Languishing in a Brain Fog

In the psycho world it’s the word of the hour. The word is-- languishing. It’s been around for a couple of decades now, but last weekend Adam Grant dusted it off and brought it out again, the better to promote his new best selling book.

At the least, for those who like words, languish is a fun word. Take away the first letter and you get “anguish.” If you mispronounce it slightly you get “language.” And if you misspell it you get-- lang-wish.

As for usage, we commonly say, for example, that someone is languishing in jail, wasting time, doing nothing, lacking purpose, what have you. When you languish you are weak and enfeebled, without purpose or resolve, depressed and ineffectual. You are lacking vigor and purpose. You are inactive.

In psychiatry it closely resembles the state of mild chronic depression, called dysthymia. Of course, it feels cooler to languish than to be dysthymic, so our psycho sages have glommed on to languishing.

For what it’s worth, the word feels like it came straight out of a mid-Victorian opium den. This is not a recommendation.

Languishing seems to be connected to anomie, a condition that people suffer when social customs and norms break down. Invented by French sociologist Emile Durkheim, anomie refers to a condition where you lost your place in society, where you do not know the game or the rules or the players, when you feel detached and bereft. The definition of anomie is less about the feeling and more about the conditions that caused the feeling.

For my part, I prefer anomie to languishing, but considering how influential I am, everybody will soon want to start languishing. Being part of the crowd has its appeal. 

Grant considers languishing the dominant emotion of this year. It almost feels like he is trying to sell it-- why else call it dominant? Don’t you want to be dominant?:

And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.... In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish. In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing.... [W]hen you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference.... When you add languishing to your lexicon, you start to notice it all around you....

Anyway, for those of us who do not subscribe to the New York Times, where Grant offered his views, one Tanner Garrity summarized the theory smartly on a site called Inside Hook.

He begins by noting that languishing as a concept dates to nearly two decades ago. We owe it to a sociologist named Corey Keyes.

Garrity writes:

Here’s Keyes’ definition: “A state in which an individual is devoid of positive emotion toward life, and is not functioning well either psychologically or socially, and has not been depressed during the past year. In short, languishers are neither mentally ill nor mentally healthy.”

He offers his own definition:

Think about mornings you’ve spent an extra hour in bed, any time you abandoned a hobby or project, or the times you’ve felt indifferent about your prospect of promotions, post-pandemic travel, family functions. Languishing sneaks up on you — it’s coasting, but without the easy breezy attitude. It thrives when we lose our focus and then lose the will to regain our focus.

What is the cure for languishing? Why, activity, socializing, seeing people, finding purpose, a rigorous schedule, and so on. This advice is surely correct. Why Grant insists on muddying the waters by calling it “flow” I have no idea.  The concept of flow means-- being in the zone. It might be applied to mowing the lawn, doing well at golf or having coffee with a friend, but that seems to be a stretch. Misusing a term does not advance our theorizing.

For the record, Flow is also the title of a book by one Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Grant recommends finding states of “flow,” — a concept, funnily enough, that was recently depicted in Pixar’s Soul. These are pursuits (from hanging out with friends to playing the piano) that take you out of yourself. They bend time and place, in the best way. I would also personally recommend routine. Fill out a calendar, fill out a journal. Schedule meals. Go to bed at the same time every night.

Sound advice, which is misrepresented by the concept of flow. 

Not to be outdone, a psychoanalyst by name of Josh Cohen has also weighed in on the conditions spawned by the pandemic, and especially by the lockdown. Cohen does not call it languishing. He calls it brain fog. To each his own lame concept.

We note that a psycho analyst has chosen to focus on brain function, while the organizational psychologist grant emphasizes the loss of social moorings.

The Guardian describes what Cohen sees when he works with his patients on the computer screen:

Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life; a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. What to Do. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has been “a contraction of life, and an almost parallel contraction of mental capacity”.

Social disconnection, loss of purpose, feeling debilitated-- it has lots in common with languishing.

This dulled, useless state of mind – epitomised by the act of going into a room and then forgetting why we are there – is so boring, so lifeless. But researchers believe it is far more interesting than it feels: even that this common experience can be explained by cutting-edge neuroscience theories, and that studying it could further scientific understanding of the brain and how it changes. I ask Jon Simons, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, could it really be something “sciencey”? “Yes, it’s definitely something sciencey – and it’s helpful to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird,” he says. “There isn’t something wrong with us. It’s a completely normal reaction to this quite traumatic experience we’ve collectively had over the last 12 months or so.”

It’s surely good to learn that a cognitive neuroscientist has pronounced it normal.

Given the isolation and stasis we have had to endure until very recently, these complaints are exactly what they expected – and they provide the opportunity to test their theories as to why such brain fog might come about. There is no one explanation, no single source, Simons says: “There are bound to be a lot of different factors that are coming together, interacting with each other, to cause these memory impairments, attentional deficits and other processing difficulties.”

The neuroscientist Catherine Loveday attributes it to the crushing boredom that comes from sameness:

One powerful factor could be the fact that everything is so samey. Loveday explains that the brain is stimulated by the new, the different, and this is known as the orienting response: “From the minute we’re born – in fact, from before we’re born – when there is a new stimulus, a baby will turn its head towards it. And if as adults we are watching a boring lecture and someone walks into the room, it will stir our brain back into action.”

Most of us are likely to feel that nobody new has walked into our room for quite some time, which might help to explain this sluggish feeling neurologically: “We have effectively evolved to stop paying attention when nothing changes, but to pay particular attention when things do change,” she says.

Loveday also emphasizes the social psychological aspect:

Perhaps one of the most important features of this period for brain fog has been what Loveday calls the “degraded social interaction” we have endured. “It’s not the same as natural social interaction that we would have,” she says. “Our brains wake up in the presence of other people – being with others is stimulating.” We each have our own optimum level of stimulation – some might feel better able to function in lockdown with less socialising; others are left feeling dozy, deadened. Loveday is investigating the science of how levels of social interaction, among other factors, have affected memory function in lockdown. She also wonders if our alternative to face-to-face communication – platforms such as Zoom – could have an impact on concentration and attention. She theorises – and is conducting a study to explore this – that the lower audio-visual quality could “create a bigger cognitive load for the brain, which has to fill in the gaps, so you have to concentrate much harder.” If this is more cognitively demanding, as she thinks, we could be left feeling foggier, with “less brain space available to actually listen to what people are saying and process it, or to concentrate on anything else.”

As it happens, Cohen offers something that resembles a Freudian theory about languishing and brain fog. It shows us that Freudian theory, in its infinite plasticity, can be used to explain almost anything, generally confusing the issue. Since this post is long enough already, I will spare you the Freud.