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 the sjaki feeling right now.

So ask yourself honestly, how are you feeling today?

If your answer is Mh, then you might be experiencing the feeling that behavioral scientists refer to as languishing.

The experience of languishing, that lethargic, joyless, meh, bleh, blasstate, 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 jaki emotion happens to be one of my favorite psychologists, podcasters and colleagues, Adam Grant.

When Adam's not teaching at war and business school, he's writing books like Think Again, the power of knowing what you don't know, and give and take, while 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.

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