Why you're feeling so blah – And what to do about it

You're not quite burnt out, and you're not quite depressed... But you just can't shake that listless, lacklustre mood. Sound familiar? You might be languishing.

- By Liesl Robertson

I always thought 'languishing' was something you did while draped across the length of a chaise longue, idly eating grapes, the ash of your cigarette steadily growing longer between your drooped fingertips.

I wasn't too far off, actually, if indeed we've all been languishing for the better part of two years. Just swap the chaise for a couch a with a now-permanent full-body indentation and the cigarette for a TV remote. As for the grapes, well, it's more likely a bag of Doritos. But the listless, lacklustre mood... that is dead on, right?

Nicknamed 'the neglected middle child of mental health', the term 'languishing' was first coined in 2002 by a sociologist named Corey Keyes to describe the space between flourishing on the one end of the mental health spectrum and depression on the other.

'In the early days of Covid, a lot of us were struggling with fear, grief and isolation,' says organisational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant in a TED talk. “But as the pandemic dragged on with no end in sight, our acute anguish gave way to chronic languish. We were all living in Groundhog Day. It felt like the whole world was stagnating.

' In a nutshell, languishing is just that: the space in between.

You're not quite faltering, but you're also not thriving. You're not quite burnt out, but you're not buzzing with energy either. Your drive has dwindled, your day-today sense of delight has dulled, and everything seems a little bit... blah. This pervasive feeling of stagnation and ennui has very much become the mood of the pandemic, even more so as it is dragging on into its third year.