ARE YOU FEELING BLAH?

If you’re just going through the motions or feel like you’re stagnating, you’re not alone. Here’s how to recharge your emotional batteries

- BROOKE LE POER TRENCH

TREADING water. Feeling meh. Coasting. We all have different ways to describe the feeling psychologists refer to as languishing.

“When you’re in this state, you feel like you’re stagnating – life is a bit aimless and joyless,” says organisational psychologist Adam Grant, author of Think Again. “You don’t have symptoms of mental illness but you’re not at the peak of mental health either.”

It might play out in different ways: you struggle to focus, or don’t feel motivated, or would rather not see friends.

Here’s how to ensure that dull feeling doesn’t escalate.

GET PERSPECTIVE

Even as the pandemic starts to ease, an aimless, unfocused feeling is normal.

Faced with uncertainty, our brain goes into high alert. We enter a state of fight-flight-or-freeze until we adjust to the new normal.