Read-Along: Mental Health

This is a new type of episode. I'm going to read an article from the New York Times that a friend sent me, shout out to Lucas, that talks about some mental health related stuff that I think a lot of us are feeling. As I read through the article, I'll be stopping once in a while to explain the less common language, tricky words, etc. So don't worry if you don't understand something, because I'll probably explain it shortly after.

I'll put a link to the article in the description of the episode so you can check it out on your own. I really recommend you read along for this one. Alright, let's do this. You are listening to episode 105 of English with Dane. Hit it. Okay, we have officially started the show, so let's dive into this article. It's titled There's a Name for That Blah You're Feeling. It's called Languishing. Adam Grant is the author.

The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus, and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021. To dull means to make less intense, and to neglect something or someone means to not care for them correctly, so descuidar in Spanish. Let's keep going. At first, I didn't recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating.

Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren't excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch National Treasure again, even though she knows the movie by heart, de memoria. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 AM, I was lying there until 7 playing words with friends. That's like apalabrados. It wasn't burnout. We still had energy. It wasn't depression. We didn't feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. Languishing.

Languishing is spelled L-A-N-G-U-I-S-H-I-N-G. A few interesting words in that previous sentence. First, somewhat, like some and what, but together. It means kind of un poco algo. We felt somewhat joyless and aimless. Joyless is sin joy, right? Sin alegria. And aimless aim as in propósito, direction, objetivo, etc. And again less. So sin propósito y sin direction. Lost, I guess, is a good synonym. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness, estancamiento y la falta de algo.

It feels like you're muddling through the days looking at your life through a foggy windshield, and it might be the dominant emotion of 2021. As 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 hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded. Long haul, by the way, means a la larga, and it was used as an adjective and as a noun in that sentence.

Here it is again. As 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. Flourishing is the peak, el pico, of well-being. You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery, and mattering to others. Depression is the valley, el valle of ill being, so the opposite of well being, ill 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 or the probability that you'll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression, and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness. The term was coined, that means it was first said by a sociologist named Cory Keys, who was struck, that many people who weren't depressed also weren't thriving.

His research suggests that the people most likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders in the next decade aren't the ones with those symptoms today. They are the people who are languishing right now. And new evidence from the pandemic healthcare workers in Italy shows that those who were languishing in the spring of 2020 were three times more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Part of the danger is that when you're languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. This next part is titled A Name for What You're Feeling. Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them. Last spring, during the acute anguish of the pandemic, the most viral post in the history of Harvard Business Review was an article describing our collective discomfort as grief, dolor. Grief is spelled G R I E F, by the way.

Along with the loss of loved ones, we were mourning the loss of normalcy. Grief. It gave us a familiar vocabulary to understand what had felt, lo que habemos sentido, like an unfamiliar experience. Although we hadn't faced a pandemic before, most of us had faced loss. It could help defog our vision, giving us a clearer window into what had been a blurry experience, una experiencia borrosa. It could remind us that we aren't alone. Languishing is common and shared.

And it could give us a socially acceptable response to how are you? Instead of saying great or fine, imagine if we answered, honestly, I'm languishing. It would be a refreshing foil for toxic positivity, that quintessentially American pressure to be upbeat at all times. When you add languishing to your lexicon, you start to notice it all around you. It shows up when you feel let down decepcionado by your short afternoon walk. It's in your kids' voices when you ask how online school went.

An antidote to languishing. So what can we do about it? A concept called flow may be an antidote to languishing. Flow is that elusive state of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a momentary bond where your sense of time, place, self melts away, said Rite. During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well being wasn't optimism or mindfulness, it was flow.

People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their pre-pandemic happiness. An early morning word game catapults me into flow. A late night Netflix binge sometimes does the trick too. It transports you into a story where you feel attached to the characters and concerned for their welfare. Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence.

In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable, serán capaces, of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing. Give yourself some uninterrupted time. That means we need to set boundaries, establiser limites. Years ago, a Fortune five hundred software company in India tested a simple policy.

No interruptions Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday before noon. When engineers managed the boundary themselves, ellos mismos, forty-seven percent had above average productivity. But when the company set quiet time as an official policy, 65% achieved above average productivity. Getting more done wasn't just good for performance at work. We now know, ahora sabemos, that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation is a sense of progress.

I don't think there's anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday before noon. The lesson of this simple idea is to treat uninterrupted blocks of time as treasures to guard, desoros a defender, proteger. It clears out constant distractions and gives us the freedom to focus. We can find solace, consuelo, in experiences that capture our full attention. Okay, here's the last bit of the article. Focus on a small goal. The pandemic was a big loss.

To transcend languishing, try starting with small wins, con pequeñas victorias, like the tiny triumph of figuring out a who-dun it, that's like a murder mystery kind of story, or the rush of playing a seven-letter word. One of the clearest paths to follow is a just manageable difficulty. A challenge that stretches your skills, and heightens your resolve, which means carving out or separating daily time to focus on a challenge that matters to you.

An interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it's a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you've missed during all these months. Languishing is not merely in our heads, it's in our circumstances. You can't heal, curar o sanar, a sick culture with personal bandages. We still live in a world that normalizes physical health challenges, but stigmatizes mental health challenges.

As we head into a new post-pandemic reality, it's time to rethink our understanding of mental health and well-being. Not depressed doesn't mean you're not struggling. Not burned out, quemado or desgastado, doesn't mean you're fired up, motivado. By acknowledging that so many of us are languishing, we can start giving voice to quiet despair and lighting a path, illuminar un camino out of the void.

This article was written by Adam Grant, who is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, and is the author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, and the host of the TED podcast Work Life. This article gave me a lot to think about when I first read it. And honestly, it was better now after this second read. I feel like I got some stuff that didn't hit me the first time around. This article really struck a chord with me.

I think it perfectly captures a lot of the emotions I was feeling during most of last year and some of this year. I think we often feel pressured to just say we're fine because anything less than fine is like negative. But in reality, we're all complicated and the things that we go through, the travesamos or que nos pasan, affect us in more ways than we realize. And the amount of emotions we feel and the complexity of each emotion is not something we often think about either.

So I hope the content of the article makes you reflect and gives you some comfort to know that you're not going crazy or anything like that. In terms of English learning, my objective was to make you feel more comfortable reading articles that you maybe feel are a bit too difficult for you or that intimidate you in some way. Remember, it's not about understanding every word, it's about putting in the time and letting your brain try and figure out what's going on.

I hope this gave you at least a little bit more of the self-confidence to do that if you weren't doing so before. Also, some of you aren't that worried about the difficulty because your level is already pretty good. And in that case, I hope this rekindled, there's a good word, that spark is a chispa for reading. If you already read regularly, awesome. But for those of you who are like me and need to be reminded of how enriching it is to read, I hope this served that purpose.

Alright, that's it for this episode of English with Dane. Thank you for listening. I hope it helped. Support English with Dane by following the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. Give it a five star rating, and if you can, leave a review if you really want to help out. Remember Englishwithdain.com for transcripts and at Englishwithdain on Instagram. Instagram for random stuff. All right, talk soon. Bye bye.