Instant Genius - How feelings of listlessness and aimlessness has become an epidemic, and how we can beat it

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

Are you feeling demotivated and aimless and struggling to figure out why? If so, it sounds like you might be languishing – a term used to describe the epidemic of listlessness that has spread across the globe in recent years. In this episode we speak to Dr Corey Keyes, author of Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Are you feeling demotivated and aimless and struggling to figure out why? If so, it sounds like you might be languishing, a term used to, to describe the epidemic of listlessness that is spread across the globe in recent years. In this episode, we speak to Dr. Corey Keyes, author of the book, Linguishing, How to Feel Alive Again, and a World That Wares Us Down. He shares some simple tricks we can use to get ourselves back on track. Okay, so first off, I think a good place to start is, could you tell me a little bit about your background, you know, what do you do and how did you get there? I was a sociologist, but I think I will always be a nice thing.

was because I retired early a year ago, in part because I really wanted to devote more time to doing things like these books, because I felt the academic approach was preventing me from the advocacy that I wanted to do, which was I care about mental illness, and I want to reduce rates of mental illness, and I want to improve mental health. And just sitting in your office at a university just isn't going to do that. And so I'm still a sociologist, but I retired early. And so right now I'm devoting all my time to writing and trying to get the message out that we have a different approach we could be taking to dealing with the crisis of mental illness in the world. Great. So let's get on to the writing then and let's have a look at your book.

So languishing how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down. So I think the sort of obvious question here is languishing. So what is languishing? What do you mean by that? languishing is the absence of good mental health. I use the word flourishing, and I had to choose a word carefully, because when I use the word mental health, it's very confusing to people. They think I'm talking about mental illness, and no, I'm talking about the fact that we can measure the presence of good mental health with my 14-item diagnostic tool,

and that's why it's sometimes described as being in the middle between mental health and mental illness. because languishing is not the presence of anything bad that might go into the category of mental illness. It's just the absence of all the good things that makes life worth living. So say someone's listening is thinking, oh, languishing, maybe I'm doing that. What sort of questions can they ask themselves? Well, I'll use a few from my questionnaire. In the past two weeks, how often did you feel that your life had purpose or meaning?

In the past two weeks, how often did you feel confident to think and expect? express your own ideas and opinions. In the past two weeks, did you like most parts of your personality, the person you are? In the last two weeks, did you feel that you belong to a community? In the last two weeks, were you contributing things of worth and value through your work or your other activities to your community or society? It's questions like that. People who are languished, you say they rarely feel those things. Their life has little purpose. They're not contributing much. They don't feel a sense of belonging. They don't have warm, trusting relationships. They don't have a sense of autonomy, which is confidence that they can express their own ideas.

They don't like themselves. They're not accepting of other people. So it's the absence of some really important stuff that makes our life meaningful. And that's why languishing is often described. I don't like the word blah. That just suggests it's just your response to bad weather. No, it's a feeling that your life is missing some really important things, and you feel empty, stuck, and some people say they feel dead inside like they're dying inside. So I think some people listening might think, well, you know, that sounds an awful lot like depression. So where do you draw the difference there? Well, diagnostic tool I created is entirely different. There's only one sign or symptom of flourishing or languishing that's shared in common. And that is interest in life. I measure

whether you feel good in three ways. Do you feel happy, satisfied with life, or have you felt interest in life? In order to flourish, you have to have one of those three feeling good things every day or almost every day. Interest in life is the only symptom shared in common with depression. The rest are diametrically opposed. Depression is about sadness or a loss of interest in life combined with some symptoms of malfunctioning that are things like overeating, not eating enough, languishing is you might not feel an interest in life or happy, but it's combined with an absence of purpose, belonging, contribution, and so forth. So there are lots of people who don't fit the criteria for depression, but fit the criteria for languishing using my diagnostic tool.

So it's quite independent, but that doesn't mean if you stay too long in languishing, you can slide into depression. Yes, it's a risk factor for becoming depressed, that state of languishing if you stay there too long. So sort of coming off the back of that then, I mean, can languishing have an effect on a health? Oh boy, does it ever? In the book I talk about, and I don't know if you remember that page, 13 reasons why you need to take this serious, because I've studied this over 25 years now in very large population studies. And what we found is in young people, kids are languishing too long. They get into all kinds of trouble and delinquency.

They do poorly in school. They want to quit. They're at risk for suicidality. In adults, it does everything from increased missed days of work. And if you show up for work, what we call presenteism, isn't that an interesting word? You're there, but you're not there. you're not very as productive. It's a risk factor for four different mental disorders.

I've already mentioned depression. Linguishing as a risk factor for anxiety. Even for PTSD, there was a study in Italy that I talk about in my book. And frontline healthcare workers, if they are flourishing in the face of that high demand, they were much less likely to develop PTSD. If they are languishing as frontline health care workers during COVID, PTSD, the risk went up. And of course, addictions, especially alcoholism. That's not even a complete list. All the problems caused by languishing. And that's why I sometimes

say languishing is just as serious as things like depression. Not only because it leads to depression, but it even leads to premature mortality, suicide attempts. People just die prematurely because they have no reasons for living. That's another way to think of languishing is my life has no purpose. I'm not making any contributions. Yeah, so you mentioned that at different ages. So in the book, you identify certain and periods throughout somebody's life where they're sort of more likely to experience languishing. So could you explain that idea to me, please? There are a lot of young people, at least in the United States data, and I wonder if this is true, and I suspect it's true in the UK. The rates of languishing go up around middle school,

what we would call ages 12 to 14 here in the US, up to around 45 to 50%, and then it jumps up to 60% in teenagers of ages 14 to 18. And it hovers around. around 40 to 60% in some college students, depending on what campus you're on. After you hit adulthood, right around the age of 13, throughout adulthood, languishing continues to decline, go down, go down, go down. It stays low in your first decade of retirement, 65 to 74, and then it goes back up if you live long enough, beyond ages of 75. So languishing is really high at the beginning of our life course and at the very end. Both periods where we see a lot of things like depression, isn't it? Interesting. So would you say some people are more prone to

languishing than others? Right now, there hasn't as much evidence produced that says there's things or risk factors for languishing. All I write about in the book is what I know as a sociologist, there's some groups that are more or less likely. We talked about, age. There's some interesting gender and race stuff that I talk about. I don't know if you recall that, but I talk about the black-white paradox in the United States where African-Americans have lower rates of mental illnesses and higher rates of flourishing. In other words, they're less likely to languish than white Americans. Then there's this Asian paradox where they have higher rates of languishing than you would expect compared to whites. I talk about the different

experiences, right? There's this historical racism and discrimination encountered by African Americans that erodes their physical health, and yet their response has been ironically, according to some people, conducive to their mental health, because it gives their life purpose meaning in the face of these adversities. Asian Americans, it's a hard one to crack, but I talk about this enormous pressure that's put on young Asian adults to succeed academically and the ways in which they sacrifice everything for academic and educational and occupational success, including their well-being. And so the highest rates of languishing in the United States is among Asian males and females, and they have the same highest rates as LGBT-plus. Those are the two

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So in the book you call languishing a global health epidemic. So sort of a two-part question. What do you mean by that? And secondly, how did we get here? You know, what happened? Everywhere that I've looked in the scientific evidence where data has been collected worldwide, there's many more young people and adults in countries from South Korea to South Africa to Norway, in UK, to Canada and the US. It doesn't matter where you look.

There's over three to four times more people languishing than there are people with mental illness in any of those countries. Globally, in any particular year, and this is a very generous estimate, if you were to measure all mental illnesses, at most 15 to 20 percent would have at least one mental disorder. And yet, there's over 40 percent to sometimes 50 percent of people who aren't mentally ill, but are languishing in many of those same contexts and countries. And what we've seen over time, we've been doing longitudinal research following these same people over time. If you stay languishing too long, you will be put at very high risk for developing things like depression, anxiety disorders, and other addictions. So I think we're only looking

at the tip of the iceberg globally. That is mental illnesses and things like depression. Underneath that, what we don't see is a big mass of people who are languishing and they're feeding that tip of the iceberg of depression. So I'm convinced that we could actually prevent some of this mental illness if we took languishing and promoting flourishing far more serious around the world in our public health systems. So kind of sort of baked into this idea is the concept of well-being. So in the book, you break this down into three different categories, emotional, social, and psychological. So could you explain the idea of that and how that fits in? Sure. Those three categories come from a long line of research and even tie back.

into ancient philosophical arguments about what is a good life. So the feeling good stuff, what we call hedonic, heedonic, well-being, hedonia, has its roots in ancient Greek philosophy, not the least of which was Epicurean philosophy about pleasure and the absence of pain was a really good life, that feeling good. We tend to measure that kind of well-being a lot in around the world. And in fact, the world happiness report focuses on happiness and satisfaction and ranks countries by that feeling good component. I, along with my mentor and collaborator Carol Riff, have been arguing, there's a whole different tradition that goes back to Aristotle's philosophy

about human excellence and functioning well. And that social and psychological well-being reflects human excellence and functioning well with social well-being as things like integration, belongingness, in other words, contribution, or what some people call mattering. There's other things like coherence, which is you can make sense of what's going on around you in the world. And then there's signs of psychological well-being, self-acceptance, purpose in life, personal growth. Those social and psychological symptoms are about functioning well that goes all the way back to notions of the good life that Aristotle talked about, which was functioning well as a human being.

Yeah, so I've got some questions about that, which we'll come back to in a moment. But I'd just like to go back. You mentioned the pressures of academic success. So another pressure or another stress that lots of people will feel is in the workplace. So how does this impact this concept? There is no doubt in my mind that things like demoralization and burnout, two things that are happening a lot in our workplaces. In the United States, in our medical professions, we see a lot of demoralization and burnout. We see that in all walks of life, regardless of your occupational status, burnout and demoralization is happening. I'm convinced those are two causes for a lot of people of languishing, because burnout can lead to this sense of exhaustion that you simply, your gas tank is empty. You don't have any more for the fight. Demoralization is an emptiness that comes from having to work in what we would call diseased or corrupt systems that don't allow you to practice your values, but actually, encourage you to do just the opposite, undermine them, like profits at all cost.

Doctors are complaining about this. They end up having to cut corners and not take care of patients, and yet their hospitals are making record profits. And yet they're being asked to cut corners and not help and do the things that they think they should be doing for their patients. So I read about a doctor who, I'm sure, is languishing and is feeling, and it's because he says he's working in a demoralizing corrupt health care system. So that's not to say all workplaces are bad, but I think we don't realize that some of our

workplaces are asking us to do things that run counter to our values, to our ethical and our moral orientations. When they do that, and when we agree to go along with that, we start to feel dead inside. And that's what a lot of people say when they're languishing. I feel like I'm dying inside. Yeah, horrible feeling. So we've sort of skimmed over and briefly, outlined the problem there. So let's go ahead and look about possible solutions. So earlier you mentioned this idea of functioning well. In the book, you term the six domains of functioning that can help us to conquer languishing and begin to flourish. So the first of those, which I think is vital, and we sort of mentioned it a little bit earlier, is personal growth and identity. Yeah. In the study,

what's interesting is that study that I'm referring to included exercise among the other activities that flourishing people regularly did. But exercising more did not lead to a better day even for flourishers. But the other five activities, if they did more of them, even if you were languishing or depressed, that has helped somebody or live your purpose, learn or prioritize learning something new and growing personally. That's the second, right? Those activities. If you do more of them,

it doesn't matter whether you're flourishing, languishing, or depressed. If you're flourishing, you do that, you stay there. If you're languishing or you're depressed, you do more of those. You start to move towards flourishing and start having better and better days. It's not an overnight change or transformation by any means.

But here's the good news. There's equality because in this recipe, because flourishers who do nothing don't have any better day than people who are languishing or depressed who do none of those five activities. It's equal. If you do nothing, it doesn't matter whether you're flourishing. You don't have a good day. But if you do more of those five activities, it doesn't matter whether you're flourishing, languishing, or depressed. You begin to move and stay in that category of being mentally healthy. So one thing that I was going to say that earlier, which I missed out, was the role of relationships in all of this. I assume it's vitally important. Yes, another vitamin. I call them

the vitamins because your readers might wonder, well, why is talking about these activities as vitamins? Because languishing is a lot like anemia, literally and figuratively, right? Being low in iron creates a sluggishness and a stagnation. And languishing is kind of like being stuck in stagnant. And doing those five things really do bring vitality back to your life. And one of those is, of course, connectedness. But I don't talk about just any relationships. It's about the kind of important ingredients. What's really missing in our lives are these three symptoms of flourishing that have to do with, do I have warm and trusting relationships, right? Warmth and trust. Do I have a sense of belonging to a group or a community? And do I matter to others?

those are the things that I don't hear a lot of talk about when we talk about this epidemic of loneliness and how to address it. And that's the point of connectedness. You have to prioritize and work on relationships where you build warmth and trust, belonging, and where you are useful and necessary and you rely on others in the same way. There's ingredients that are important that people need to be, shall we say, prioritizing in their connections. Another thing that you talk about in the book, which you don't often see in science books, is the notion of spirituality. So that's a sort of big, scary word. So what do you mean by that?

Well, I'll blame it on the first thing people that were studied because they did that, right? We learned this by following, and I ended up reviewing this study. And what they were doing, longitudinally is calling these people up every Tuesday and ask them what they did on Monday. and the things that made their day better. One of those five things that flourishes do regularly is something spiritual or something religious. And I write about that in the chapter, but I try to be very careful

because I'm not prescribing religion here. I'm simply trying to invite people into, what do you get when you engage in these kind of activities that we call transcending, right? Spirituality and religion are activities that we do to transcend. send our ego, right? Religion, I try to bake it down to its simplest ingredients. At the core of all spirituality and religion is the attempt to make us become better people for other people, right? Because our natural instinct is to take care of ourselves and put me first. Nothing wrong

with that. But if that's all you do, it might be much more difficult to flourish. But something about flourishers is they prioritize becoming better people for people. Some kind we call these character traits, right? You're kind, you're compassionate, you're generous. That's what spirituality does. And if you don't like spirituality or religion, I wish I had written about this. I see people picking up modern books that talk about stoic philosophy. Philosophy before there was religion was an attempt to encourage you to learn ways to develop your character strengths, to become better people for other people. Now, I keep saying that because we're good at becoming better than other people. Competition isn't something that's foreign to us. I talk about this fact that religion and spirituality

slash philosophy are attempting to get us to not just prioritize becoming better than others. We should prioritize becoming better for other people. And when we do, it's amazing. You can see people smile and enjoy life when they're doing good things for other people. They light up. So I don't know why religion and spirituality is such a scary thing to people, because I don't know what else you're doing to encourage yourself to become better for other people. I don't know anything else except spirituality, religion, or slash some forms of philosophy.

like stoicism. So we talked earlier about the stresses of work and the pressures of academic study. So one thing that I found really interesting that you talk about is the notion of play. I loved this part because that's another thing that flourishers did regularly that kept them there. And I love it because for good reasons, we're talking about a deficit and a growing deficit of play, but it's all focused on children and for good reason. But most of the work on play for some reason excludes adults. And I don't know why that is, because we're just big versions of our children's selves, really. And I think what happens to us is we forget how to play because work and responsibilities in watching time and how we use time becomes more important.

So play, I talk about play as a form of resistance. It's a way of pushing back at the world that wants to quantify and monetize your time. like time is always money. Play says you do something just for the sheer joy of it. Outcomes don't matter unless it's a game, but even then whether you win or lose isn't the point. It's that you play. And so I think adults can and should do more.

And then the last thing I really found interesting is this research that shows that if you want to flourish, you've got to be careful what kind of leisure and play you engage in more and more people are doing what we call passive leisure, which is you sit down and you simply consume what you call leisure, rather than actively going out and doing and making things happen, like hiking and biking and all that other stuff. It's the active leisure that's really the key ingredient to flourishing

and that flourishers do and prioritize. So we've covered quite a lot of ground already there then. So by way of summary, other than buying your book, obviously, say somebody suspects they think, oh, this sounds familiar, I think I'm one of these languishes. What sort of first steps would you say that they could take to kind of head towards the flourishing path? The entire second half of the book is devoted to giving you the best scientific evidence I can provide for things that you can do yourself, you can prioritize it as a family, those five things as a family activity. And by the way, let me step back and say, flourishers don't.

do all of those five things every day. They choose one of them and do more of it, right? So it's not like you have to do all of those every day. But when they do one of those things, when they do more of it, they have a much better day. But the truth is, everyone does. Even languishers, I find that incredibly hopeful and gives agency back to people because these aren't things you have to go to a medical system to get help with. And if you don't want to do it alone, I can imagine. in creating a community or even a workplace that says, hey, during our lunch hour or our break, let's go do something that pushes one of the buttons that has to do with one of the five vitamins. So my recommendation is that a lot of self-help books focus on changing your mind or your

emotions. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with meditating more or practicing gratitude. But the thing I'm recommending is getting out there and doing something. Those five vitamins are activities. You can't sit and simply think about these things. You have to do them. And if you do them, the evidence is unequivocal. But you have to be patient if you're languishing because you're going to move step by step up the continuum,

but you're not going to jump from zero all the way up to 10 and flourish. Each day and each week and each month, you will begin to experience better days. And over time, the evidence shows as you move closer to flourishing, you do more of those five things, just as a matter of practice. That's the best I can do. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not recommending, well, you can fit this in in five minutes. I want to be realistic. And the fact is, I can't want it more than you want it. So I'm not here to inspire you. I'm here to give you something that you have to want more than I want for you. And that's, I'm just trying to be realistic. I'm done with the raw raw stuff and reading that.

Well, only if you, you know, no, you're going to have to stop some of the things you're doing and start adding these things into your life and doing that. That was Dr. Corey Keyes. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, languishing, how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius,

brought to you from the team behind BBC ScienceFocus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download a digital copy from your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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