By Wanda Wallace
Amanda genuinely likes her job. She is good at it, too: as one of the best software engineers in a large tech organization, Amanda is solving complex problems, leading a diverse team well, and making a significant impact to help her company flourish. But she herself…isn’t.
For months now, Amanda has been feeling just a little off. In the morning, she finds it a smidge harder to get up and go to the office, even though she has projects she enjoys waiting on her desk. After work Amanda meets friends, exercises, spends quality time with her partner, and takes her dog hiking on the weekends. And yet, it all seems just a little dull. Amanda has trouble concentrating, is indifferent about the things that used to give her joy and moves through the days as if in a fog. What is going on?
Amanda is not alone in her feelings of numbness and disconnection. As a global study by Josh Freedman shows, emotional intelligence has been declining for four years in a row, with conflict rates and feelings of isolation rising. "There is a shortage of motivation and drive", says Freedman, "and so we are not able to translate human energy into productivity, into health, into thriving."
What is happening to Amanda and so many others? On my podcast Out of the Comfort Zone, I sat down with sociologist Corey Keyes, who has spent his career studying this phenomenon and the dangerous ripple effect it can have on our health, our productivity, our relationships and overall well-being. He calls it languishing – a prolonged feeling of emptiness, demotivation, indifference or paralysis that, if unaddressed, can lead to serious mental health problems like depression, burn-out, or anxiety.
In our conversation, Corey taught me how to spot whether you are at risk of languishing, and shares five key vitamins that will help you truly flourish again.
Here’s what you need to know.
Languishing vs. Flourishing
To understand what languishing is and how we can avoid falling into its trap, we first need to define its opposite – our ideal state of flourishing. As Corey said on my podcast: “Mental health is much more than the absence of mental illness. It's the presence of positive well-being.” When we are truly flourishing, we are motivated, resilient, and able to handle stress and uncertainty. Let’s consider two teams:
Team F is full of flourishers. They enter a high-stress, high-conflict period at work – their workdays become unusually demanding, and tensions are rising. But the base level of stress of the flourishers remains low. They rise to the challenge.
Team L has several languishers, or people on the brink of subpar mental health. When they enter the same period of stress, they are at much higher risk of developing PTSD, depression, and anxiety. This team’s productivity and overall happiness drops, and they crumble under adversity.
Truly Flourishing (Some of the Time)
Here’s the good news: You don’t need to have a perfect score in all categories of your life in order to reap the benefits of good mental health. In fact, mental health looks a little different for everyone, and you only need seven out of fourteen well-being markers Corey’s team has devised in order to be considered flourishing.
These fourteen questions include: (if you’d like to take the full assessment, you can find it here).
Are you happy, satisfied or interested in life every day or almost every day?
Do you feel on a regular basis that you belong to a community where you derive comfort and meaning?
Do you regularly believe you have something of worth and value to contribute to your community or society?
Do you like most parts of who you are?
Do you believe that you are good at managing your day-to-day responsibilities?
Are you challenged to grow and become a better person?
Do you feel direction, meaning or purpose every day or almost every day?
Secondly, you do not have to feel perfect about your seven answers all day, every day. No one is in a perfect state of flourishing all the time. Nor should you aspire to be. In fact, most days have moments of “natural languishing”, where we might feel a burst of emptiness, a moment of mental fog, or an absence of joy. These moments can be productive – they invite us to assess our circumstances and recommit to making our upcoming days more meaningful.
The Five Vitamins of Flourishing
So how can you create positive change? What does it take to start flourishing? According to the studies presented in Corey’s book, there are five activities that helped languishers transform into flourishers. If you would like practical tips on how to implement these five things into your day-to-day life, you can find the corresponding worksheet here:
Help
This means making a difference and having positive impact on people you care about, or the community at large
Learn
This means investing time in an activity or field of knowledge because you are interested, and because you want to grow for you (not for work, school, your CV or external validation).
Socialize or Connect
According to studies, your connections should be genuine in three ways: They should be characterized by warmth and trust, they should give you a sense of belonging as an authentic member of a group, and they should make you feel like you are having a positive impact on other people or society.
Engage in a Transcending Practice
This does not have to mean practicing religion or joining a spiritual community. It means finding a path for a better way of living that helps you plan for, react to, and reflect on the challenging moments in a way that lets the best version of you show up to adversity - however that may look like for you.
Pursue Active Play
When it comes to leisure time, focus on being an active participant. Choose to pursue play time and engage with the activity rather than passively consuming a distraction you did not specifically choose or have a particular interest in.
You do not have to be perfect, and you do not have to spend every day being completely content in order to flourish and reap the benefits of good mental health. But an investment in your well-being pays off: when you are truly flourishing, you will see a positive ripple effect not just on your happiness, but your productivity, your health, and your relationships.
Sources
Freedman, Joshua et al (2024). State of the Heart. New Data on Emotional Intelligence, Wellbeing, and the Emotional Recession. Six Seconds. URL: https://6sec.org/soh.
Keyes, C. L. M. (2002). The mental health continuum: From languishing to flourishing in life. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 43 (2), 207–222.
Keyes, Corey L. M. (2007), Promoting and Protecting Mental Health as Flourishing. A Complementary Strategy for Improving National Mental Health, American Psychologist 62 (2), 95-108.
Keyes, Corey, Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down (New York: Crown 2024).
Chowdhury, Madhuleena Roy, (2019), What Is the Mental Health Continuum Model? PositivePsychology.com, URL: https://positivepsychology.com/mental-health-continuum-model/.