Languishing: the name for what you are feeling

There is a state that does not appear on any medical report and yet, you will recognize it immediately. You are not unwell: you sleep reasonably well, you perform at work, and no one around you would notice anything. But you are not well either, and you know it. The things that used to ignite you now barely warm you. Plans are made, weeks pass, projects get done; and everything happens as if behind a glass pane, with the volume turned down slightly. If someone asks how you are, you answer "well," and you are not exactly lying. It is just that for some time now, "well" has simply meant "no news."

This state has a name. It was not invented by a science communicator or a corporate wellness campaign: it was proposed more than twenty years ago by a researcher who was studying a very specific question—what lies between mental illness and mental health—and discovered that a great many people live in that no-man's-land.

The gap between being unwell and being well

For much of the 20th century, mental health was defined by elimination: being healthy meant not being sick. If you did not meet the criteria for depression, an anxiety disorder, or any clinical label, you were filed away as healthy, and that was the end of the conversation. The problem is that this accounting leaves out precisely your case: that of someone who has nothing diagnosable and yet notices that their life has lost its flavor. With the old yardstick, that did not exist. And what does not exist is not studied, not named, and not addressed.

A sociologist named it in 2002

Corey Keyes, a sociologist at Emory University, had suspected for years that the math did not add up. In 2002, he published an article in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior whose title was already an entire program: "The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life." His thesis, built on surveys of thousands of American adults between the ages of 25 and 74, had two parts. The first: mental health is not the absence of mental illness; they are two distinct axes, and one can be free of any diagnosis and yet feel empty. The second: this state—low well-being without illness—deserved its own name. He called it languishing: a life that functions but does not flourish. Stillness, stagnation; "emptiness" was the word he chose to describe it.

At the other end of the continuum, he placed flourishing: feeling interest, satisfaction, and purpose, not as occasional peaks but as the general tone of one's days. And among his data was an uncomfortable detail: those who were flourishing were a minority, around one in five adults. Languishing, on the other hand, was no rarity: it hovered around one in six. Translated: in any meeting you attend this week, chances are someone else is exactly where you are. They just are not saying it either.

What happens if you don't look at it

You might think that languishing, not being an illness, is a minor matter: a question of vital tone, a phase, or age. Keyes himself wanted to test this, and what he found is the part of the matter that circulates the least. Ten years after the first major survey, they measured the same adults again. Those who were languishing at the beginning and continued to languish at the end were more than six times as likely to suffer from a mental illness, compared to those who had remained flourishing throughout the decade.

Let us be precise, because in this house figures are handled with care: this is survey epidemiology, not a physical law. A ten-year correlation is not a sentence, and no one can tell you that languishing "leads to" depression the way smoke leads to fire. But the direction of the data is stubborn, and a sensible reading fits into a single sentence: languishing is not being sick, but it is not a safe place to stay and live either.

The word that went viral (and what virality did to it)

For nearly two decades, languishing was a technical term in academic journals. Until April 2021, in the midst of the pandemic hangover, organizational psychologist Adam Grant wrote an article in The New York Times—"There's a Name for the 'Blah' You're Feeling: It's Called Languishing"—which ended up being the most read of the year in the newspaper. Suddenly, the word was everywhere: talks, company newsletters, after-dinner conversations. Millions of people felt the relief of that state finally having a name.

And here comes the counterpoint, because words must also be audited. Anthropologist Sarah Willen published a critical analysis in 2022 of this lightning journey from the laboratory to the headline, and her reservations deserve to be heard. First: just because a word resonates with you does not make it a diagnosis; cultural resonance is not clinical value, and using it as a casual medical label attributes to psychology something it never claimed. The second is more serious: turning malaise into a purely individual matter—your languishing, your management, your habits—leaves out of the frame the conditions that cause languishing: precariousness, loneliness, caregiving duties that are not shared, jobs drained of meaning. In short: sometimes you are not the one languishing; it is the life that has been organized around you, or the one you have gradually accepted without signing up for it. The word is useful if it helps you look at all of that. It is a trap if it convinces you that everything can be fixed from the inside out.

This is not a medical consultation

Before the end, the usual boundary, which we will not blur. Everything said applies to the state that coexists with a functioning life: you work, you sleep, you laugh at times, and yet everything runs on half-flame. If yours is not a half-flame but a blackout—weeks of sadness that does not lift, disrupted sleep or appetite, the feeling that nothing that mattered before matters now—then this article is not your text: your serious next step is a healthcare professional, and taking it is not giving up but taking your own life seriously. Tomorrow, moreover, is World Mental Health Day; the motto chosen this year in Spain by popular vote invites people to "make a match" with their mental health. The packaging is modern; the core is very old and sensible: listening to oneself, and asking for help when the time comes.

Naming is not curing: it is beginning

On the old map we work with at El Viaje, this area also exists and also appears at the very beginning: it is the strange unease, the second step of the path, which we have already written about in this journal. That two maps so different—that of ancient myths and that of epidemiological surveys—point to the same territory proves nothing in the scientific sense of the word. It says, at the very least, that the territory exists, that it is highly populated, and that you are not the first to cross it. What Keyes's word adds to the old map is a precision and a warning: the precision that you are not sick, and the warning that this is not a place to settle down either.

We are not going to give you five steps to stop languishing. Distrust anyone who sells them to you: if this state had a recipe, it would not have been studied for a quarter of a century. Naming serves another purpose, more modest and more serious. It turns background noise into information: it stops being "nothing is wrong with me" and becomes "this is happening to me, and it is called this." That gesture—looking at what is there instead of covering it up—is exactly the point where the autopilot, which we have also written about, begins to switch off. The old map tells what usually comes after this zone: a call, almost always inconvenient, almost always rejected at first. We will continue writing about that next week. Today, this is enough: what you feel has a name, it is not a breakdown, and you are not alone on the map.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.