S3:E4 // Stuck on the Staircase // 10.28.21

Episode description:

How do we move from languishing to flourishing even when things are not okay?

Languishing has become a buzzword of 2021, a name for the “blah” feeling that has cast a gray light over so much of life. But as the months wear on and the term “post-pandemic” becomes increasingly irrelevant, perhaps we need a term—or a whole vocabulary—to capture the complexity of the very different ways that we are experiencing this time.

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Show notes:

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Episode Transcript:

Laura: This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about embracing the journey in a world forever changed. Coming to you from Oakland, California, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

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Laura: It was a Christmas party straight out of the movies: lots of guests in fancy dresses and tuxes, a string quartet, and even waiters offering hors d'oeuvres. My family was there, and all of my friends were there too, toasting each other with glasses of champagne.

But while my loved ones were celebrating, I was in the corner of the room talking with a freelance client, who was asking me to complete her project by 5 p.m. that same day—even though it was Christmas Eve.

This was the dream I startled awake from at 5 a.m. this past Saturday. After I got over the initial relief that no one was asking me to work on Christmas and accepted the fact that I wasn’t going back to sleep, I got up and decided I might as well get that freelance work done.

I used to have these kinds of dreams all the time, back when I was a collegiate coach regularly working overtime. I’d wake up feeling resentful that even in sleep I was working.

What puzzled me about this dream was that my life now is nothing like it was then. Yes, I’m tired a lot, and working too much, and still doing those freelance jobs to pay the bills, but I’m choosing this work in a way I wasn’t able to back then. I feel more certain than ever before that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

There was also this fascinating little detail: I was anxious about my deadline, but at the same time, a part of me was still enjoying the party.

Psychologists say that one of the best ways to begin to deal with negative emotions is to name them, and it turns out that there’s a word for what I was feeling in my dream: “languishing.”

Sociologist Corey Keyes coined the term back in 2002 to identify the “state of being characterized by generally disinterested or dreary affect, minimal goal-seeking behaviors, and the perception of poor social support systems.” Keyes saw languishing as a point on a continuum of mental health, with flourishing at the opposite end. You’re not depressed, but you’re also not thriving.

When I first learned about languishing, it was helpful to have a word for the latent exhaustion and uncertainty that has been the underlayer to life during the last year and a half. But as languishing has gone from being a fascinating concept to a way of life, it’s begun to feel less helpful, and more discouraging.

So in today’s episode, we’re calling languishing out, not just naming it, but interrogating it. We’re looking unflinchingly at why it’s there in the first place, and then figuring out what to do with it. We’re going to throw off the new normal of languishing. We’re going to see if it’s possible to find our way to a better normal of flourishing—even when life feels out of control.

I’m going to start by taking a note from the psychologist, author, and meditation teacher Tara Brach, whose RAIN exercise is something I’ve talked about before, in our season 2 episode “In the Tunnel.” If you listened to the very end of that episode, to our outtake, then you’ve even heard my kids guide you through RAIN.

In our house, RAIN is our hail Mary whenever negative emotions erupt . . . which is pretty much every day with kids who are 4, 7, and 9 . . . and two grownups who are still learning how to manage their own emotions.

RAIN stands for recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture.

Recognize: what’s the emotion? LANGUISHING. Okay, languishing, I see you there.

Allow: Languishing, I allow you to be here. And also, I need to remind you that you’re not going to be here forever.

Investigate. Where in your body do you feel that languishing?

And finally, nurture: put your hand on your heart, take a big breath, and say, “it’s going to be okay, my little dumpling. This is hard, but we’re going to get through this together.”

You don’t have to call yourself a little dumpling—that was my addition, not Tara Brach’s. You might prefer something a little less precious. That’s fine. The point is to be kind to yourself even when you’re at your very worst. But I stand by it, because it makes my kids laugh. Also, it’s really hard to be a jerk when you’re referring to yourself as a little dumpling.

Being told to do RAIN when you’re in the middle of a temper tantrum is extremely annoying. My kids hate it too. But for this little dumpling, it works every time.

Until I started working on this episode, it never occurred to me to do RAIN for languishing. I think that’s because languishing feels deceptively normal. RAIN works well for moments of crisis, but languishing usually doesn’t appear in an outburst of anger or sadness. It’s more like a gray, translucent layer that we can sometimes forget is even there. I’ve often wondered, Is languishing just the way life is now? What would it look like to not languish, but flourish in this world where so much is out of our control?

It’s the question that has shaped every single episode of Shelter in Place. It’s why we’re calling this season “In Search of Home,” and we’re using that word—home—in an expansive sense, not just a building, but a life where we can be ourselves and feel okay—or better yet, more than okay.

Languishing entered our public consciousness back in April when organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant wrote about it for the New York Times. In that story he writes,

“Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work.”

Webster’s definition of “languish” is incredibly telling:

To be or become weak or feeble; droop; fade.
To lose vigor and vitality.
To suffer hardship and distress, as in to languish in prison for ten years.
To be subjected to delay or disregard: to be ignored.
To pine with desire or longing.
To assume an expression of tender, sentimental melancholy.

I’ve experienced languishing in all six of those ways during the last year and a half.

Adam Grant says that early in the pandemic, when many of us thought it would all be over in a couple of weeks, our fight-or-flight instinct kicked in—that high energy response of the amygdala that made it possible for me to launch a daily podcast and keep it going for 100 episodes straight while everything around me was falling apart.

But that initial burst of energy didn’t last long. Grant says that what began as an acute sense of anguish gave way to a chronic condition of languish.

That shared sense of purpose that we were in this together, united in our goal of getting back to normal as quickly as possible, lost its heft as we began to feel trapped inside our own homes. Essential workers who had to decide between increasing their daily risk and quitting their jobs began to feel trapped inside their lives. For those who lost loved ones to COVID—or couldn’t visit sick relatives and friends in the hospital, the experience wasn’t just one of anguish or even languish, but of grief.

Suddenly our experiences were no longer quite so similar. Everything from vaccines to systemic racism to climate change to mask-wearing became a pain point we couldn’t heal.

Our political divisions were nothing new of course, but they began to feel unbearable. I’ll never forget the cognitive dissonance of learning that my friend’s father had just died of COVID, and minutes later getting a text from an extended family member saying they just weren’t that afraid of the virus. It’s the kind of moment that has become shockingly common, but that I can’t seem to grow used to no matter how many times it happens.

Last week, as we were working on this episode and I read the script to our team, you could feel the languishing in all of us. It’s depressing to recount what we’ve been through as a world, because there’s no real indication that languishing will ever end.

A few months ago the term “post-pandemic” was being thrown around a lot—I even used it myself a few times—but as the death toll rises once again and the arguments over how to fix our problems grow more heated, it’s increasingly clear that we are not in a post-pandemic reality . . . and we may never be.

The closest thing I’ve ever had to a recurring dream goes something like this: I’m running a race, but I’m not wearing the proper shoes or clothes and I have no idea where I’m going. Sometimes I get lost, or my legs suddenly just won’t move. The course is poorly marked, and yet there are others around me who seem to know where they’re going.

As a lifelong runner, this feeling of being lost and unprepared is something I try to avoid whenever I can. I don’t just lay out my clothes and plan my pre-race meal ahead of time. I check out the course if I can. When you know a race course well—when you know exactly how far you are from each mile marker and where in the race the big hill comes and you can feel the finish line before you can even see it—you still have to endure suffering to get through it, but knowing the course makes that suffering manageable. It makes it easier to stay focused on small things like breathing, or getting up on your toes and driving your elbows back as you charge up a hill, or running just off someone’s shoulder so you can pretend that they’re pulling you along. Being present in the moment makes all the difference in how you experience the race.

But the past year and a half has often felt like that race in my recurring dream. We didn’t train for this and we’re on a course we’d never seen. Many of us don’t even own running shoes. We were just rushed to the starting line in a bathrobe and house slippers, running before we could even fully register what was happening. The course was poorly marked, with surprise mud pits and hay bales to hurdle, and hills we didn’t even know were there. Several times we’ve come to forks in the road and had no idea which way to go, because half of the runners were going one way, and half were going the other. How long can our bodies hold up, anyway? And underneath it all, there is that horrible nagging question of not just where the finish line is, but if there is a finish line. That is languishing.

One of our Kasama Collective trainees put it another way: it’s like you’re stuck on a spiral staircase in one of those old stone buildings with no windows. You can’t see what’s above you or below you, so you just keep climbing, going around in circles. The longer you’re on that staircase, the harder it gets to stay motivated to keep climbing. You start to wonder if this is just life now, if we’re all just stuck on an eternal staircase with no end. If maybe our world, our families, ourselves—are so broken that it’s futile to try to fix them.

When I began working on this episode, I thought it would be easy. Languishing! We’ve all experienced that. I know that one well.
But the deeper I got into it, the more complicated it became. I realized that yes, there have been times when I’ve been truly languishing, when everyone around me has been languishing too. But there have also been beautiful moments of celebration and connection, moments that never would have happened if not for this pandemic. Sometimes languishing feels like that race I never planned to run, but sometimes it feels more like that Christmas party in my dream.

It’s too simplistic to simply say we are languishing, because even though it’s true that our whole world has experienced something together, our individual and collective experiences have also been painfully, distinctly different.

I see languishing in the faces of my friends who work in hospitals, who have seen so many deaths—often preventable ones—that they’ve started describing their experience of work as trauma. I see it when I ask climate change experts if it’s possible to reverse the damage we’ve done. “Yes, of course,” they say wearily. “There are so many good solutions if we could act instead of argue.”

Our world is languishing. We all want to feel safe. We all want to feel at home. We all want to get off the staircase of languishing and find our way to flourishing. But we’re stuck, too busy defending our positions to remember that all of that energy we’re expending could be directed toward actually fixing those problems.

Never before has it been so obvious that we are not, in fact, together. We might not even be on the same staircase.

This past weekend I went for a hike with a close friend who is a therapist, and I asked her if she had any insight on how to move from languishing to flourishing.

She said that what’s hard about languishing is that we don’t have the vocabulary to describe the complexity of it. When Adam Grant wrote his story about languishing last April, it struck a chord with so many of us, because finally we could name that thing we were feeling! But months later we’re not any closer to moving out of it, and that one word no longer feels sufficient to describe the complexity of what we’re experiencing.

She said that her 8-year-old son, who loves math, asked her recently how many people had died of COVID in the U.S. When she told him the number—which was over 700,000 at that point—he couldn’t comprehend it. It was too much to take in.

We can’t quantify languishing, and even if we try, it’s too much to process all at once. We never quite know where we are on the staircase, or if we’re any closer to the end.

She said that her therapy clients used to naturally come to a point where they both agreed it was time to stop meeting because their lives had stabilized. But now when she encourages her clients to move on, they don’t want to go—even when they’re doing great, when they’ve found new relationships or gotten better jobs. They’re already braced for the next tragedy, no longer sure that whatever stability they’ve managed to regain will remain. There’s a sense of uncertainty that remains even when life is good, like at any moment it may all come crashing down once again.

This helped me a lot, to hear that I wasn’t alone in feeling like I couldn’t quite escape languishing even in my best moments. I’ve never felt so consistently grateful to be doing work that is satisfying and allows me to connect with others. In some ways, I’m thriving. But then there have been days when I’m so tired and the world feels so hopeless that all I want to do is stop.

My friend said that languishing itself isn’t always a bad thing. It can be the thing that triggers a response, maybe one that has been needed for a very long time. She said that in therapy, there’s always a moment when the person she’s seeing realizes that they aren’t willing to stay in their current situation anymore, that this is not how they want to live their life. They’re not acting yet, but they can see more clearly that change is possible.

In his article “A Languishing–Flourishing Model of Goal Striving and Mental Health for Coaching Populations,” Anthony M. Grant uses the term “acquiescence” to describe that state of being in between languishing and flourishing. You’re not in despair, but you’re not highly motivated to reach your goals either. Instead, acquiescence is being “content to remain,” at least for the time being.

In therapy, the term that is used is “radical acceptance,” and Tara Brach has written a whole book with that title. You know that things aren’t how you’d like them to be, but you can accept that this is how they are right now (and that they won’t be like that forever).

In meditation, the word that is sometimes used is “equanimity,” that subtle skill of being open and not getting uptight about any imperfections in our immediate environment. Jeff Warren, who does the Daily Trip meditations on the Calm app, is my favorite champion of equanimity. He says that meditation is our opportunity to do something utterly simple: just be.

I will admit that when I first encountered meditation a few years ago, I scoffed at this kind of thinking. How could ‘just being’ make a difference? It seemed too simple. I wanted to change things, to get out of my languishing and make something happen.
But the older I get, the more I realize how little of my life I actually can change. Especially in this pandemic, there have been so many moments when I was faced with exhausting, frustrating, maddening situations that could—and sometimes did—leave me feeling hopeless, at least for a little while. But that subtle shift to equanimity, or radical acceptance, or acquiescence—whatever you want to call it—isn’t just simple, but elegant. Because it reminds me that

I don’t have to be in control to be okay.

It’s not passive. You’re not throwing up your hands and giving up. Instead you’re saying, this is how things are right now. You’re noticing how you’re feeling, maybe even doing RAIN. You’re reminding yourself that it’s not going to be this way forever, and then focusing on something that will help you get through that day, that will help you take a tiny step away from languishing and toward flourishing.

Moving from languishing to flourishing isn’t just helpful right now; it protects our mental health down the road. Studies have shown that people who find themselves on the flourishing end of the mental health continuum are 6 times less likely to experience depression than those who are languishing.

My therapist friend said that sometimes what we need most is not some huge boost toward flourishing and productivity, but the permission to not have it all together, to recognize that we need extra support, or encouragement, or rest.

She said she’s started taking short naps between seeing clients when her days start to feel especially long and difficult, and this simple kindness to herself has gone a long way in refueling her so she can help others.

She loves her job, and she’s thriving in it—but in certain ways she’s languishing too. We all are. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s actually an opportunity for us to recognize that a change is needed, and that the biggest change of all may just be that we need to be kind to ourselves when we don’t live up to standards that no longer feel possible in the way that they used to.

I can’t express how grateful I was to hear this. I have struggled with this episode, because it’s come on a week when I was languishing myself.

Unlike times in my life when I’ve experienced real depression, my languishing comes and goes, sometimes with the moment. A couple of weeks ago life felt a lot like that Christmas party. Even though I still had a lot on my plate and was aware of looming deadlines, I was having fun, enjoying myself at a conference where I was meeting other podcasters, feeling totally fulfilled in my work and certain that I was headed in the right direction. And that’s all still true. But this past week, as I’ve tried to play catch-up in work and life, I’ve felt completely exhausted.

There’s a concept in Zen Buddhism called Shoshin, which means “beginner’s mind.” It means that we allow ourselves to approach life with the same openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions that beginners have. Think about the way a little kid approaches a new task: when they learn to kick a soccer ball that first time, they don’t think about whether or not they’re going to someday be a scholarship athlete. They just get a kick out of that surprising power of their foot connecting with the ball. When they color a picture, they aren’t feeling pressure to get that work in an art museum or even—in the beginning—to stay within the lines. They’re just trying this new thing, seeing how it feels to put that waxy crayon to paper, noticing how much fun it can be to watch the color spill onto the page.

Maybe the key to moving past languishing—or at least learning to cope with it better–is to develop a beginner’s mindset about it. Yes, our world has been through pandemics before, and yes, we have technology and education and we know a lot more now than we did a year and a half ago. But when it comes to this exact moment in time and the extremely complicated and varied ways that we are languishing or flourishing or grieving in it—or maybe all of the above, depending on the day, we are all beginners who haven’t yet developed the vocabulary to adequately describe what we’re experiencing.

This isn’t just fancy reframing of a bad situation. It’s how our brains work. When we develop a beginner’s mindset and allow ourselves to approach life with the same curiosity and delight that kids do, our brains rewire themselves in what’s known as neuroplasticity.

David Robson writes about this in his BBC story, “How a 'beginners’ mindset' can help you learn anything,” which follows Tom Vanderbilt’s research for his book Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning.”

Developing a beginner’s mindset might just be the key to moving from languishing to flourishing.

So how do we get there?

First, take a moment to identify what you’re feeling. Do RAIN.

Second, give yourself permission to feel this way, and remember that whether it means taking a nap or listening to a song you love or calling yourself a little dumpling, self-compassion can go a long way to making you feel okay even when you’re not okay.

Third, try something new. Develop a beginner’s mindset. Draw a picture, or garden, or learn how to sing.

Vanderbilt says that the key to making that beginner’s mindset work for us is to not only give ourselves permission to not get it right the first time, but to learn from our mistakes, and then change it up when we try again.

Especially when we’re languishing, we can easily get stuck in a rut, just mindlessly repeating the same actions over and over again without identifying what we did right and wrong—what psychologists call “deliberate practice.”

But when we analyze that mistake, and then intentionally vary the ways that we try again, we force our brain to become more flexible, which makes us more able to adjust and cope when we face new difficult situations. Vanderbilt uses the example of a juggler trying out different objects and throwing them at different heights, and sitting down or standing up while juggling. It’s hard to keep mixing it up. It’s the opposite of what most of want to do, which is get more comfortable and stuck in the ways of doing things that take the least amount of effort.

Fourth, become a teacher of the thing you are learning.

Vanderbilt discovered that we often learn best when we know we’ll have to teach others, maybe because we approach that learning with genuine curiosity as we imagine how we’ll explain it to others.

And finally, reach out to someone. Studies have shown that languishing tends to go hand in hand with feeling isolated, which leads to a more self-centered worldview. Flourishing on the other hand, often stems from feeling connected to others, which leads us to a worldview that is more others-oriented and focused on the greater good. (Wissing et al., 2021).

Reaching out to others might mean allowing those who are truly grieving to not rush past that process, and figuring out how to support them better as they do. It might mean helping them to celebrate and savor the good moments, too, the ones when we feel like we can raise our glass of champagne. Sometimes it means giving ourselves permission to slink away into the corner or tell the people pushing us too hard that no, we will not get that project done by 5 p.m. We’re at a party. And it’s Christmas Eve.

Our training program is rooted in these ideas of beginners mindset, teaching what you learn, and working in community, it took working on this episode to remind me that even though I’ve been doing this for a while now, I still need to approach not just my work but my life with a beginner’s mindset.

I’ve felt the weight of managing not just my own sense of languishing, but for making sure that my family and our Kasama Collective trainees aren’t languishing too.

My conversation with my friend, and writing this episode, and circling around that spiral staircase again and again and feeling completely stuck finally brought me to this realization: there are going to be weeks when I am on top of the world, when life feels like a Christmas party.

And there are going to be other times when I’m languishing, when what I need most is not to feel the pressure of being an expert, but to give myself permission to be a beginner, to learn from my mistakes, to remember that at the end of the day, I’m still just human.

The moments when I’m able to break out of my languishing are the ones where I’m investing in our trainees, or when I’m taking the time to stop and really listen to my kids, to hear what they’re excited about, when I become a beginner with them. Or when I’m on a hike with a friend who reminds me that it’s normal to languish sometimes. We all do. Especially lately.

Most of all, we need to remind ourselves that languishing is where we are, but that doesn’t mean it’s a permanent state. Maybe languishing is just the moment when we realize that some movement is needed, when we figure out how to help this little dumpling flourish—even when everything around us reminds us that life is not, in fact, okay.

As always, if you listen to the end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, our little easter egg to thank you for sticking around.

But first, we want to say that if you’re listening and recognizing that you’re in need of support, there are resources available and people who can help. We’ve listed resources for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in our show notes, which provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Their helpline number is 1-800-273-8255.

You can also find help through TheHopeLine, which offers free and confidential conversations with trained responders for those who are struggling with any of life’s issues, at thehopeline.com.

The Crisis Text Line provides free, 24/7, high-quality text-based mental health support and crisis intervention. You can text HOME to 741741 to connect with a Crisis Counselor.

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects came from Storyblocks. Nathan Wizard was the assistant editor for this episode, Meridian Watters was the assistant audio editor, and Hannah Fowler was our assistant producer. Nate Davis was our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 3 Kasama Collective trainees are Bethany Hawkins, Zahra C, Nathan Wizard, Hannah Fowler, Meridian Watters, and Nikki Schaffer.