Fighting that "Meh" Feeling of Languishing

because we don't have great words for it. But even though it's pretty nondescript, this middling, listless feeling is very much worth paying attention to. It's a not so nice experience that many of us have gone through, especially in the past few years, and it's one that's negatively affected my own personal happiness, maybe even as much as bigger emotions like fear, fury, and regret. You might even be in the grip of this yucky feeling right now, So

ask yourself, honestly, how are you feeling today. If your answer is MEH, then you might be experiencing the feeling that behavioral scientists refer to as languishing. The experience of languishing that lethargic, joyless blah state has always been part of the human condition. But these days, in the midst of the COVID nineteen pandemic, with lockdowns and restrictions disrupting so many of our routines, a scientific interest in the

importance of languishing has come back into fashion. And one of the scholars who's thinking most carefully about this yucky emotion happens to be one of my favorite psychologists, podcasters, and colleagues, Adam Grant. When Adam's not teaching at war in business school, he's writing books like Think Again, The Power of Knowing what you don't Know, and Give and

Take Why helping others drives our success. He's also the host of the fantastic ted podcast Work Life with Adam Grant, which is about the science of making work not suck. Adam decided to address the overlooked emotion of languishing in a widely shared New York Times article, but he didn't approach the topic as a curious observer, and that's because this world renowned expert on human behavior had wound up finding himself just as a drift and languishing as the

rest of us. When I was in college. I was really frustrated by the amount of time that I was wasting watching TV. So I said a rule that I was never going to turn the TV on unless I already knew what I wanted to watch, and I stopped wasting time. And then over time I had to add things to that to don't list. So I said, Okay, I don't scroll on social media, and you know, if there's literally nothing else I could be doing, like I'm about to have a plane takeoff, then maybe I'll scroll.

But otherwise I just don't want to get sucked in. And I'm definitely not going to pick up my phone in bed because I would like to get some rest. And in twenty twenty, in the early days of the pandemic, I found myself breaking all of those rules. I'm normally asleep by ten, but I was staying up way past midnight, and sometimes I was playing words with friends on my phone. Other times I was like, I'd binge a whole season of a show that you know, Netflix just recommended to me.

I'd finish it and then wonder, wait, have I already seen this? And I couldn't even remember. I was just kind of zoned out. And I would swear when I woke up the next morning, Okay, this time, I'm going to bed by ten, no more breaking the rules. And the pattern just kept repeating. And I study motivation for a living. I'm supposed to understand my own behavior. What am I doing? And why can I not make any

sense of it? Yeah? I mean my deep dive in early twenty twenty was rewatching season three of Jersey Shore and then ending it and then just rewatching the season, which like wasn't a particularly good seat, Like it was just gross and yucky. But the thing that was most frustrating was like, I'm supposed to be an expert on behavior change, Like I'm supposed to not be doing things that are gross and yucky, and yet you know, finding

myself doing this too. And so as you were going through this year, to talk about some of the emotions that come with this, because you know, it's one thing to like, you know, binge watch a season if you're kind of enjoying it and like blowing off work and it's fun, But it's another if it's kind of giving you this gross feeling. And so you know, what was this feeling like as you were going through this yeah. I think at first it was just frustration I was.

I guess I was mentally beating myself up. I have specific plans and goals. I'm not following them, I'm not working toward them. This is out of character. Who are you? Who? This person who's taken over my brain? And then I guess the other thing I felt really early was I guess I almost felt like I understood what most people experienced when they procrastinate, which is again something I'm normally

good at avoiding. Right I've been called a procrastinator because I love to dive into something months before it's due and finish things early. And I just felt like, Okay, there's this gap between what I know I should be doing and what I want to be doing. And even when I don't want to be playing another game of words with friends, like I still find myself slipping into it. And I think that came along with some guilt. I

felt like I was letting my self down. I felt like I was I was also letting my family down because I would wake up tired the next morning, and I know my energy affects the people around me, and I think those are the early emotions. And then they morphed over time as you kind of get stuck in this pattern, right, you do kind of what I did, which is like, you want to figure out what's going on, right, and so in your nerdy scientists like me, so you

come up with some hypotheses. Right. So your hypothesis number one is that you know, maybe you're depressed, right, you know maybe if this is you know, seeds of early depression. Right. You'll talk about why that hypothesis didn't work, why this wasn't exactly depression. I think the main reason was it was pretty obvious that I wasn't depressed. Was I still

had plenty of hope? I was. I was the person who was telling everyone, look, we don't know when and how this pandemic is going to end, but we know it will end. Like they don't go on into perpetuity, like we know this is a historical fact. Right. If they did, we wouldn't be here. Humans would not have survived a prior pandemic, right, And so you know I knew that. I guess my ability to stay optimistic was a big factor. The other thing was I was very active, right.

It wasn't like I was sitting around doing nothing all day, I was still getting plenty done. I was just below my normal level of productivity and wasting a lot more time than I normally do. So that loses the second hypothesis you might have, right, which is that you know, maybe you're just burned out, right, like, maybe you need a break and that's why you're, you know, staying up late and you know, playing words with friends and stuff. You'll talk about why this wasn't exactly burnout either from

a psychological perspective. Yeah, so psychologists normally to find burnout is at least the heart of it is emotional exhaustion, the sense that you're so drained by your job that you literally have nothing left to give. And I failed all those tests of burnout. Did you actually take the survey in the middle of this, I did, actually did? No? I did, actually embarrassingly. Yeah, you're a much more conscientious

self assessor than I am. Apparently. No. I just you know, the first thing was this was not job related, so it didn't fit the definition of burnout. I was actually thrilled with my work overall. I just my mental state and my mostly nighttime and morning habits weren't what I wanted them to be. I also, I had plenty of energy. I didn't feel depleted, I didn't feel drained, I didn't feel exhausted, except that I wasn't sleeping enough or sleeping well. But you know, I was still working out six days

a week. I was putting the finishing touches on think again, and it was I felt the best thing I'd ever written. So like, wait a minute, that that does not fit with my picture burnout at all. And so you want to come up with a different hypothesis, like a different diagnosis, And so what was that diagnosis? Well, I decided at

some point that I must be languishing. It's funny in retrospect that it didn't hit me because I remember first reading the research in well technically in sociology but also in psychology by Corey Keys that put the concept on the map almost two decades earlier, and I was so intrigued by this idea that there's a whole spectrum of well being and then on one extreme you have mental illness,

which might include depression or anxiety. On the other extreme, you have peak mental health, which you would call flourishing or thriving. And we don't really talk about the neglected middle child, which is languishing. So when I thought about languishing, I think the technical definition is that it's a sense of emptiness and stagnation, or you might call it unwi. But I actually didn't connect the dots until much much later. I languished for a few weeks. It's subsided. I didn't

really know why. And then Tara Parker Pope from The New York Times calls me and says, you know, I keep hearing people say they're in a pandemic fog and they're having trouble concentrating. What is that? And I started making a list of all these different hypotheses and none of them fit. And all of a sudden I said to her, Oh, sounds like languishing. And then it hit me, Oh, that's what I was doing. So let's walk through like a definition of languishing. It's kind of this in the

middle between depression and kind of full mental health. But like, how would we define it? I think most people would say it feels kind of mat or blah or even ah. I love that they're all monosyllabic words, right, It's the quintessential picture of language to say I can't even pull off a second syllable. You know, in psychology we would define it as as a sense of probably aimlessness and joylessness.

Its Corey Keys would would describe it. It's not the presence of mental illness, it's the absence of mental health. And so, you know, I guess another way to think about that is to quote Harvey Danger, I'm not sick,

but I'm not well. You're just missing well being. And it's funny because you know, there's so much talk of other mental health issues like depression and anxiety, but like languishing is surprisingly less well known and given you know in some ways how common it was, especially during twenty twenty. But I feel like in general, you know, so, what's the history of why this just doesn't come to the force so much. I've been wondering the same thing. I'm not sure we have a clear answer on it. I

have a couple of hunches. One is that it's just much more invisible in our daily experiences. Right. If you get depressed, you almost can't notice anything else. If you're anxious, the cycles of rumination start to kick in. You're worrying constantly, you feel that intensely. But languishing is almost an absence of emotion, and so I think that makes it harder to see. My other hunch is it's not a disease or a disorder. It's just kind of a lingering emotional state.

It doesn't have the same urgency or intensity that we would associate with more serious mental challenges. But there is evidence for the consequences of languishing, so you know, talk about the consequences for our productivity but also for our future mental health. Yeah, this is all really spearheaded by Corey Keys. So in the Keys research, we see that people are about three times more likely to cut back on work when they're languishing. They become more distracted, they

have trouble focusing. We also see that if you wanted to predict who's going to be depressed or anxious in the next decade, it is not the people who are depressed and anxious today. It's actually the people who are

languishing right now who are at the greatest risk. And I think that's because you know, when you're depressed or anxious, you feel like you have to do something eventually right, either you seek help or you try to help yourself, Whereas when you're languishing, you just kind of sit there with it. You might be oblivious to it until it develops into something much more serious. When I first read Adam's viral New York Times article, it was like a slap in the face, the good kind of a slap

in the face. It made me realize that I'd been ignoring my own meth feeling of languishing for months. Initially, I figured the solution would be defined ways to force myself back into becoming more engaged at work. But it turns out that this just get back to its strategy is more counterproductive than you might expect. When we get back from the break, I'll talk to Adam about how we can better understand this chronic state of feeling blah and what we can really do to stop it. The

Happiness Lab will be right back. Adam Grant's work is already familiar to millions of fans through his books and podcast episodes, but when he started to chronicle his own brush with languishing, he struck a chord with people across the entire world and from every walk of life. His New York Times piece about languishing was talked about everywhere, which kind of fits with the articles subheading that languishing

maybe the dominant emotion of twenty twenty one. So it was adam surprised that an article that literally has bleh in the title took off like a rocket. Most of my writing has been a random walk in the sense that, you know, sometimes I'm really confident that an article is going to strike a chord and it doesn't, and other times I'm like, oh, this is kind of interesting and

people really respond to it. This one, I actually had a really strong sense that it was going to resonate, and I had it in part because I got to experience it right when I was having that conversation with Tara. It was like a light bulb went off. And I don't think I've had that many Eureka moments in my career, but this was one of them. Like, Okay, at this point,

I've been through a full year of the pandemic. I had languished myself, I had watched pretty much everyone I knew languish, and for a whole year I didn't figure it out. And so this was like a WHOA, Okay, I guess that this is a really common experience. People are struggling to label it understand it makes sense of it do something about it. I have something to stay here, and so I basically cleared my calendar when I got

off the phone with her and started writing. You know what was the response like, because in my Twitter feed at least, it was pretty incredible. For like months after the article came out, it was as close as I've ever come to something going viral. I don't know what the bar is on that, but I quickly got an email from The Times that in the first week or two it had been read I don't know, five or six million times. It was all over social media. I

was seeing celebrities share it. Then Prince Harry talked about it in a podcast. It was pretty much everywhere. My favorite moments were when I had a former student or a friend or a colleague reach out and say, hey, nine people have sent me this article and they don't even know that I know you. So it was exciting. It was also there was a part of me that was a little disappointed by the reaction in what sense,

like why the disappointment. What was disappointing to me was when I put an idea in a body of evidence sound into the worlds. I want to learn something new from the reactions, and normally what happens is when something attracts attention, it sparks a bunch of dialogue. It leads to you know, for me, I get to do some rethinking. I questioned some of my assumptions, I changed some of

my views, I encounter new evidence. And it also often, I guess, when it goes well to motivate other people to shift some of their thoughts or decisions or actions. And I felt like a reaction to languishing was just over and over. It was one note, it was yep, I'm languishing, this is me, I'm languishing. We're all languishing,

and it just kept repeating over and over again. And I guess I want I wanted it to be more generative in starting a conversation that I hadn't thought of before, as opposed to just validating what people were already feeling and giving them a vocabularity to describe it. And I realized, that's a ridiculous expectation. And this is probably the most useful thing that I could have written, at least from

you know, what we do and what I know. But there were definitely exceptions to this, and my favorite one was the critique that Austin Cleon wrote. So Austin as an artist, and he wrote this great critique where he said I hated the term languishing. The moment I saw it, I was like, yes, tell me more, what did you hate about it? I read a little further and he says, I'm not languishing. I recognize some of the symptoms you're describing, but I'm dormant, like a volcano or like a plant

in the dead of winter. And he said, it is ridiculous to expect that, when the world is standing still, that I'm going to flourish, like as a plant. Like you don't try to flourish. You don't try to thrive in the dead of winter. You wait for spring. And he went on to say that, you know, even though I'm dormant right now, quiet things are happening inside me. And I thought that was such a profound alternative. That was the kind of dialogue that I wanted to start

with languishing. And I think he was right. I don't think that people should feel pressure to immediately say, Okay, I'm languishing, Now what do I do to get out of it? I don't think there's anything wrong with sitting with it for a few days or a few weeks, I think it's reasonable to say, if the world really is stagnating, I don't want to put unrealistic pressure on

myself to be flourishing. At the same time, I worried that Austin was creating a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy and saying, well, I'm not capable of flourishing in difficult circumstances, and therefore I'm not going to bother

to try. And so I think this is so powerful because I think, you know, it raises this question of where languishing comes from in the first place, and you know, part of I think what he's saying is that, you know, that's our unrealistic expectations about how much we're going to be able to work in the context of a global pandemic, or how much we're going to be able to work

when things are tough. But I think that's one of the reasons I think the article resonated so much is that you gave people a term to describe what was going on. Like, part of the languishing is the frustration, It is the guilt, and we're like, no, no, no, this isn't like you doing something bad or you messing up. This is just this thing that happens. It's languishing, it's fine.

And so you know, talk about what we know psychologically about just like giving a term for something and how powerful that can be for kind of understanding the phenomena

of like taking next steps. So I think my favorite demonstration of the power of naming emotions would be the Matthew Lieberman research, which you know well right on, dealing with phobia of spiders in particular, right, So you basically track whether people overcome their fear of spiders by looking at whether they're willing to let a spider approach them and whether they show a physiological response when that happens.

And I thought what was going to work best was either some level of distraction or some kind of reappraisal to say, Okay, the spider is actually harmless, it can't hurt me. You know. Maybe we do that through flooding and we just dropped the spider in your lap and

then you realize this is okay. Maybe we take more of a systematic desensitization approach to exposure therapy and say, all right, first we're gonna have you draw a spider, and then we're going to put a spider halfway across the room in a cage, and then slowly we'll give you the chance to approach. And none of those steps, to my recollection of the data, were as powerful as

just having people label their fear. When they said I'm afraid of spiders, all of a sudden, I think it gave them some power over their emotions and they realize, well, okay, I can't con troll the fact that I felt that physiological reaction, but I can definitely make choices about how

I want to respond to it. And so when I hear psychologists say name it to tame it, I think maybe something similar happened with languishing, that when you recognize that you were languishing, it shifts the way that you process the pandemic. One of the interesting things that I caught myself doing, which I also saw a lot of people do, was say, well, I don't know what to do. I've never been through a pandemic before. And it's true, unless you're one hundred three years old, you probably have

not survived a pandemic. And even then, I'm guessing you don't remember it. Very well, and I think that framing of it was extremely unhelpful because it meant that people were having a completely foreign experience and there was nothing to lean on or learn from. Whereas when people were

able to pinpoint the emotional state, they could say, I'm languishing. Well, I've languished before, Like there was definitely a time in college where you know, I had a bad breakup and I got over the depression, but I still felt sort of blah. If you've ever said you had the case of the Mondays at work head quoted office space, right, you are ling on Monday. And once you recognize that you've languished before, you can learn lessons from your own

past resilience. You can look at those times and say, well, what are some of the choices and behavior patterns that got me out of it? And then maybe you're in a better position to learn how to stop languishing and you don't have to get advice from someone else, right, you can actually maybe gain some wisdom from your own past. And I think that's part of the power of labeling the emotion is it lets you realize this is in some ways a unique experience, but the psychological state is

familiar and that lends itself to some changes. The other thing, I think the power of giving it a name is that you can kind of figure out the science that goes with it, right, you know. I think when I'm experiencing anxiety, it's sometimes really helpful for me to realize this is just a fight or flight response. My heart is reacting because I know my sympathetic nervous system, or like,

I can throw some biology on there. And I think when you think about languishing, you realize that this is an emotional state in which you don't really realize how bad the state is. Right, because you can't experience the emotions in the same way, you don't get the it's so bad, and that's one of the reasons you don't

like take action on it. Like for me, that was really powerful, Oh, this is a feature of what I'm going through is I don't really get how bad it is in this state, and therefore I'm not doing anything about it. Was that kind of powerful for you too, in terms of your own frustration with languaging, Yeah, I'd like to do it as rationally as you just described it.

I don't think the neuroscience is there yet for languishing right to describe exactly what's happening, like, if I had to guess, I would say that, you know, there's maybe a shortage of dopamine and we're not getting the reward response that we normally experience, either from feeling productive or from doing something fun and enjoyable. And so it's the absence of those highs the rushes that probably I would

want to describe. But I think I did something similar, which is to say, you know, look him back at least, Okay, those are symptoms of languishing. That's a real thing. There's nothing wrong with me, there's something wrong in my circumstances. And I think that made it much easier to find some self compassion. And then the next time I found myself languishing, oh okay, there done that. I can probably

get through it. So what did you do were you going through this Jersey Shore situation when you read my article? How did the timing play at there was you know, like everything in the pandemic, there was kind of more Jersey Shore time than others. And it wasn't just Jersey Shore. Sometimes it was like hoarders. I think it was reading the article and also just realizing that because this is a thing with a name, I can take action on it, right, Like, there's things I can do to kind of feel better,

you know. For me, it was really just like moving my body, doing some yoga, being proactive about picking things that I know when I'm in a languishing state is going to help, and so that was kind of powerful

for me. But another was kind of what you mentioned, which is just this idea that when you have a label and when you know what it is, you can give yourself some self compassion, right, And it especially being you know, so called happiness expert these days, you know, it's hard to admit that you're like going through some tough times and it's not just me, right, Like, this is the problem of what's called toxic positivity. Right. It was to talk about toxic positivity and why it makes

it hard to talk specifically about an emotion like languishing. Well, I think I think the way that I experienced this during the pandemic, once the acute phase was over and we were kind of into the chronic Okay, you know, whatever extreme fear or grief most people were feeling, some of that had subsided and now stragging on this endless groundhog day. I felt like what happened was, as I started seeing people outdoors again, they would say how are you,

and I'd say pretty good. I'd almost get judged like what do you what do you mean? Like why are you not great or awesome? And that's toxic positivity, right, It's it's the pressure to be optimistic and upbeat and enthusiastic at all times, no matter what's going on in your life. And that doesn't exist in every culture, as

you know, right, It's it's much easier. For example, if you live in Russia, the actual expected response to how are you, and the research I've read is normal, literally normal, and if you say you're great, people will think you're a Pollyanna or that you're up to something sneaky. So, you know, here and obviously in the land of optimism, we live the American dream and that means we're expected to be exuber and I think that's really hard. I think that made it really difficult for people to say,

you know, honestly kind of ah. And I guess that was one of the reasons I got excited about writing this article is I wanted people to have the freedom to say you know, honestly, I'm kind of languishing right now, or, as they'd be more likely to say it, kind of, I guess I'm languishing. One of the reasons I really want to interview you for this podcast, and one of my favorite things about the article is that you are a good example because you made it out like you

rescued yourself. And in your article you give people some really great tips for kind of what you can do to solve things. And so when we get back from the break, we're going to hear some of those solutions. But just a quick teaser. Adam's solution involved a princess, a man in a mustache, and a red hat. We'll hear more about this curious solution when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. I love that when I was a drift in my own state of languishing, I made

all the classic mistakes. I'd try to push myself with woollpower alone to do tasks that I had little motivation to complete. I also get sucked into a ton of mindless distractions like junk TV that didn't really nourish me. Psychologist Adam Grant, however, figured out a better solution. He was rescued from languishing by a pair of plumbers, Mario and Luigi. All Right, so summer twenty twenty, I think I guess I'm at peak languishing, although peak feels like

the wrong term. Yes, like an ultimate met whatever that is. We all of a sudden had a bunch of free time. We're just kind of we're not going on vacation. We're sitting around, what are we going to do? And one day my sister suggests that we should play Mario Kart on Nintendo Switch, which you can play online. So she and my brother in law are halfway across the country

in Michigan. I'm in Philly with my family. We're basically all locked down, and we start this weekly game and I am fired up, like I haven't been pretty much for the whole pandemic. I'm like shouting, got you, creen shell. And first of all, I don't think my kids have ever seen me trash shock before, and I was like,

is this okay? Is this a good thing? But they loved it, and my sister was cracking up, and I kept promising when i'd lose, like I'm like, we're playing one more round, You're going down, and then, you know, I would celebrate these moments of like I perfectly aimed at greenshell and I took you out, and you know, I'd get bombed by our six year old son and end up behind all our kids, and like then I'd

scream about that and even that was fun. And it started out as a weekly game, and then our kids started waking up in the morning and asking what time are we playing today, and it became a daily game. And after a couple weeks of that, I did not feel like I was languishing any anymore, and I felt re energized. I felt goal oriented. I felt like I was more productive at work, I felt like I was

more enthusiastic at home. And I did not connect it to Mario Kart at the time, but looking back, it was pretty clear that Mario Kart met some of the conditions for escaping languishing and ever since, actually, when I'm kind of feeling blah, like, all right, let's get a Mario Kart game going, I mean, I love this story because there are a few parts of it that really

fit with some of the happiness research. I mean, one is that you know you're embracing social connection, right, which we know is just super good, you know, for feeling better. But another, and the big one that you identify is that you're really engaging in some practice that gives you flow. And so you know, what is this idea of flow and why is it so powerful for our well being? Well? I first read about flow when I was an undergrad studying psychology, and I thought Holly sh extent mehi as

conceptualization of it was really meaningful. He described something that I had experienced a lot, I never had a name for, I hadn't really paid much attention to, and it gave me suddenly an understanding of what I loved about what I thought were very very unrelated passions of mine. So he defined flow there's a state of total absorption in an activity, where you get so immersed that you lose track of all of your surroundings. You might not hear a sound, you might not notice you know what people

are doing around you. Sometimes you even forget who you are. And when I read Flow, right afterward, my sister made me read the first three Harry Potter books, and I remember I was like, ah, book about a wizard. Really. I remember loving the first one so much that I read the other two in the same weekend, and I finished the third, and I was genuinely upset to remember

that Hogwarts wasn't real like that. That's flow. I got so absorbed in that world that I forgot that there was no Platform nine and three quarters, which was devastating, But a flow state for me was It's what I loved about everything that I spent my free time on. It's why I loved playing video games. It's why I had so much fun playing Ultimate Frisbee. It's why I was a huge fan of scrabble and Trivial Pursuit and clue.

It's even what I found when I was writing, And all of a sudden I realized, way, these these are not totally disparate interests. These are actually different ways that I get into the same psychological state. And the cool thing about flow, though, is that it's not kind of a one size fits all. I mean, she sent me high me this interesting distinction between what he called good flow,

or hemostly called the other one junk flow. Right, the sort of flow that you get into My favorite example of junk flow is the sort of binging on the Jersey Shore kind of thing where it's like you know time's going by, right, but then at the end of it, I'm kind of like, I feel super gross and so talk about like, you know, this idea that binging can be this temporary escape, but what we really need is a better non junk flow we escape to kind of

get out of the languishing. Yeah, I think. I think one of the challenges that a lot of us ran into during the pandemic was I think everyone binge tiger king and definitely, I mean it was riveting. I could not look away, and then it finished like, Okay, that's technically a real world, but it's not one I want anything to do with. I don't want to think about it. I don't want to remember that they're actually humans who treat animals this way and also treat each other this way.

It was slimy, and it rubs off on you when you binge it right, because you get transported into that world. Whereas I think, and I would love to see better experimental data for this, I'm waiting for somebody to do the watch an hour a day versus binge it all in one day. I don't think it rubs off on you in the same way if you spread it out yeah, definitely for Jersey Shore. That's true in part just because I'd be trying to go to sleep and I'd have the theme, so I'll like get crazy to get you

know anyway. But yeah, so the keys that we need to find flow activities that will kind of build us up rather than kind of drag us down. And in your ted talk you mentioned these three features that might be helpful mnemonic for kind of thinking about flow that feels good. And so this is sort of mastery mindfulness in mattering. And so let's start with mastery. What is it and why is it so important for kind of popping us out of languishing. Mastery is basically a feeling

of competence. You've either gotten better at something or you've accomplished something. And I think it's relevant to avoiding languishing because if languishing is stagnation, mastery feels like forward movement. It's like you have momentum as opposed to standing still. I think a lot of people hear mastery and they think, Okay, I have to become an expert on playing the drums, or I have to learn everything there is to know about, you know, seventeenth century history. No, Yeah, not at all.

My beloved colleague Malcolm Gladwell has messed us up on this. Do you think mastery and you think, okay, ten thousand hours will be starting our number one right, But that's not really what you mean hearing, not at all. I'm thinking much less about huge triumphs and much more about small wins, those little jolts of I can do this, or I'm capable, or I succeeded at something today. And I realized this is actually why I was drawn into

word games in the first place. It's really easy to get that rush playing a seven letter word even when you're languishing. Right, I can look at seven tiles, rearrange them and do the anagram until I find the bingo. And I think I was staying up past midnight because when I had one of those, I wanted another one. I wanted to keep the sense of mastery going. Only I was exhausting myself and then waking up in the morning regretting it. The experience of languishing is aimlessness and joylessness.

When you have mastery, all of a sudden, you not only have a goal, you've actually made progress to court it, and you get this kind of spring in your step of Ooh, I like that. And you talked about the key to finding mastery, especially when you're kind of in this sort of mess state, is to look for these sort of just manageable difficulties in life. So give me a definition of just manageable difficulty and how we can

find something. Oh. There was a Gilbert brim book years ago called Ambition where he wrote about this poignant set of challenges that his father ran into. I guess if I remember correctly, his father lived on a farm. As he started getting older, he went from being able to basically take care of a huge, huge plot of land to having a scale back. But he kept going, he didn't stop. And what he realized was, Okay, my limits are now at a different place that they were before,

but I can still challenge myself. And that became something he looked forward to. It became something that gave him a sense of you know, I did achieve something today, right. I was able to mow maybe a smaller lawn than I did twenty thirty years ago, but I still was able to take care of some of my land. And I think those just manageable difficulties they give you a sense of confidence that you can overcome challenges. They also reinforce that when you hit an obstacle, you are not

necessarily going to be stopped by it. I said, that's mastery. The second kind of part of this triumphate is this idea of mindful, something we talk a lot about on the podcast. So give me your own definition of mindfulness and why it's so important for our well being. So I guess I am printed on the Allen Langer definition of mindfulness, which is just being present in the moment and you know, actively noticing what's happening in your environment.

And so I think of real mindfulness as focusing all your attention on a single task or activity, and not exactly something that many of us are doing regularly, right, you know, I think I think so many people make the mistake of assuming that they can pay attention to multiple things at once, And computers are designed to do that. Computers are great at parallel processing. Last time I checked, humans are serial processors. We can only focus on one

thing at a time. And I think about mindfulness is basically concentrating on whatever that activity is that gives you a sense of mastery. Without that concentration, you don't get to mastery, and you also don't really get into flow. And one of the reasons I love you bring up that example in mindfulness of the kind of multitaskings. I feel like this is the kind of thing that got even worse during the worst days of the pandemic. Right, you know, I'm on zoo, but I'm also checking my email.

I'm supposed to be watching some colloquium talk, but I'm like, you know, reading some recipe in the background. Right, I felt like because we added so much more screen time, it made us so much more susceptible to the bad habits that lead you away from mindfulness. So true, I think we went from Okay, at least they're certain hours of the day where I'm in transit, I'm commuting, I'm driving somewhere, I'm flying somewhere, I'm in meetings, I'm actively

hands on working on a problem too. Huh. Now, I could be distracted every moment of the day. And so the solution to that you've argued is to really think carefully about our time and how we use our time, you know, explain how we can kind of use our time better to experience more of this mindfulness. Well, I think blocking out time to concentrate on one activity is

a critical step. I was so surprised to read the evidence that even pre pandemic people were checking email seventy four times today, that they were switching tasks on average at least once every ten minutes. You can't get into a real flow state with that kind of distraction, and you're not going to accomplish much of anything either. I also really love the way that I think Brigade Shelter

first coined the term time confetti. That captured this that when when you're you're checking email or your phone every few minutes, you're taking what could be a really meaningful block of time and you're basically slicing it into these

tiny pieces, none of which are useful. You can't do anything with the sixty two seconds right that you you're spent between moments of checking your text messages, and so you basically start losing entire hours and days of your life just by dividing up the minutes into these miniature chunks. And I think we needed the opposite of that, right. We need to carve out time for if it's if it's on the job, it's deep work, if it's something

that you're doing for leisure. It's deep fun right where you put your phone away, you block the time in your calendar, and you say, this is the only thing that deserves my attention right now. And I think it's one of the reasons that playing video games can induce such flow. I mean, they're built to induce flow in

a lot of ways. But one thing is you're not whipping out your phone and checking your email halfway through you know, a game of Mario Kart, right like you're fully immersed in it because you know, temporarily you're fully immersed in it only between races occasionally just a trash talk over tech exactly. But while while you're driving, you can't take your eyes off the screen otherwise your car is going to spin out and then there goes your

shot at mastery again. You know, the biggest reason I love your Mario Kart story is it gets to kind of this third factor, this factor of kind of mattering, right, which is really about our social connection, whether they're people, and that kind of impact we're having on other people. And so talk about why mattering can be so important for kind of popping you out of languishing. Well, when I think about the research by Gregory Elliott and colleagues.

Most people, when they think about mattering, they think I matter if other people notice me and care about me. They forget that there's a critical piece, which is that other people rely on me, that I count, that I

make a difference. I think this is something that was missing for a lot of people, especially during the early days of the pandemic, feeling like their hands were tied in terms of being able to be there for their extended families, to be able to support their friends, to show up and do their jobs effectively, right wherever your contribution was, to be able to volunteer right then all of a sudden, you can't do it, and so you lose the sense of meaning and purpose that comes through

helping other people. And I did not expect to get that playing a video game, that's for sure. You know, the mastery and mindfulness. I've had that my whole life. You know, I've played Mario Kart for three decades now, on and off. Never really felt like a mattered playing it before. But in this situation, my sister was expecting

for the first time, she's actually expecting twins. There's literally nothing I can do to help her, and I feel like, Okay, well this is something I can do, you know, to maybe relive some of our favorite childhood memories, to stay connected when we're far apart, and maybe even more importantly, on a daily basis. You know, there's not a lot that our kids can do, like we're kind of all stuck at home, and the fact that they're waking up in the morning excited to find out what time Mario

Kart is. I felt like I had something to contribute there, that I could organize this experience that was exciting and energizing to them, and that she was another thing. We talked about baby steps with mastery, but I think there's also kind of baby steps in mattering that we forget can be psychologically really powerful. But that's all what the research shows. It doesn't have to be saving someone's life. You know, you can actually matter to someone in these

tiny ways too. It's amazing how much good a five minute favor can do, just a few minutes of of sharing a bit of knowledge, giving someone a piece of feedback, making an introduction between two people who could benefit from knowing each other but are not currently connected. Those actions take relatively small amounts of effort, but they have a big impact on our mood. You know, I think a lot of people underestimate the psychological boost that comes from

random acts of kindness. But also like the randomness was gone, Like you're not running into somebody in the line at Starbucks or the grocery store or on the bus, and so well, how am I going to randomly help people all of a sudden. If I'm going to help anyone, I have to plant. And I think that that that's something that stood in the way for a lot of people of feeling like on a daily basis, Oh, I

did something where I actually felt like I matter? And so do you think kind of understanding kind of how languishing works and understanding some strategy as we can use to pop out of it can help us, you know, the next global pandemic that comes around, or the next kind of mini version of languishing that comes up for all of us. You know, have you found that we can really snap ourselves out of it when we need to?

I hope, So, I hope. So. I think the empirical jury is still out, but I mean, it seems to be a state that responds well to a lot of the kinds of positive psychology interventions that you cover on this show, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't. I think the problem is that when people are languishing, they don't put their knowledge into action. Right. They may be fully aware of what to do, do they put

that into practice. I don't know. I've had a lot of people ask in the last few months, Okay, I feel like I'm languishing, or I care about someone who's languishing, what do I do? Don't come to me for answers. I'm muddling through this the same way that the rest

of us are. Why don't you take that person who's languishing and ask them to find somebody else who's languishing and give that person advice, or better yet, if you're languishing, find someone else you know who's languishing, give them some suggestions on how to overcome it, and you will probably find that the advice you give to others is the advice that you need to take for yourself. That is wonderfully said, and also for someone who has been languishing

herself and doing this podcast, I will try to do it. Yeah, Laurie, tell me, how do you think we can get out of languishing well, I'm going to buy a switch, like as student as this interviews over love. I love how literally people took that. By the way, I got all these emails after the Ted Talks saying can you give me some tips on how to improve my Mario Kart skills? Like that was not the point. The point was think

about what is your version of Mario Kart? Right, what's the activity of the project where you have flow with people you love or care about, and where you get that sense of mastery, mindfulness and mattering. But you know what, if Mario Kart is your cup of tea, I will race you, Laurie Santos, and you're going down awesome. In the final episode of this season of The Happiness Lab, we'll tackle an emotion that Adam and I touched on a few times when that's hurting so many people right now, burnout.

We'll see that burnout isn't just a matter of feeling blah. It's a state of mind that, if not addressed, can wreck havoc on your career and your livelihood. But as well, here next time, there are some evidence based ways to come back from burnout, even if it feels like life has drained you dry. I burned out at my dream job. My constant thought was, Ah, you know, not this again. I stress eight, I stress drank, and it was just utterly miserable. So I knew that something had a change,

and I did not yet have a way out. And so I hope you'll return to hear the final episode in this season of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor Laurie Santos. If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted listening

for only four ninety nine a month. As a special gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons we've learned from our experts. Pushkin Plus is available on the show page and Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,

and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle, Heather Faine, John Stars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast