On new words and new ideas, what's your opinion?
Remember that feeling when you wish that moment will never end, just like slowly savouring a rainbow-coloured candy or enjoying a bubble bath?
We’re talking about the opposite here: ‘When will this be over?’ I can nearly hear the choir of voices joining into this shout of anger or impatience, or sadness or..
“There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing
The neglected middle child of mental health can dull your motivation and focus — and it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.”
This is how the New York Times calls the feeling in a recent article.
In the article, languishing is defined as "a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield […] — 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."
I have to admit I have moments in which I say to myself ‘I lost my allegria’ (an Italian word for joy) and this word seems to apply. Also, when talking with students, this feeling appears as being pretty common.
“Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.”
Some of the tips to deal with this feeling suggested on the article are related first of all to bringing awareness to it and naming it. So being mindful can truly help, and if you did not explore the great benefits of this approach yet, it could just be the time to do it!
The article also mentions as a remedy experiencing the feeling of ‘flow’, an absorption into what you are doing - like something challenging - that might re-establish a sense of purpose.
It is also true that life through the pandemic fatigue still has requirements, things we have to do in the absence of motivation; therefore, there will be challenges that ignite a flow experience (as they mention: ‘An early-morning word game catapults me into flow. A late-night Netflix binge sometimes does the trick too’) but there also are people, like students for example, with a strong need to find focus on things they might find less pleasure in, within a very upside-down everyday life 'spiced' with languishness..
So I’d like to remind readers that well-being is a skill, and we personally hold the key to transform the present moment in a moment full of life. I recommend readers to refer back to Richard Davidson’s 4 areas of well-being to be cultivated, which include awareness, connection, insight and purpose.
Within this context, I recently learned something from a G7 student (learning from students is a refreshing experience): the phenomenon of ‘study with me’ videos on youtube.
Here is an excerpt from a VICE article which you might want to fully read here.
To me, it feels like creativity is always surprising and a resourceful way of coping with the #pandemic, including possibly reducing the #languishing by increasing a sense of ‘connectedness’, common experience, satisfaction following the ability to refocus and therefore accomplish something.
Clearly, this is not a substitute of ‘live’ experiences, but I still find it fascinating and potentially useful. What do you think?
“The sense of companionship provided by study with me videos is even more palpable during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the height of the pandemic last year, more than 1.3 billion students had to stay at home due to school closures. Even as students start streaming back to campuses, in-person classes have not gone back to full capacity and social distancing measures remain in place.
Unlike regular vlogs, study with me videos feature raw clips of entire study sessions — this means unadulterated head-in-a-book footage. Most of these videos are two to four hours long, though there are some that go on for 10 or more hours.
Many of them use the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method that portions work sessions into chunks, marked by periods of short rest.
The unique genre of study with me videos seems to have first gained traction in South Korea, but there are now prominent video creators across the world, including the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Singapore.
A browse through comments sections reveal tons of viewers playing such videos during their personal study sessions:
“Because of the coronavirus, most people around the world are studying alone at home. I think my video tells them that [they] are not alone,” Kim said.
“Just knowing someone else is studying with me made these two hours more tolerable. Whenever I have a ‘study buddy’ with me, it really really helps me keep focused on what I'm doing,”