Speaker 1: Pushkin. Many of the difficult feelings we've talked about over
Speaker 1: the course of this season of the Happiness Lab are
Speaker 1: at the extreme edges of our emotional spectrum. So far,
Speaker 1: we've mostly focused on emotions that feel powerful and profound,
Speaker 1: think the raging fires of anger and the deep sorrow
Speaker 1: that comes with grief. But today I want to address
Speaker 1: an equally problematic feeling that's kind of in the middle.
Speaker 1: It's an emotional state we don't usually talk about, partly
Speaker 1: because we don't have great words for it. But even
Speaker 1: though it's pretty nondescript, this middling, listless feeling is very
Speaker 1: much worth paying attention to. It's a not so nice
Speaker 1: experience that many of us have gone through, especially in
Speaker 1: the past few years, and it's one that's negatively affected
Speaker 1: my own personal happiness, maybe even as much as bigger
Speaker 1: emotions like fear, fury, and regret. You might even be
Speaker 1: in the grip of this yucky feeling right now, So
Speaker 1: ask yourself, honestly, how are you feeling today. If your
Speaker 1: answer is MEH, then you might be experiencing the feeling
Speaker 1: that behavioral scientists refer to as languishing. The experience of
Speaker 1: languishing that lethargic, joyless blah state has always been part
Speaker 1: of the human condition. But these days, in the midst
Speaker 1: of the COVID nineteen pandemic, with lockdowns and restrictions disrupting
Speaker 1: so many of our routines, a scientific interest in the
Speaker 1: importance of languishing has come back into fashion. And one
Speaker 1: of the scholars who's thinking most carefully about this yucky
Speaker 1: emotion happens to be one of my favorite psychologists, podcasters,
Speaker 1: and colleagues, Adam Grant. When Adam's not teaching at war
Speaker 1: in business school, he's writing books like Think Again, The
Speaker 1: Power of Knowing what you don't Know, and Give and
Speaker 1: Take Why helping others drives our success. He's also the
Speaker 1: host of the fantastic ted podcast Work Life with Adam Grant,
Speaker 1: which is about the science of making work not suck.
Speaker 1: Adam decided to address the overlooked emotion of languishing in
Speaker 1: a widely shared New York Times article, but he didn't
Speaker 1: approach the topic as a curious observer, and that's because
Speaker 1: this world renowned expert on human behavior had wound up
Speaker 1: finding himself just as a drift and languishing as the
Speaker 1: rest of us. When I was in college. I was
Speaker 1: really frustrated by the amount of time that I was
Speaker 1: wasting watching TV. So I said a rule that I
Speaker 1: was never going to turn the TV on unless I
Speaker 1: already knew what I wanted to watch, and I stopped
Speaker 1: wasting time. And then over time I had to add
Speaker 1: things to that to don't list. So I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't scroll on social media, and you know, if
Speaker 1: there's literally nothing else I could be doing, like I'm
Speaker 1: about to have a plane takeoff, then maybe I'll scroll.
Speaker 1: But otherwise I just don't want to get sucked in.
Speaker 1: And I'm definitely not going to pick up my phone
Speaker 1: in bed because I would like to get some rest.
Speaker 1: And in twenty twenty, in the early days of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: I found myself breaking all of those rules. I'm normally
Speaker 1: asleep by ten, but I was staying up way past midnight,
Speaker 1: and sometimes I was playing words with friends on my phone.
Speaker 1: Other times I was like, I'd binge a whole season
Speaker 1: of a show that you know, Netflix just recommended to me.
Speaker 1: I'd finish it and then wonder, wait, have I already
Speaker 1: seen this? And I couldn't even remember. I was just
Speaker 1: kind of zoned out. And I would swear when I
Speaker 1: woke up the next morning, Okay, this time, I'm going
Speaker 1: to bed by ten, no more breaking the rules. And
Speaker 1: the pattern just kept repeating. And I study motivation for
Speaker 1: a living. I'm supposed to understand my own behavior. What
Speaker 1: am I doing? And why can I not make any
Speaker 1: sense of it? Yeah? I mean my deep dive in
Speaker 1: early twenty twenty was rewatching season three of Jersey Shore
Speaker 1: and then ending it and then just rewatching the season,
Speaker 1: which like wasn't a particularly good seat, Like it was
Speaker 1: just gross and yucky. But the thing that was most
Speaker 1: frustrating was like, I'm supposed to be an expert on
Speaker 1: behavior change, Like I'm supposed to not be doing things
Speaker 1: that are gross and yucky, and yet you know, finding
Speaker 1: myself doing this too. And so as you were going
Speaker 1: through this year, to talk about some of the emotions
Speaker 1: that come with this, because you know, it's one thing
Speaker 1: to like, you know, binge watch a season if you're
Speaker 1: kind of enjoying it and like blowing off work and
Speaker 1: it's fun, But it's another if it's kind of giving
Speaker 1: you this gross feeling. And so you know, what was
Speaker 1: this feeling like as you were going through this yeah.
Speaker 1: I think at first it was just frustration I was.
Speaker 1: I guess I was mentally beating myself up. I have
Speaker 1: specific plans and goals. I'm not following them, I'm not
Speaker 1: working toward them. This is out of character. Who are you? Who?
Speaker 1: This person who's taken over my brain? And then I
Speaker 1: guess the other thing I felt really early was I
Speaker 1: guess I almost felt like I understood what most people
Speaker 1: experienced when they procrastinate, which is again something I'm normally
Speaker 1: good at avoiding. Right I've been called a procrastinator because
Speaker 1: I love to dive into something months before it's due
Speaker 1: and finish things early. And I just felt like, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's this gap between what I know I should be
Speaker 1: doing and what I want to be doing. And even
Speaker 1: when I don't want to be playing another game of
Speaker 1: words with friends, like I still find myself slipping into it.
Speaker 1: And I think that came along with some guilt. I
Speaker 1: felt like I was letting my self down. I felt
Speaker 1: like I was I was also letting my family down
Speaker 1: because I would wake up tired the next morning, and
Speaker 1: I know my energy affects the people around me, and
Speaker 1: I think those are the early emotions. And then they
Speaker 1: morphed over time as you kind of get stuck in
Speaker 1: this pattern, right, you do kind of what I did,
Speaker 1: which is like, you want to figure out what's going on, right,
Speaker 1: and so in your nerdy scientists like me, so you
Speaker 1: come up with some hypotheses. Right. So your hypothesis number
Speaker 1: one is that you know, maybe you're depressed, right, you
Speaker 1: know maybe if this is you know, seeds of early depression. Right.
Speaker 1: You'll talk about why that hypothesis didn't work, why this
Speaker 1: wasn't exactly depression. I think the main reason was it
Speaker 1: was pretty obvious that I wasn't depressed. Was I still
Speaker 1: had plenty of hope? I was. I was the person
Speaker 1: who was telling everyone, look, we don't know when and
Speaker 1: how this pandemic is going to end, but we know
Speaker 1: it will end. Like they don't go on into perpetuity,
Speaker 1: like we know this is a historical fact. Right. If
Speaker 1: they did, we wouldn't be here. Humans would not have
Speaker 1: survived a prior pandemic, right, And so you know I
Speaker 1: knew that. I guess my ability to stay optimistic was
Speaker 1: a big factor. The other thing was I was very active, right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like I was sitting around doing nothing all day,
Speaker 1: I was still getting plenty done. I was just below
Speaker 1: my normal level of productivity and wasting a lot more
Speaker 1: time than I normally do. So that loses the second
Speaker 1: hypothesis you might have, right, which is that you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you're just burned out, right, like, maybe you need
Speaker 1: a break and that's why you're, you know, staying up
Speaker 1: late and you know, playing words with friends and stuff.
Speaker 1: You'll talk about why this wasn't exactly burnout either from
Speaker 1: a psychological perspective. Yeah, so psychologists normally to find burnout
Speaker 1: is at least the heart of it is emotional exhaustion,
Speaker 1: the sense that you're so drained by your job that
Speaker 1: you literally have nothing left to give. And I failed
Speaker 1: all those tests of burnout. Did you actually take the
Speaker 1: survey in the middle of this, I did, actually did? No?
Speaker 1: I did, actually embarrassingly. Yeah, you're a much more conscientious
Speaker 1: self assessor than I am. Apparently. No. I just you know,
Speaker 1: the first thing was this was not job related, so
Speaker 1: it didn't fit the definition of burnout. I was actually
Speaker 1: thrilled with my work overall. I just my mental state
Speaker 1: and my mostly nighttime and morning habits weren't what I
Speaker 1: wanted them to be. I also, I had plenty of energy.
Speaker 1: I didn't feel depleted, I didn't feel drained, I didn't
Speaker 1: feel exhausted, except that I wasn't sleeping enough or sleeping well.
Speaker 1: But you know, I was still working out six days
Speaker 1: a week. I was putting the finishing touches on think again,
Speaker 1: and it was I felt the best thing I'd ever written.
Speaker 1: So like, wait a minute, that that does not fit
Speaker 1: with my picture burnout at all. And so you want
Speaker 1: to come up with a different hypothesis, like a different diagnosis,
Speaker 1: And so what was that diagnosis? Well, I decided at
Speaker 1: some point that I must be languishing. It's funny in
Speaker 1: retrospect that it didn't hit me because I remember first
Speaker 1: reading the research in well technically in sociology but also
Speaker 1: in psychology by Corey Keys that put the concept on
Speaker 1: the map almost two decades earlier, and I was so
Speaker 1: intrigued by this idea that there's a whole spectrum of
Speaker 1: well being and then on one extreme you have mental illness,
Speaker 1: which might include depression or anxiety. On the other extreme,
Speaker 1: you have peak mental health, which you would call flourishing
Speaker 1: or thriving. And we don't really talk about the neglected
Speaker 1: middle child, which is languishing. So when I thought about languishing,
Speaker 1: I think the technical definition is that it's a sense
Speaker 1: of emptiness and stagnation, or you might call it unwi.
Speaker 1: But I actually didn't connect the dots until much much later.
Speaker 1: I languished for a few weeks. It's subsided. I didn't
Speaker 1: really know why. And then Tara Parker Pope from The
Speaker 1: New York Times calls me and says, you know, I
Speaker 1: keep hearing people say they're in a pandemic fog and
Speaker 1: they're having trouble concentrating. What is that? And I started
Speaker 1: making a list of all these different hypotheses and none
Speaker 1: of them fit. And all of a sudden I said
Speaker 1: to her, Oh, sounds like languishing. And then it hit me, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's what I was doing. So let's walk through like
Speaker 1: a definition of languishing. It's kind of this in the
Speaker 1: middle between depression and kind of full mental health. But like,
Speaker 1: how would we define it? I think most people would
Speaker 1: say it feels kind of mat or blah or even ah.
Speaker 1: I love that they're all monosyllabic words, right, It's the
Speaker 1: quintessential picture of language to say I can't even pull
Speaker 1: off a second syllable. You know, in psychology we would
Speaker 1: define it as as a sense of probably aimlessness and joylessness.
Speaker 1: Its Corey Keys would would describe it. It's not the
Speaker 1: presence of mental illness, it's the absence of mental health.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, I guess another way to think
Speaker 1: about that is to quote Harvey Danger, I'm not sick,
Speaker 1: but I'm not well. You're just missing well being. And
Speaker 1: it's funny because you know, there's so much talk of
Speaker 1: other mental health issues like depression and anxiety, but like
Speaker 1: languishing is surprisingly less well known and given you know
Speaker 1: in some ways how common it was, especially during twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: But I feel like in general, you know, so, what's
Speaker 1: the history of why this just doesn't come to the
Speaker 1: force so much. I've been wondering the same thing. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure we have a clear answer on it. I
Speaker 1: have a couple of hunches. One is that it's just
Speaker 1: much more invisible in our daily experiences. Right. If you
Speaker 1: get depressed, you almost can't notice anything else. If you're anxious,
Speaker 1: the cycles of rumination start to kick in. You're worrying constantly,
Speaker 1: you feel that intensely. But languishing is almost an absence
Speaker 1: of emotion, and so I think that makes it harder
Speaker 1: to see. My other hunch is it's not a disease
Speaker 1: or a disorder. It's just kind of a lingering emotional state.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have the same urgency or intensity that we
Speaker 1: would associate with more serious mental challenges. But there is
Speaker 1: evidence for the consequences of languishing, so you know, talk
Speaker 1: about the consequences for our productivity but also for our
Speaker 1: future mental health. Yeah, this is all really spearheaded by
Speaker 1: Corey Keys. So in the Keys research, we see that
Speaker 1: people are about three times more likely to cut back
Speaker 1: on work when they're languishing. They become more distracted, they
Speaker 1: have trouble focusing. We also see that if you wanted
Speaker 1: to predict who's going to be depressed or anxious in
Speaker 1: the next decade, it is not the people who are
Speaker 1: depressed and anxious today. It's actually the people who are
Speaker 1: languishing right now who are at the greatest risk. And
Speaker 1: I think that's because you know, when you're depressed or anxious,
Speaker 1: you feel like you have to do something eventually right,
Speaker 1: either you seek help or you try to help yourself,
Speaker 1: Whereas when you're languishing, you just kind of sit there
Speaker 1: with it. You might be oblivious to it until it
Speaker 1: develops into something much more serious. When I first read
Speaker 1: Adam's viral New York Times article, it was like a
Speaker 1: slap in the face, the good kind of a slap
Speaker 1: in the face. It made me realize that I'd been
Speaker 1: ignoring my own meth feeling of languishing for months. Initially,
Speaker 1: I figured the solution would be defined ways to force
Speaker 1: myself back into becoming more engaged at work. But it
Speaker 1: turns out that this just get back to its strategy
Speaker 1: is more counterproductive than you might expect. When we get
Speaker 1: back from the break, I'll talk to Adam about how
Speaker 1: we can better understand this chronic state of feeling blah
Speaker 1: and what we can really do to stop it. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab will be right back. Adam Grant's work is
Speaker 1: already familiar to millions of fans through his books and
Speaker 1: podcast episodes, but when he started to chronicle his own
Speaker 1: brush with languishing, he struck a chord with people across
Speaker 1: the entire world and from every walk of life. His
Speaker 1: New York Times piece about languishing was talked about everywhere,
Speaker 1: which kind of fits with the articles subheading that languishing
Speaker 1: maybe the dominant emotion of twenty twenty one. So it
Speaker 1: was adam surprised that an article that literally has bleh
Speaker 1: in the title took off like a rocket. Most of
Speaker 1: my writing has been a random walk in the sense that,
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes I'm really confident that an article is
Speaker 1: going to strike a chord and it doesn't, and other
Speaker 1: times I'm like, oh, this is kind of interesting and
Speaker 1: people really respond to it. This one, I actually had
Speaker 1: a really strong sense that it was going to resonate,
Speaker 1: and I had it in part because I got to
Speaker 1: experience it right when I was having that conversation with Tara.
Speaker 1: It was like a light bulb went off. And I
Speaker 1: don't think I've had that many Eureka moments in my career,
Speaker 1: but this was one of them. Like, Okay, at this point,
Speaker 1: I've been through a full year of the pandemic. I
Speaker 1: had languished myself, I had watched pretty much everyone I
Speaker 1: knew languish, and for a whole year I didn't figure
Speaker 1: it out. And so this was like a WHOA, Okay,
Speaker 1: I guess that this is a really common experience. People
Speaker 1: are struggling to label it understand it makes sense of
Speaker 1: it do something about it. I have something to stay here,
Speaker 1: and so I basically cleared my calendar when I got
Speaker 1: off the phone with her and started writing. You know
Speaker 1: what was the response like, because in my Twitter feed
Speaker 1: at least, it was pretty incredible. For like months after
Speaker 1: the article came out, it was as close as I've
Speaker 1: ever come to something going viral. I don't know what
Speaker 1: the bar is on that, but I quickly got an
Speaker 1: email from The Times that in the first week or
Speaker 1: two it had been read I don't know, five or
Speaker 1: six million times. It was all over social media. I
Speaker 1: was seeing celebrities share it. Then Prince Harry talked about
Speaker 1: it in a podcast. It was pretty much everywhere. My
Speaker 1: favorite moments were when I had a former student or
Speaker 1: a friend or a colleague reach out and say, hey,
Speaker 1: nine people have sent me this article and they don't
Speaker 1: even know that I know you. So it was exciting.
Speaker 1: It was also there was a part of me that
Speaker 1: was a little disappointed by the reaction in what sense,
Speaker 1: like why the disappointment. What was disappointing to me was
Speaker 1: when I put an idea in a body of evidence
Speaker 1: sound into the worlds. I want to learn something new
Speaker 1: from the reactions, and normally what happens is when something
Speaker 1: attracts attention, it sparks a bunch of dialogue. It leads
Speaker 1: to you know, for me, I get to do some rethinking.
Speaker 1: I questioned some of my assumptions, I changed some of
Speaker 1: my views, I encounter new evidence. And it also often,
Speaker 1: I guess, when it goes well to motivate other people
Speaker 1: to shift some of their thoughts or decisions or actions.
Speaker 1: And I felt like a reaction to languishing was just
Speaker 1: over and over. It was one note, it was yep,
Speaker 1: I'm languishing, this is me, I'm languishing. We're all languishing,
Speaker 1: and it just kept repeating over and over again. And
Speaker 1: I guess I want I wanted it to be more
Speaker 1: generative in starting a conversation that I hadn't thought of before,
Speaker 1: as opposed to just validating what people were already feeling
Speaker 1: and giving them a vocabularity to describe it. And I realized,
Speaker 1: that's a ridiculous expectation. And this is probably the most
Speaker 1: useful thing that I could have written, at least from
Speaker 1: you know, what we do and what I know. But
Speaker 1: there were definitely exceptions to this, and my favorite one
Speaker 1: was the critique that Austin Cleon wrote. So Austin as
Speaker 1: an artist, and he wrote this great critique where he
Speaker 1: said I hated the term languishing. The moment I saw it,
Speaker 1: I was like, yes, tell me more, what did you
Speaker 1: hate about it? I read a little further and he says,
Speaker 1: I'm not languishing. I recognize some of the symptoms you're describing,
Speaker 1: but I'm dormant, like a volcano or like a plant
Speaker 1: in the dead of winter. And he said, it is
Speaker 1: ridiculous to expect that, when the world is standing still,
Speaker 1: that I'm going to flourish, like as a plant. Like
Speaker 1: you don't try to flourish. You don't try to thrive
Speaker 1: in the dead of winter. You wait for spring. And
Speaker 1: he went on to say that, you know, even though
Speaker 1: I'm dormant right now, quiet things are happening inside me.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was such a profound alternative. That
Speaker 1: was the kind of dialogue that I wanted to start
Speaker 1: with languishing. And I think he was right. I don't
Speaker 1: think that people should feel pressure to immediately say, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm languishing, Now what do I do to get out
Speaker 1: of it? I don't think there's anything wrong with sitting
Speaker 1: with it for a few days or a few weeks,
Speaker 1: I think it's reasonable to say, if the world really
Speaker 1: is stagnating, I don't want to put unrealistic pressure on
Speaker 1: myself to be flourishing. At the same time, I worried
Speaker 1: that Austin was creating a little bit of a self
Speaker 1: fulfilling prophecy and saying, well, I'm not capable of flourishing
Speaker 1: in difficult circumstances, and therefore I'm not going to bother
Speaker 1: to try. And so I think this is so powerful
Speaker 1: because I think, you know, it raises this question of
Speaker 1: where languishing comes from in the first place, and you know,
Speaker 1: part of I think what he's saying is that, you know,
Speaker 1: that's our unrealistic expectations about how much we're going to
Speaker 1: be able to work in the context of a global pandemic,
Speaker 1: or how much we're going to be able to work
Speaker 1: when things are tough. But I think that's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons I think the article resonated so much is
Speaker 1: that you gave people a term to describe what was
Speaker 1: going on. Like, part of the languishing is the frustration,
Speaker 1: It is the guilt, and we're like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: this isn't like you doing something bad or you messing up.
Speaker 1: This is just this thing that happens. It's languishing, it's fine.
Speaker 1: And so you know, talk about what we know psychologically
Speaker 1: about just like giving a term for something and how
Speaker 1: powerful that can be for kind of understanding the phenomena
Speaker 1: of like taking next steps. So I think my favorite
Speaker 1: demonstration of the power of naming emotions would be the
Speaker 1: Matthew Lieberman research, which you know well right on, dealing
Speaker 1: with phobia of spiders in particular, right, So you basically
Speaker 1: track whether people overcome their fear of spiders by looking
Speaker 1: at whether they're willing to let a spider approach them
Speaker 1: and whether they show a physiological response when that happens.
Speaker 1: And I thought what was going to work best was
Speaker 1: either some level of distraction or some kind of reappraisal
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, the spider is actually harmless, it can't
Speaker 1: hurt me. You know. Maybe we do that through flooding
Speaker 1: and we just dropped the spider in your lap and
Speaker 1: then you realize this is okay. Maybe we take more
Speaker 1: of a systematic desensitization approach to exposure therapy and say,
Speaker 1: all right, first we're gonna have you draw a spider,
Speaker 1: and then we're going to put a spider halfway across
Speaker 1: the room in a cage, and then slowly we'll give
Speaker 1: you the chance to approach. And none of those steps,
Speaker 1: to my recollection of the data, were as powerful as
Speaker 1: just having people label their fear. When they said I'm
Speaker 1: afraid of spiders, all of a sudden, I think it
Speaker 1: gave them some power over their emotions and they realize, well, okay,
Speaker 1: I can't con troll the fact that I felt that
Speaker 1: physiological reaction, but I can definitely make choices about how
Speaker 1: I want to respond to it. And so when I
Speaker 1: hear psychologists say name it to tame it, I think
Speaker 1: maybe something similar happened with languishing, that when you recognize
Speaker 1: that you were languishing, it shifts the way that you
Speaker 1: process the pandemic. One of the interesting things that I
Speaker 1: caught myself doing, which I also saw a lot of
Speaker 1: people do, was say, well, I don't know what to do.
Speaker 1: I've never been through a pandemic before. And it's true,
Speaker 1: unless you're one hundred three years old, you probably have
Speaker 1: not survived a pandemic. And even then, I'm guessing you
Speaker 1: don't remember it. Very well, and I think that framing
Speaker 1: of it was extremely unhelpful because it meant that people
Speaker 1: were having a completely foreign experience and there was nothing
Speaker 1: to lean on or learn from. Whereas when people were
Speaker 1: able to pinpoint the emotional state, they could say, I'm languishing. Well,
Speaker 1: I've languished before, Like there was definitely a time in
Speaker 1: college where you know, I had a bad breakup and
Speaker 1: I got over the depression, but I still felt sort
Speaker 1: of blah. If you've ever said you had the case
Speaker 1: of the Mondays at work head quoted office space, right,
Speaker 1: you are ling on Monday. And once you recognize that
Speaker 1: you've languished before, you can learn lessons from your own
Speaker 1: past resilience. You can look at those times and say, well,
Speaker 1: what are some of the choices and behavior patterns that
Speaker 1: got me out of it? And then maybe you're in
Speaker 1: a better position to learn how to stop languishing and
Speaker 1: you don't have to get advice from someone else, right,
Speaker 1: you can actually maybe gain some wisdom from your own past.
Speaker 1: And I think that's part of the power of labeling
Speaker 1: the emotion is it lets you realize this is in
Speaker 1: some ways a unique experience, but the psychological state is
Speaker 1: familiar and that lends itself to some changes. The other thing,
Speaker 1: I think the power of giving it a name is
Speaker 1: that you can kind of figure out the science that
Speaker 1: goes with it, right, you know. I think when I'm
Speaker 1: experiencing anxiety, it's sometimes really helpful for me to realize
Speaker 1: this is just a fight or flight response. My heart
Speaker 1: is reacting because I know my sympathetic nervous system, or like,
Speaker 1: I can throw some biology on there. And I think
Speaker 1: when you think about languishing, you realize that this is
Speaker 1: an emotional state in which you don't really realize how
Speaker 1: bad the state is. Right, because you can't experience the
Speaker 1: emotions in the same way, you don't get the it's
Speaker 1: so bad, and that's one of the reasons you don't
Speaker 1: like take action on it. Like for me, that was
Speaker 1: really powerful, Oh, this is a feature of what I'm
Speaker 1: going through is I don't really get how bad it
Speaker 1: is in this state, and therefore I'm not doing anything
Speaker 1: about it. Was that kind of powerful for you too,
Speaker 1: in terms of your own frustration with languaging, Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: like to do it as rationally as you just described it.
Speaker 1: I don't think the neuroscience is there yet for languishing
Speaker 1: right to describe exactly what's happening, like, if I had
Speaker 1: to guess, I would say that, you know, there's maybe
Speaker 1: a shortage of dopamine and we're not getting the reward
Speaker 1: response that we normally experience, either from feeling productive or
Speaker 1: from doing something fun and enjoyable. And so it's the
Speaker 1: absence of those highs the rushes that probably I would
Speaker 1: want to describe. But I think I did something similar,
Speaker 1: which is to say, you know, look him back at least, Okay,
Speaker 1: those are symptoms of languishing. That's a real thing. There's
Speaker 1: nothing wrong with me, there's something wrong in my circumstances.
Speaker 1: And I think that made it much easier to find
Speaker 1: some self compassion. And then the next time I found
Speaker 1: myself languishing, oh okay, there done that. I can probably
Speaker 1: get through it. So what did you do were you
Speaker 1: going through this Jersey Shore situation when you read my article?
Speaker 1: How did the timing play at there was you know,
Speaker 1: like everything in the pandemic, there was kind of more
Speaker 1: Jersey Shore time than others. And it wasn't just Jersey Shore.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it was like hoarders. I think it was reading
Speaker 1: the article and also just realizing that because this is
Speaker 1: a thing with a name, I can take action on it, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's things I can do to kind of feel better,
Speaker 1: you know. For me, it was really just like moving
Speaker 1: my body, doing some yoga, being proactive about picking things
Speaker 1: that I know when I'm in a languishing state is
Speaker 1: going to help, and so that was kind of powerful
Speaker 1: for me. But another was kind of what you mentioned,
Speaker 1: which is just this idea that when you have a
Speaker 1: label and when you know what it is, you can
Speaker 1: give yourself some self compassion, right, And it especially being
Speaker 1: you know, so called happiness expert these days, you know,
Speaker 1: it's hard to admit that you're like going through some
Speaker 1: tough times and it's not just me, right, Like, this
Speaker 1: is the problem of what's called toxic positivity. Right. It
Speaker 1: was to talk about toxic positivity and why it makes
Speaker 1: it hard to talk specifically about an emotion like languishing. Well,
Speaker 1: I think I think the way that I experienced this
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, once the acute phase was over and
Speaker 1: we were kind of into the chronic Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever extreme fear or grief most people were feeling, some
Speaker 1: of that had subsided and now stragging on this endless
Speaker 1: groundhog day. I felt like what happened was, as I
Speaker 1: started seeing people outdoors again, they would say how are you,
Speaker 1: and I'd say pretty good. I'd almost get judged like
Speaker 1: what do you what do you mean? Like why are
Speaker 1: you not great or awesome? And that's toxic positivity, right,
Speaker 1: It's it's the pressure to be optimistic and upbeat and
Speaker 1: enthusiastic at all times, no matter what's going on in
Speaker 1: your life. And that doesn't exist in every culture, as
Speaker 1: you know, right, It's it's much easier. For example, if
Speaker 1: you live in Russia, the actual expected response to how
Speaker 1: are you, and the research I've read is normal, literally normal,
Speaker 1: and if you say you're great, people will think you're
Speaker 1: a Pollyanna or that you're up to something sneaky. So,
Speaker 1: you know, here and obviously in the land of optimism,
Speaker 1: we live the American dream and that means we're expected
Speaker 1: to be exuber and I think that's really hard. I
Speaker 1: think that made it really difficult for people to say,
Speaker 1: you know, honestly kind of ah. And I guess that
Speaker 1: was one of the reasons I got excited about writing
Speaker 1: this article is I wanted people to have the freedom
Speaker 1: to say you know, honestly, I'm kind of languishing right now, or,
Speaker 1: as they'd be more likely to say it, kind of,
Speaker 1: I guess I'm languishing. One of the reasons I really
Speaker 1: want to interview you for this podcast, and one of
Speaker 1: my favorite things about the article is that you are
Speaker 1: a good example because you made it out like you
Speaker 1: rescued yourself. And in your article you give people some
Speaker 1: really great tips for kind of what you can do
Speaker 1: to solve things. And so when we get back from
Speaker 1: the break, we're going to hear some of those solutions.
Speaker 1: But just a quick teaser. Adam's solution involved a princess,
Speaker 1: a man in a mustache, and a red hat. We'll
Speaker 1: hear more about this curious solution when the Happiness Lab
Speaker 1: returns in a moment. I love that when I was
Speaker 1: a drift in my own state of languishing, I made
Speaker 1: all the classic mistakes. I'd try to push myself with
Speaker 1: woollpower alone to do tasks that I had little motivation
Speaker 1: to complete. I also get sucked into a ton of
Speaker 1: mindless distractions like junk TV that didn't really nourish me.
Speaker 1: Psychologist Adam Grant, however, figured out a better solution. He
Speaker 1: was rescued from languishing by a pair of plumbers, Mario
Speaker 1: and Luigi. All Right, so summer twenty twenty, I think
Speaker 1: I guess I'm at peak languishing, although peak feels like
Speaker 1: the wrong term. Yes, like an ultimate met whatever that is.
Speaker 1: We all of a sudden had a bunch of free time.
Speaker 1: We're just kind of we're not going on vacation. We're
Speaker 1: sitting around, what are we going to do? And one
Speaker 1: day my sister suggests that we should play Mario Kart
Speaker 1: on Nintendo Switch, which you can play online. So she
Speaker 1: and my brother in law are halfway across the country
Speaker 1: in Michigan. I'm in Philly with my family. We're basically
Speaker 1: all locked down, and we start this weekly game and
Speaker 1: I am fired up, like I haven't been pretty much
Speaker 1: for the whole pandemic. I'm like shouting, got you, creen shell.
Speaker 1: And first of all, I don't think my kids have
Speaker 1: ever seen me trash shock before, and I was like,
Speaker 1: is this okay? Is this a good thing? But they
Speaker 1: loved it, and my sister was cracking up, and I
Speaker 1: kept promising when i'd lose, like I'm like, we're playing
Speaker 1: one more round, You're going down, and then, you know,
Speaker 1: I would celebrate these moments of like I perfectly aimed
Speaker 1: at greenshell and I took you out, and you know,
Speaker 1: I'd get bombed by our six year old son and
Speaker 1: end up behind all our kids, and like then I'd
Speaker 1: scream about that and even that was fun. And it
Speaker 1: started out as a weekly game, and then our kids
Speaker 1: started waking up in the morning and asking what time
Speaker 1: are we playing today, and it became a daily game.
Speaker 1: And after a couple weeks of that, I did not
Speaker 1: feel like I was languishing any anymore, and I felt
Speaker 1: re energized. I felt goal oriented. I felt like I
Speaker 1: was more productive at work, I felt like I was
Speaker 1: more enthusiastic at home. And I did not connect it
Speaker 1: to Mario Kart at the time, but looking back, it
Speaker 1: was pretty clear that Mario Kart met some of the
Speaker 1: conditions for escaping languishing and ever since, actually, when I'm
Speaker 1: kind of feeling blah, like, all right, let's get a
Speaker 1: Mario Kart game going, I mean, I love this story
Speaker 1: because there are a few parts of it that really
Speaker 1: fit with some of the happiness research. I mean, one
Speaker 1: is that you know you're embracing social connection, right, which
Speaker 1: we know is just super good, you know, for feeling better.
Speaker 1: But another, and the big one that you identify is
Speaker 1: that you're really engaging in some practice that gives you flow.
Speaker 1: And so you know, what is this idea of flow
Speaker 1: and why is it so powerful for our well being? Well?
Speaker 1: I first read about flow when I was an undergrad
Speaker 1: studying psychology, and I thought Holly sh extent mehi as
Speaker 1: conceptualization of it was really meaningful. He described something that
Speaker 1: I had experienced a lot, I never had a name for,
Speaker 1: I hadn't really paid much attention to, and it gave
Speaker 1: me suddenly an understanding of what I loved about what
Speaker 1: I thought were very very unrelated passions of mine. So
Speaker 1: he defined flow there's a state of total absorption in
Speaker 1: an activity, where you get so immersed that you lose
Speaker 1: track of all of your surroundings. You might not hear
Speaker 1: a sound, you might not notice you know what people
Speaker 1: are doing around you. Sometimes you even forget who you are.
Speaker 1: And when I read Flow, right afterward, my sister made
Speaker 1: me read the first three Harry Potter books, and I
Speaker 1: remember I was like, ah, book about a wizard. Really.
Speaker 1: I remember loving the first one so much that I
Speaker 1: read the other two in the same weekend, and I
Speaker 1: finished the third, and I was genuinely upset to remember
Speaker 1: that Hogwarts wasn't real like that. That's flow. I got
Speaker 1: so absorbed in that world that I forgot that there
Speaker 1: was no Platform nine and three quarters, which was devastating,
Speaker 1: But a flow state for me was It's what I
Speaker 1: loved about everything that I spent my free time on.
Speaker 1: It's why I loved playing video games. It's why I
Speaker 1: had so much fun playing Ultimate Frisbee. It's why I
Speaker 1: was a huge fan of scrabble and Trivial Pursuit and clue.
Speaker 1: It's even what I found when I was writing, And
Speaker 1: all of a sudden I realized, way, these these are
Speaker 1: not totally disparate interests. These are actually different ways that
Speaker 1: I get into the same psychological state. And the cool
Speaker 1: thing about flow, though, is that it's not kind of
Speaker 1: a one size fits all. I mean, she sent me
Speaker 1: high me this interesting distinction between what he called good flow,
Speaker 1: or hemostly called the other one junk flow. Right, the
Speaker 1: sort of flow that you get into My favorite example
Speaker 1: of junk flow is the sort of binging on the
Speaker 1: Jersey Shore kind of thing where it's like you know
Speaker 1: time's going by, right, but then at the end of it,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of like, I feel super gross and so
Speaker 1: talk about like, you know, this idea that binging can
Speaker 1: be this temporary escape, but what we really need is
Speaker 1: a better non junk flow we escape to kind of
Speaker 1: get out of the languishing. Yeah, I think. I think
Speaker 1: one of the challenges that a lot of us ran
Speaker 1: into during the pandemic was I think everyone binge tiger
Speaker 1: king and definitely, I mean it was riveting. I could
Speaker 1: not look away, and then it finished like, Okay, that's
Speaker 1: technically a real world, but it's not one I want
Speaker 1: anything to do with. I don't want to think about it.
Speaker 1: I don't want to remember that they're actually humans who
Speaker 1: treat animals this way and also treat each other this way.
Speaker 1: It was slimy, and it rubs off on you when
Speaker 1: you binge it right, because you get transported into that world.
Speaker 1: Whereas I think, and I would love to see better
Speaker 1: experimental data for this, I'm waiting for somebody to do
Speaker 1: the watch an hour a day versus binge it all
Speaker 1: in one day. I don't think it rubs off on
Speaker 1: you in the same way if you spread it out yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely for Jersey Shore. That's true in part just because
Speaker 1: I'd be trying to go to sleep and I'd have
Speaker 1: the theme, so I'll like get crazy to get you
Speaker 1: know anyway. But yeah, so the keys that we need
Speaker 1: to find flow activities that will kind of build us
Speaker 1: up rather than kind of drag us down. And in
Speaker 1: your ted talk you mentioned these three features that might
Speaker 1: be helpful mnemonic for kind of thinking about flow that
Speaker 1: feels good. And so this is sort of mastery mindfulness
Speaker 1: in mattering. And so let's start with mastery. What is
Speaker 1: it and why is it so important for kind of
Speaker 1: popping us out of languishing. Mastery is basically a feeling
Speaker 1: of competence. You've either gotten better at something or you've
Speaker 1: accomplished something. And I think it's relevant to avoiding languishing
Speaker 1: because if languishing is stagnation, mastery feels like forward movement.
Speaker 1: It's like you have momentum as opposed to standing still.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people hear mastery and they think, Okay,
Speaker 1: I have to become an expert on playing the drums,
Speaker 1: or I have to learn everything there is to know about,
Speaker 1: you know, seventeenth century history. No, Yeah, not at all.
Speaker 1: My beloved colleague Malcolm Gladwell has messed us up on this.
Speaker 1: Do you think mastery and you think, okay, ten thousand
Speaker 1: hours will be starting our number one right, But that's
Speaker 1: not really what you mean hearing, not at all. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking much less about huge triumphs and much more about
Speaker 1: small wins, those little jolts of I can do this,
Speaker 1: or I'm capable, or I succeeded at something today. And
Speaker 1: I realized this is actually why I was drawn into
Speaker 1: word games in the first place. It's really easy to
Speaker 1: get that rush playing a seven letter word even when
Speaker 1: you're languishing. Right, I can look at seven tiles, rearrange
Speaker 1: them and do the anagram until I find the bingo.
Speaker 1: And I think I was staying up past midnight because
Speaker 1: when I had one of those, I wanted another one.
Speaker 1: I wanted to keep the sense of mastery going. Only
Speaker 1: I was exhausting myself and then waking up in the
Speaker 1: morning regretting it. The experience of languishing is aimlessness and joylessness.
Speaker 1: When you have mastery, all of a sudden, you not
Speaker 1: only have a goal, you've actually made progress to court it,
Speaker 1: and you get this kind of spring in your step
Speaker 1: of Ooh, I like that. And you talked about the
Speaker 1: key to finding mastery, especially when you're kind of in
Speaker 1: this sort of mess state, is to look for these
Speaker 1: sort of just manageable difficulties in life. So give me
Speaker 1: a definition of just manageable difficulty and how we can
Speaker 1: find something. Oh. There was a Gilbert brim book years
Speaker 1: ago called Ambition where he wrote about this poignant set
Speaker 1: of challenges that his father ran into. I guess if
Speaker 1: I remember correctly, his father lived on a farm. As
Speaker 1: he started getting older, he went from being able to
Speaker 1: basically take care of a huge, huge plot of land
Speaker 1: to having a scale back. But he kept going, he
Speaker 1: didn't stop. And what he realized was, Okay, my limits
Speaker 1: are now at a different place that they were before,
Speaker 1: but I can still challenge myself. And that became something
Speaker 1: he looked forward to. It became something that gave him
Speaker 1: a sense of you know, I did achieve something today, right.
Speaker 1: I was able to mow maybe a smaller lawn than
Speaker 1: I did twenty thirty years ago, but I still was
Speaker 1: able to take care of some of my land. And
Speaker 1: I think those just manageable difficulties they give you a
Speaker 1: sense of confidence that you can overcome challenges. They also
Speaker 1: reinforce that when you hit an obstacle, you are not
Speaker 1: necessarily going to be stopped by it. I said, that's mastery.
Speaker 1: The second kind of part of this triumphate is this
Speaker 1: idea of mindful, something we talk a lot about on
Speaker 1: the podcast. So give me your own definition of mindfulness
Speaker 1: and why it's so important for our well being. So
Speaker 1: I guess I am printed on the Allen Langer definition
Speaker 1: of mindfulness, which is just being present in the moment
Speaker 1: and you know, actively noticing what's happening in your environment.
Speaker 1: And so I think of real mindfulness as focusing all
Speaker 1: your attention on a single task or activity, and not
Speaker 1: exactly something that many of us are doing regularly, right,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I think so many people make
Speaker 1: the mistake of assuming that they can pay attention to
Speaker 1: multiple things at once, And computers are designed to do that.
Speaker 1: Computers are great at parallel processing. Last time I checked,
Speaker 1: humans are serial processors. We can only focus on one
Speaker 1: thing at a time. And I think about mindfulness is
Speaker 1: basically concentrating on whatever that activity is that gives you
Speaker 1: a sense of mastery. Without that concentration, you don't get
Speaker 1: to mastery, and you also don't really get into flow.
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons I love you bring up
Speaker 1: that example in mindfulness of the kind of multitaskings. I
Speaker 1: feel like this is the kind of thing that got
Speaker 1: even worse during the worst days of the pandemic. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm on zoo, but I'm also checking my email.
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to be watching some colloquium talk, but I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, reading some recipe in the background. Right, I
Speaker 1: felt like because we added so much more screen time,
Speaker 1: it made us so much more susceptible to the bad
Speaker 1: habits that lead you away from mindfulness. So true, I
Speaker 1: think we went from Okay, at least they're certain hours
Speaker 1: of the day where I'm in transit, I'm commuting, I'm
Speaker 1: driving somewhere, I'm flying somewhere, I'm in meetings, I'm actively
Speaker 1: hands on working on a problem too. Huh. Now, I
Speaker 1: could be distracted every moment of the day. And so
Speaker 1: the solution to that you've argued is to really think
Speaker 1: carefully about our time and how we use our time,
Speaker 1: you know, explain how we can kind of use our
Speaker 1: time better to experience more of this mindfulness. Well, I
Speaker 1: think blocking out time to concentrate on one activity is
Speaker 1: a critical step. I was so surprised to read the
Speaker 1: evidence that even pre pandemic people were checking email seventy
Speaker 1: four times today, that they were switching tasks on average
Speaker 1: at least once every ten minutes. You can't get into
Speaker 1: a real flow state with that kind of distraction, and
Speaker 1: you're not going to accomplish much of anything either. I
Speaker 1: also really love the way that I think Brigade Shelter
Speaker 1: first coined the term time confetti. That captured this that
Speaker 1: when when you're you're checking email or your phone every
Speaker 1: few minutes, you're taking what could be a really meaningful
Speaker 1: block of time and you're basically slicing it into these
Speaker 1: tiny pieces, none of which are useful. You can't do
Speaker 1: anything with the sixty two seconds right that you you're
Speaker 1: spent between moments of checking your text messages, and so
Speaker 1: you basically start losing entire hours and days of your
Speaker 1: life just by dividing up the minutes into these miniature chunks.
Speaker 1: And I think we needed the opposite of that, right.
Speaker 1: We need to carve out time for if it's if
Speaker 1: it's on the job, it's deep work, if it's something
Speaker 1: that you're doing for leisure. It's deep fun right where
Speaker 1: you put your phone away, you block the time in
Speaker 1: your calendar, and you say, this is the only thing
Speaker 1: that deserves my attention right now. And I think it's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that playing video games can induce
Speaker 1: such flow. I mean, they're built to induce flow in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. But one thing is you're not
Speaker 1: whipping out your phone and checking your email halfway through
Speaker 1: you know, a game of Mario Kart, right like you're
Speaker 1: fully immersed in it because you know, temporarily you're fully
Speaker 1: immersed in it only between races occasionally just a trash
Speaker 1: talk over tech exactly. But while while you're driving, you
Speaker 1: can't take your eyes off the screen otherwise your car
Speaker 1: is going to spin out and then there goes your
Speaker 1: shot at mastery again. You know, the biggest reason I
Speaker 1: love your Mario Kart story is it gets to kind
Speaker 1: of this third factor, this factor of kind of mattering, right,
Speaker 1: which is really about our social connection, whether they're people,
Speaker 1: and that kind of impact we're having on other people.
Speaker 1: And so talk about why mattering can be so important
Speaker 1: for kind of popping you out of languishing. Well, when
Speaker 1: I think about the research by Gregory Elliott and colleagues.
Speaker 1: Most people, when they think about mattering, they think I
Speaker 1: matter if other people notice me and care about me.
Speaker 1: They forget that there's a critical piece, which is that
Speaker 1: other people rely on me, that I count, that I
Speaker 1: make a difference. I think this is something that was
Speaker 1: missing for a lot of people, especially during the early
Speaker 1: days of the pandemic, feeling like their hands were tied
Speaker 1: in terms of being able to be there for their
Speaker 1: extended families, to be able to support their friends, to
Speaker 1: show up and do their jobs effectively, right wherever your
Speaker 1: contribution was, to be able to volunteer right then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you can't do it, and so you
Speaker 1: lose the sense of meaning and purpose that comes through
Speaker 1: helping other people. And I did not expect to get
Speaker 1: that playing a video game, that's for sure. You know,
Speaker 1: the mastery and mindfulness. I've had that my whole life.
Speaker 1: You know, I've played Mario Kart for three decades now,
Speaker 1: on and off. Never really felt like a mattered playing
Speaker 1: it before. But in this situation, my sister was expecting
Speaker 1: for the first time, she's actually expecting twins. There's literally
Speaker 1: nothing I can do to help her, and I feel like, Okay,
Speaker 1: well this is something I can do, you know, to
Speaker 1: maybe relive some of our favorite childhood memories, to stay
Speaker 1: connected when we're far apart, and maybe even more importantly,
Speaker 1: on a daily basis. You know, there's not a lot
Speaker 1: that our kids can do, like we're kind of all
Speaker 1: stuck at home, and the fact that they're waking up
Speaker 1: in the morning excited to find out what time Mario
Speaker 1: Kart is. I felt like I had something to contribute there,
Speaker 1: that I could organize this experience that was exciting and
Speaker 1: energizing to them, and that she was another thing. We
Speaker 1: talked about baby steps with mastery, but I think there's
Speaker 1: also kind of baby steps in mattering that we forget
Speaker 1: can be psychologically really powerful. But that's all what the
Speaker 1: research shows. It doesn't have to be saving someone's life.
Speaker 1: You know, you can actually matter to someone in these
Speaker 1: tiny ways too. It's amazing how much good a five
Speaker 1: minute favor can do, just a few minutes of of
Speaker 1: sharing a bit of knowledge, giving someone a piece of feedback,
Speaker 1: making an introduction between two people who could benefit from
Speaker 1: knowing each other but are not currently connected. Those actions
Speaker 1: take relatively small amounts of effort, but they have a
Speaker 1: big impact on our mood. You know, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people underestimate the psychological boost that comes from
Speaker 1: random acts of kindness. But also like the randomness was gone,
Speaker 1: Like you're not running into somebody in the line at
Speaker 1: Starbucks or the grocery store or on the bus, and
Speaker 1: so well, how am I going to randomly help people
Speaker 1: all of a sudden. If I'm going to help anyone,
Speaker 1: I have to plant. And I think that that that's
Speaker 1: something that stood in the way for a lot of
Speaker 1: people of feeling like on a daily basis, Oh, I
Speaker 1: did something where I actually felt like I matter? And
Speaker 1: so do you think kind of understanding kind of how
Speaker 1: languishing works and understanding some strategy as we can use
Speaker 1: to pop out of it can help us, you know,
Speaker 1: the next global pandemic that comes around, or the next
Speaker 1: kind of mini version of languishing that comes up for
Speaker 1: all of us. You know, have you found that we
Speaker 1: can really snap ourselves out of it when we need to?
Speaker 1: I hope, So, I hope. So. I think the empirical
Speaker 1: jury is still out, but I mean, it seems to
Speaker 1: be a state that responds well to a lot of
Speaker 1: the kinds of positive psychology interventions that you cover on
Speaker 1: this show, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't.
Speaker 1: I think the problem is that when people are languishing,
Speaker 1: they don't put their knowledge into action. Right. They may
Speaker 1: be fully aware of what to do, do they put
Speaker 1: that into practice. I don't know. I've had a lot
Speaker 1: of people ask in the last few months, Okay, I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm languishing, or I care about someone who's languishing,
Speaker 1: what do I do? Don't come to me for answers.
Speaker 1: I'm muddling through this the same way that the rest
Speaker 1: of us are. Why don't you take that person who's
Speaker 1: languishing and ask them to find somebody else who's languishing
Speaker 1: and give that person advice, or better yet, if you're languishing,
Speaker 1: find someone else you know who's languishing, give them some
Speaker 1: suggestions on how to overcome it, and you will probably
Speaker 1: find that the advice you give to others is the
Speaker 1: advice that you need to take for yourself. That is
Speaker 1: wonderfully said, and also for someone who has been languishing
Speaker 1: herself and doing this podcast, I will try to do it. Yeah, Laurie,
Speaker 1: tell me, how do you think we can get out
Speaker 1: of languishing well, I'm going to buy a switch, like
Speaker 1: as student as this interviews over love. I love how
Speaker 1: literally people took that. By the way, I got all
Speaker 1: these emails after the Ted Talks saying can you give
Speaker 1: me some tips on how to improve my Mario Kart skills?
Speaker 1: Like that was not the point. The point was think
Speaker 1: about what is your version of Mario Kart? Right, what's
Speaker 1: the activity of the project where you have flow with
Speaker 1: people you love or care about, and where you get
Speaker 1: that sense of mastery, mindfulness and mattering. But you know what,
Speaker 1: if Mario Kart is your cup of tea, I will
Speaker 1: race you, Laurie Santos, and you're going down awesome. In
Speaker 1: the final episode of this season of The Happiness Lab,
Speaker 1: we'll tackle an emotion that Adam and I touched on
Speaker 1: a few times when that's hurting so many people right now, burnout.
Speaker 1: We'll see that burnout isn't just a matter of feeling blah.
Speaker 1: It's a state of mind that, if not addressed, can
Speaker 1: wreck havoc on your career and your livelihood. But as well,
Speaker 1: here next time, there are some evidence based ways to
Speaker 1: come back from burnout, even if it feels like life
Speaker 1: has drained you dry. I burned out at my dream job.
Speaker 1: My constant thought was, Ah, you know, not this again.
Speaker 1: I stress eight, I stress drank, and it was just
Speaker 1: utterly miserable. So I knew that something had a change,
Speaker 1: and I did not yet have a way out. And
Speaker 1: so I hope you'll return to hear the final episode
Speaker 1: in this season of The Happiness Lab with me Doctor
Speaker 1: Laurie Santos. If you love this show and others from
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is
Speaker 1: a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted listening
Speaker 1: for only four ninety nine a month. As a special
Speaker 1: gift to Pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be sharing a series
Speaker 1: of six guided meditations to help you practice the lessons
Speaker 1: we've learned from our experts. Pushkin Plus is available on
Speaker 1: the show page and Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm,
Speaker 1: slash plus. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced
Speaker 1: by Ryan Dilley, Emily Anne Vaughan, and Courtney Guerino. Our
Speaker 1: original music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing,
Speaker 1: and mastering by Evan Viola. Special thanks to Milabelle, Heather Faine,
Speaker 1: John Stars, Carli Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Brandt Haynes, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent,
Speaker 1: Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos. To find more
Speaker 1: Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your podcast