Practical Magic | How I Ended a Cycle of Languishing
Adam Grant calls 'languishing' the dominant emotion of 2021. In this episode, I share my own experience with languishing this spring, and what helped me end the cycle.
I Found a Name for What I Was Experiencing
Earlier this week, I read an article by Adam Grant, a Wharton psychologist and a contributor to The New York Times. He wrote an article about languishing and how it may be the dominant emotion of 2021.
When I saw that word, something clicked in me because I realized that I had myself experienced the sensation of languishing for quite some weeks, at the end of winter and early spring. Yes, even your high priestess of Magical Living has been struggling to stay motivated, connected, and energized. I want to share this with you because I think it's important to remember that as energy beings, it’s a constant dance of fine-tuning, adjusting, feeling, calibrating, and figuring out what our body and mind need from us at any one moment. It's always in flux.
What I had found particularly perplexing was that I have an arsenal of Magical Living practices; all the tools that I used to heal from burnout and stay well sustainably for the last few years. Yet, I didn't feel well.
Why was I stagnating?
What could I do to shift out of it?
How could I become aware of it so that I could liberate myself, take the medicine, and move out of the cycle?
How Does Adam Grant Describe Languishing?
According to Grant, languishing is a state of stagnation and emptiness. It feels like you're muddling through your days looking at it through a foggy windshield. For those of us who are not directly grieving a massive loss right now, it can feel a bit indulgent. I personally felt guilty about acknowledging this strange emotion because I'm safe, I'm in good health, and I couldn't figure out why I was feeling so bad. But the first key to emotional alchemy and using everything, even those emotions you don't appreciate and those states of contraction. Denial or suppression doesn't make it go away.
Grant makes a good point in the article that mental health does not exist on a binary. It's not depression or flourishing; there’s a large spectrum in the middle. If flourishing is the peak of well-being where you have a strong sense of meaning purpose and you feel connected to others, then depression is the valley of feeling unwell, despondent, disconnected, isolated, drained, and low self-esteem. Languishing can fall somewhere in the middle of these two states: you don't necessarily feel the acute symptoms of depression, but you're also not the picture of mental health either.
This gray area is where I found myself because I had experienced depression before and I knew it wasn't that. I didn't understand why now over a year into the pandemic, I felt the worst I'd felt in this whole time. The clue as I gleaned from the article was that last spring, just as we had gone into lockdown, I was busy with two major things in my life. The first was moving from Paris to Bordeaux; we moved two days Before the main lockdown in France, and that took all my energy and attention. The second thing was that I was in the middle of working deeply on my book proposal and the creation of my coaching program, Unstoppable, which had firm deadlines. Being absorbed in both of those projects protected me from being sucked into lots of panic and anxiety.
This is what Grant shares as a potential solution for languishing: finding the state of flow where you are able to dedicate to a project, activity, or challenge that really matters to you. Having a worthwhile goal. He talks specifically about finding this right level of challenge, this ‘Goldilocks sweet spot’ between too easy and too hard.
This is something that’s so essential to the human condition; there's a need for meaning, a need to be involved in some kind of quest, some kind of purpose.
This is where I realized that my Magical Living practices were not quite enough. They were supporting my energy, soothing my nervous system, and finding grounding, pleasure, and joy in simple everyday activities and rituals. But something was missing. I was still languishing.
Magical Living Tools to Help You Find Flow
If you feel that you're languishing or worse, you may not be able to achieve flow if your nervous system is fried or you're perennially exhausted or drained.
You may first need some self-soothing practices to calm your nervous system and find a baseline from where to take action. Self-care is simply taking care of your nervous system.
If you're in this place, I recommend using some of the Magical Living tools I've shared already on this podcast.
Episode 12: A Q&A episode about setting boundaries with people and technology so that you're not sending yourself into fight, flight, freeze mode all day long.
Episode 9: Ending a stress cycle with shaking. Stress on its own is not a problem. It's when we don't end the stress cycle by bringing our nervous system back to baseline and all those hormones stay in our body creating a toxic residue that is the problem. The stress itself we can deal with if we end the cycle.
Episode 7: Raising your energy. An invitation to start considering that in order to output anything you need to input first.
For me, I already had those things in place. I didn't feel stressed. I didn't feel fried or drained. I just felt meh. It was a kind of lack of purpose, lack of meaning, lack of excitement, lack of enjoyment. Even my daily walks made me despondent because of the strict restrictions, so I had to dig deeper.
I'm going to share my own experience about what I choose to do about my languishing, but this is not an instruction or an assignment. I’m sharing this purely for inspirational purposes because everyone is so different.
If you're experiencing symptoms of languishing or even early depression, I encourage you to seek out a medical professional or a therapist who can help you work through that because these issues that we're dealing with are no joke. We need to have a great amount of self-compassion for ourselves. Even if we consider ourselves to be resilient, strong, capable individuals, these are incredibly trying times, and even the strongest of us can find our resources totally depleted and needing extra support. So please consider giving that to yourself if this is something that's going on for you.
How I Ended My Cycle of Languishing
As energy beings, it’s important for us to really take into account how are we getting sourced by the right kind of energy. Lots of the activities I normally do to give me energy – spending time with friends, going to group fitness classes – have all been completely off the cards for me for at least eight months now.
1. I realized I wasn't eating well.
I had become disconnected from what I was eating, and when I started to look at what I was eating I realized I was overeating. I'd fallen into patterns of numbing myself with food and wine.
I always encourage people to ignore their weight ‘number’ and to instead focus on how they feel. For me, I didn't feel well and I knew from experience that if I wanted to alleviate mental and emotional languishing, I had to start in my body.
I decided to commit to a practice of becoming much more aware of what I'm putting in my body. To become more connected with my hunger, my satiation points, what kind of foods are making me feel good and energized, what kind of foods are making me feel drained or crampy. It was really a pleasure to go on this journey because my body was ready for it. I realized that my body had been asking me for this for so long and I hadn't listened. I even found a state of flow in the art of preparing healthy food.
The protocol that I used, to the letter, was Alisa Vitti’s 4-day Hormonal Protocol (it’s free). I would never recommend anything I haven't tried myself, and I have to say I was very happy with the results. Alisa Vitti is a functional nutritionist and women's hormone expert, and I really back her way of empowering women with education and resources for working with their cyclical energy.
So I committed to the four-day protocol. I felt a bit off for three days, and then on day four, I came alive. Since then I've been more or less sticking to the kind of foods in the protocol.
I instantly had far more energy, and with that energy came desire came purpose. Almost instantly after I finished the protocol, I decided to relaunch Align + Flow, my group coaching program on cyclical energy. Relaunching this has been on my plate since the end of last year. It's been moving very slowly; gestational momentum 100%. I didn’t have the energy to relaunch it and had let it slide. As soon as I started feeling differently, I had tons of energy and desire to jump straight back into it.
2. I found flow in how I moved my body.
I also decided I wanted to find more flow in how I moved my body. I decided to seek out a roller skating teacher to help me take on some more challenging jam skating moves, and that has been such fun to work on that juicy level of challenge where I'm now comfortable enough on my skates to be rolling around on my tiptoes and going pretty fast. This is the perfect time for me to commit to learning some complex moves.
3. I brought my attention to the concept of flow every day.
I'm finding flow in my work, in my personal life, and I'm bringing my attention to this concept of flow every day.
Can I create flow by really taking my time to prepare a recipe that I haven't made before?
Can I find flow in increasing my challenge level when I'm doing my online workouts?
So many things that we've been having to take on in the past year have pushed us outside of our comfort zone, but in a way that is too hard. That it's not the right level of challenge. It's overly challenging and therefore can create feelings of exhaustion and despondency.
That’s why I love this idea of identifying this Goldilocks level of challenge for yourself because that's the flow magic zone.
What Did I Learn From My Cycle of Languishing?
We are so complex as energy beings.
Even though I had was taking care of my nervous system, I was using a lot of the Magical Living tools, I still felt the sense of languishing because I was missing this creative challenge of flow. And it just reminds me again that we live and move in cycles. We are in a constant process of choosing ourselves and then losing ourselves and then getting the choice to choose ourselves again. We can't assume that everything is going to stay the same. Through these cycles of losing and choosing of expansion and contraction, this is how we grow, this is how we evolve. If we’re aware and compassionate enough to recognize the medicine that's in those contractions, then we're more likely to not have to learn that lesson again on the next journey around.
Do You Think You Might Be Languishing?
First, I hope that sharing my experience here has given you the sense that you are far from alone. You can also look at the comments on Adam Grant’s article to confirm that for yourself.
Second, I hope you're walking away with some inspiration for how to create more flow in your own life, whether through work or in your personal life.
Finally, if you think you might be languishing, I invite you to consider joining my next cohort of Align + Flow. Align + Flow is a program for you to reclaim cyclical energy as your superpower, banish burnout and become a Magical Living time bender.
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