The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Fighting that "Meh" Feeling of Languishing
Episode Date: February 14, 2022Psychologist and writer Adam Grant used every second of his day to the fullest... until he was struck by feelings of emptiness and stagnation. His sleep patterns changed, his productivity dipped, he f...ound himself breaking his own rules by aimlessly watching Netflix. Adam decided this listless middle ground between depression and flourishing was "languishing" and he needed to escape it fast.The author of the #1 NYT bestselling book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know (www.adamgrant.net/thinkagain), and host of TED's Work Life podcast (https://tedtalks.social/WLAdam) says we ignore this "meh" feeling at our peril and explains how he fought back against languishing...with a game of Mario Kart. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Pushkin.
Many of the difficult feelings we've talked about over the course of this season of the Happiness Lab are at the extreme edges of our emotional spectrum.
So far, we've mostly focused on emotions that feel powerful and profound.
Think the raging fires of anger and the deep sorrow that comes with grief.
But today I want to address an equally problematic feeling that's kind of in the middle.
It's an emotional state we don't usually talk about,
partly 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, meh, bleh, blah state, has always been part of the human condition. But these days,
in the midst of the COVID-19 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 Wharton 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 adrift 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 set 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 if there's literally nothing else I could be
doing, like I'm about to have a plane take off, 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 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, I found myself breaking all of those rules.
I'm normally asleep by 10, 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 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 10, 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 2020 was rewatching season three of Jersey Shore
and then ending it and then just rewatching the season, which wasn't a particularly good seat.
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, you talk about some of the emotions that come with this. Cause 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, what was this feeling like as you were going through this?
Yeah, I think at first it was just frustration. 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 is 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 experience 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, I still find myself slipping into it. And I think that came along with some guilt.
I felt like I was letting myself 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 were 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, and you're a nerdy scientist 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 this is, you know, seeds of early depression, right?
You know, talk about why that hypothesis didn't work, why this wasn't exactly depression.
I think the main reason it was pretty obvious that I wasn't depressed was I still had plenty
of hope. Like 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.
They don't go on into perpetuity. We know this is a historical fact. If they did, we wouldn't be here. Humans would not have survived a prior pandemic. And so I knew that I guess my ability
to stay optimistic was a big factor. The other thing was I was very active. 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 know, talk about why this wasn't exactly burnout either from a psychological perspective.
Yeah. So psychologists normally define burnout as, 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.
You did? No.
I did, actually, embarrassingly. It was okay.
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 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 I'm like, wait a minute, that does not fit with my picture of burnout at all.
And so you wound up coming 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 Keyes 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 wellbeing.
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 ennui. But I actually didn't connect the dots until much, much later.
I languished for a few weeks. It 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.
And 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 meh or blah or even eh.
I love that they're all monosyllabic words, right?
It's the quintessential picture of languishing to say, I can't even pull off a second syllable.
You know, in psychology, we would define it as a sense of
probably aimlessness and joylessness. As Corey Keyes would describe it, it's not the presence
of mental illness, it's the absence of mental health. And so 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 there's so much talk of other mental health issues like depression and
anxiety, but languishing is surprisingly less well-known given in some ways how common it was,
especially during 2020, but I feel like in general. So what's the history of why this
just doesn't come to the fore so much? I've been wondering the same thing. I'm
not sure we have a clear answer on it. I have a couple 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, so this is all really spearheaded by Corey Keyes.
So in the Keyes 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 anxious today. It's actually the people who
are languishing right now who are at the greatest risk. And I think that's because 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 meh feeling of languishing for months.
Initially, I figured the solution would be to find ways
to force myself back into becoming more engaged at work.
But it turns out that this just-get-back-to-it 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. Thank you. 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 article's subheading
that languishing may be the dominant emotion of 2021. So 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. 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'd 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, whoa, okay. I guess this is a really common experience. People are struggling to label it,
understand it, make sense of it, do something about it. People are struggling to label it, understand it,
make sense of it, do something about it. I have something to say 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 out into the world, 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 question some of my assumptions. I change 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 the 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 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 vocabulary 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 what we do and what I know. But there were definitely
exceptions to this. And my favorite one was, I love the critique that Austin Kleon wrote.
So Austin's 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 it raises this question of where languishing comes from in the first place. And
part of, I think, what he's saying is, 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 phenomenon,
but 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. Maybe we do that through flooding and we just drop 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 going to 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 realized, well, okay, I can't control 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 are 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 103 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. There was definitely
a time in college where 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, I quoted Office Space,
you are languishing 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 that 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 languishing? 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 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, looking back at least, okay, those were 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, I've been 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 out?
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 quarters. 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 especially being, you know, a 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 were feeling, some of that had subsided and now it's dragging 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 mean? Why are you not great or awesome?
And that's toxic positivity, right? 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 much easier, for example, if you live in Russia, the actual
expected response to how are you from 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 here and obviously in the land of
optimism, we live the American dream. And that means we're expected to be exuberant. And I think
that's really hard. I think that made it really difficult for people to say, honestly, kind of, eh. 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, eh, kind of,
I guess I'm languishing. One of the reasons I really wanted 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 adrift in my own state of languishing, I made all the classic mistakes.
I'd try to push myself with willpower alone to do tasks that I had little motivation to complete.
I'd try to push myself with willpower 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 2020, I guess I'm at peak languishing, although peak feels like the wrong term. I'm like an ultimate meh, 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. I haven't been pretty much for the whole
pandemic. I'm shouting, got you, green shell. And first of all, I don't think my kids have
ever seen me trash talk 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, we're playing one more round.
You're going down.
And then I would celebrate these moments of, I perfectly aimed a green shell and I took you out.
And I'd get bombed by our six-year-old son and end up behind all our kids.
And 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 of weeks of that, I did not feel like I was languishing anymore. And I felt
re-energized. I felt goal-oriented. I felt like I was more productive at work. I felt like I was languishing 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,
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 wellbeing?
Well, I first read about flow when I was an undergrad studying psychology and I thought Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's conceptualization of it
was really meaningful. He described something that I'd 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 as 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
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. 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 love 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, wait, 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, Csikszentmihalyi made this interesting distinction between what he
called kind of good flow or mostly called the other one junk flow, right? This 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 flowy escape to kind of get out of the languishing. Yeah, I think one of the challenges
that a lot of us ran into during the pandemic was I think everyone binged Tiger King. Definitely. I mean, it was riveting. I could not
look away. And then it finished. I'm 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 there are
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 song like, get crazy, get now, you know,
anyway, but yeah. So the key is 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 a helpful mnemonic for kind of thinking about flow that feels good. And so this is sort
of mastery, mindfulness, and 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 17th century history. No, not at all. My beloved colleague, Malcolm Gladwell,
has messed us up on this. You think mastery and you think, okay, 10,000 hours, let me start hour
number one, right? But that's not really what you mean here, right? 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 was 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 toward 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 some.
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 to 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
20, 30 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.
And so that's mastery. The second kind of part of this triumvirate is this idea of mindfulness,
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 wellbeing. So I guess I imprinted on the Ellen Langer
definition of mindfulness, which is just being present in the moment and 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? 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 as 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 bringing up that
example in mindfulness of the kind of multitasking is I feel like this is the kind of thing that got
even worse during the worst days of the pandemic, right? I'm on Zoom, but I'm also checking my
email. I'm supposed to be watching some colloquium talk, but I'm 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 there are 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, you know'm actively hands-on
working on a problem to, 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. Explain how we can kind of use our time better to experience more of this mindfulness.
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 74 times a day, that they were
switching tasks on average at least once every 10 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 Brigitte Schulte first coined the term time confetti.
That captured this, that when 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 62 seconds that you 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 need to do the opposite of that, right? We need to carve out time for 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
a game of Mario Kart, right?
Like you're fully immersed in it because temporarily you're fully immersed in it.
Only between races occasionally.
Just a trash talk over time.
Exactly.
But 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, 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 with other
people and the 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, wherever your contribution was, to be able to
volunteer, that all of a sudden you can't do it. And so you lose this 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.
The mastery and mindfulness, I've had that my whole life. I played Mario Kart for three decades
now on and off. I've never really felt like I mattered playing it before. But in this situation,
my sister was expecting for the first time, she was 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 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, there's not a
lot that our kids can do. 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 shows 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 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 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.
I think a lot of people underestimate the psychological boost that comes from random
acts of kindness, but also the randomness was gone. 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 plan it. And I think that that's something that stood in
the way for a lot of people of feeling like on a daily basis, huh, I did something where I actually
felt like I mattered. And so do you think kind of understanding kind of how languishing works
and understanding some strategies 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 the 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 put it into a video. Yeah. Lori, tell me, how do you think we can
get out of languishing? Well, I'm going to buy a Switch as soon as this interview is over.
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, 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, one that's hurting so many people
right now. Burnout. We'll see that burnout isn't just a matter of feeling bleh. It's a state of
mind that if not addressed, can wreak havoc on your career and your livelihood. But as we'll hear
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,
ugh, you know, not this again.
I stress ate, I stress drank,
and I was just utterly miserable.
So I knew that something had to 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, Dr. Laurie Santos.
If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus.
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The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley, Emily Ann Vaughn, and Courtney Guarino. Our original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring,
mixing, and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Heather Fane, John Schnarz,
Carly Migliore, Christina Sullivan,
Brant Haynes, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Marano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg,
and my agent, Ben Davis.
The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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