpose of life was to be happy. Rather, they proposed that the purpose in life was to achieve Eudaimonia. As the writer Mark Twain said, "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." Purpose is the key to unlock the door to flourishing.
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