Rhymes With Brain: Languishing, Flow, and Building a Better Routine

Posted on: September 13th, 2021 by Julie Bestry | 22 Comments

Are you having trouble getting back in the saddle

Yes, I know, this is not your first rodeo. You’ve had to get back into a routine before: after the easy pace of summer, after the winter holidays, after vacations.

But perhaps this feels a little different? Maybe you’re distracted because this is the first time you’re headed back into the office after a year and a half of working remotely? Or perhaps you’ve realized that you can’t keep working from your kitchen table anymore, and it’s time to really get back into a routine.

There are a few reasons why you might be feeling at loose ends. First, you might be stuck in the past. It happens to all of us. Last week, in Emerson, Angelou, Ted Lasso, Tashlich & Zen Monks: Letting Go for a Fresh Start, I walked you through rituals and mantras for helping you let go of past mistakes and frustrations.

A LESSON ON LANGUISHING

Perhaps the problem isn’t the past, but the present. Over the summer, the New York Times got a lot of attention for a piece called Feeling Blah During the Pandemic? It’s Called Languishing. (Depending on where you’re located, you might have more luck with this link to the piece.)

Some people have flourished as a result of the past 18 months; people who’d lost time with their families due to long work hours, commutes, and work travel were sometimes able to bask in the joy of remote work; others were able to put energy into side hustles that became true callings and got to leave careers that weren’t fulfilling.

Meanwhile, of course, many others have found working and just getting through life to be agonizing. This has been a period of distress, whether a constant onslaught or troubles that come in waves, worrying about keeping themselves and their families healthy, coping with financial strife, and being expected to work and act as if all of this {picture me waving my hands all around} was remotely normal.

So, for some, after the initial period in Spring 2020, life has been a collage of yoga positions and perfectly golden sourdough bread. For others? Let’s just say Edvard Munch could easily time travel from 1893 to 2021 and paint The Scream all over again. (Except he’d have needed to draw a mask.)

But in between flourishing and drowning, the Times article found that many of us are having trouble gaining traction because we’re languishing. It’s not depression or anxiety, but in an excerpt of the piece, we see exactly what’s making it difficult for many to get back into a routine:


In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.

Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental healtheither. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.


The author of the piece, Adam Grant, is a organizational psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and his TEDTalk really clarifies what languishing is, and how it negatively impacts our motivation and focus, and thus, our productivity. It’s definitely worth watching:

 

Cheatsheet: the best predictor of well-being (and thus, I’d say, productivity) is not optimism, but flow. We’ve talked a lot of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow recently in Back-to-School Solutions for the Space-Time Continuum and in the spring in Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek (where you also learned how to pronounce Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).

Flow is that experience when you’re completely absorbed in what you are doing. Time and space and your annoying neighbor and the fight you had with your teenager and the stresses you’re feeling all dissolve, or are at least held at bay, and you are completely focused, without distraction, on what you’re doing. It might be a creative endeavor like playing a piece of music or writing a blog post; it could be playing with your child or dining with your family; and if you’re lucky when you’re sitting down to work, it’s whatever you’re supposed to be doing.

Grant advises us to have some small, achievable goals to work toward to chip away at languishing and give us the opportunity to achieve flow. I have a few more ideas to add to his.

So, having looked at how to let go of past troubles in last week’s post, now let’s look at how we can make your near future an opportunity for flow so you can get back in the saddle.

FLOW FACTORS THAT RHYME WITH BRAIN

Abstain 

There are all sorts of distractions, from within and without. Some come at you, and some you go out of your way to pick up. You know what leads you down a rabbit hole. Maybe it’s social media. (OK, yeah, it’s probably social media.) Maybe it’s the news. Maybe it’s one TikTok or YouTube video someone sent you that leads to you watching the next and the next, and suddenly you’ve missed lunch.

I’m not saying that you should eschew all social media or news reports or videos. But instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning when you wake up, or while you’re eating breakfast, making it more likely that you’ll be late to your desk (and in a less chipper and more distractible mood), consider alternatives activities.

Retrain 

From bed to desk, whether that involves a commute or a stroll down the hall, your brain needs buffer time. You definitely can’t be expected to go from zero to 60 with work (or life) mere minutes after you were in La La Land. Retrain your brain by selecting different types of sensory inputs from your usual fare.

Instead of starting with the news and social media, how about reading a book, a short story, or a few non-news-related articles while eating breakfast? What if you read a poem before getting out of bed, and then spent your shower-and-grooming time thinking about what the poem means, both the words on the page and what it means to you?

I’ve covered a number of ways to have more opportunities to read:

12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 1 (When, Where, What, With Whom)

12 Ways to Organize Your Life to Read More — Part 2 (Reading Lists, Challenges & Ice Cream Samples)

How To Make Your Reading Time More Productive With Book Summaries

If you complain that you never have time to read, this eliminates that problem along with the trouble of a whirring mind. You’ll “make” time by trading a task that swallows you up (like doomscrolling) for one that can give you gentle practice at immersion and flow. And if your prep time in the morning requires a lot of hands-on work (packing lunches, walking the dog), an audio book or a podcast can give you that immersion in an auditory instead of visual way.

If you don’t think you can focus on words and meanings longer than a tweet, explore listening to a genre of music that’s new to you. If you like rap, try Broadway. (Hamilton blends the two.) If you only listen to country, noodle the dial to a jazz station. Retrain — shake up your brain.

Restrain 

If you’re not unwittingly seeking out obstacles to flow, both in advance of getting things done and once you’ve started, it may be others standing in your way. Perhaps one of the parents in the pick-up/drop-off line wants to gossip and (no matter how entertaining) doesn’t seem to understand that you’ve got a deadline, a doctor’s appointment, or something else that requires your immersive attention.

Build some muscles for restraining that tendency to go along to get along. I’m not suggesting you wear dark glasses and a trench coat so you won’t be seen by Social Suzie, but perhaps you can cut her off at the pass and let her know for the next few months, you have to be on a daily conference call at “oh-will-you-look-at-the-time?!” If she’s someone you do want to hang with, schedule a phone call, a Zoom lunch, or a weekend walk (to get your steps in) at the park. You don’t have to eliminate people from your life, just be more deliberate about what part of your life (and schedule) they can take up.

Constrain

Restricting how much space you take up for your work and resources means fewer attempts to find things, fewer guesses where something might be, and more time to do the important work on your plate. 

If you’re working remotely, your whole house may be available to you for work, but that doesn’t mean you should take up all of that space. Sure, you could work on your bed, at your dining table, and with your computer on the coffee table when you’re on the floor with your back against the bottom of the couch. But should you? Nope. 

Create an atmosphere where a space is designated for a task. If you do expense reports in the bedroom, you’re letting your financial brain seep into the space that should be for sleep, rest, and intimacy, making it more likely that math-y concepts will pop up into your mind when you’re trying to, um, do something else in that space. If you work where you hang with your family or binge-watch Netflix, you lose that delineation between work and life, making it harder to leave work at work, already made difficult when you’re working from home!

Contain 

If you’re back to working outside the home, you already have a space assigned to you, whether that’s a desk in an office, a counter in the bank, a conveyor belt in the cashier line, or the cockpit of a plane. (If it’s the latter, can you hook a girl up with some of those Biscoff cookies? Yum.) And if you’re working from home, it just makes sense to promote one space in your home to your ideal workspace.

But either way, limiting the spread of your stuff is going to make it easier for you to focus and get into flow.

So, as you move to contain the things round you, you’ll want to clear your desk of excess and keep your workspace for the project or tasks you’re working on now, or at least today. Read the Paper Doll classic article, Clean Desk Club to make your deskspace functional, hygienic, and secure. If paper clutter is the problem, read If You’re Drowning in Paper, Build a RAFT.

And for a detailed look at how to organize your home office so it’ll deliver opportunities for you to be comfortable and focused, explore the bonus-sized guest post I did for meori, Home Office Storage Ideas: From Dad’s Study to the Modern Home Office.

 

Containing and constraining aren’t just about tangible items. They’re also about how we schedule our time. If we have a long to-do list with nothing prioritized, no game plan, and no firm schedule, chances are, we’re going to spend more energy thinking about what we have to do than actually getting started.

Developing routines, where we can put the efforts of part of our days and weeks on autopilot, is a key. To help you contain your worktime and constrain your output to acheive the most good, start with the advice in these posts:

Playing With Blocks: Success Strategies for Time Blocking Productivity

Checklists, Gantt Charts, and Kanban Boards – Organize Your Tasks

Getting in the flow so you can get back to a (hopefully better) routine means setting boundaries in your time as well as your space. (That’s where that time-blocking post really comes in handy!) We all know that we never get enough done if we only do what we feel like doing. Most of us never feel like working out or vacuuming or writing monthly reports. 

Just as our stuff has to have a place to live in our desk, our tasks need a place to live in our schedules. Merely giving them homes is a super way to jump-start ourselves back into the saddle if we were loosey-goosey with our schedules all summer (and even before).

We also depend on activation energy. Because the hardest part of what we do is the getting started, we have to incentivize ourselves to get going. There are all sorts of ways we can trick ourselves (a little bit) with rewards, like pretty desk accessories or a coffee break, but the problem is that action precedes motivationWe’re not usually psyched to get going until we have already started!

Action precedes motivation. We're not usually psyched to get going until we have already started, whether it's a runner's high or Csikszentmihalyi's flow. Click To Tweet

If you are struggling to get back into the thick of it with your routines, the best way to “contain and constrain,” time-wise, is to borrow accountability support from others as described in:

Count on Accountability: 5 Productivity Support Solutions

Flow and Faux (Accountability): Productivity, Focus, and Alex Trebek

Maintain

One of the best predictors of future productivity is past productivity success. Stop and think about when and how you are good at maintaining your routines.

What is it that has helped you in the past?

  • Interspersing short work sprints with breaks? Embrace the Pomodoro Technique.
  • Deadlines? Borrow a friend as an accountability partner to give you some external spinal fortitude!
  • Physical activity and/or time in nature to get your creative juices flowing? Block times for daily mid-afternoon walks. Research shows that shinrin-yoku, the Japanese concept of “forest bathing,” has a variety of benefits, including mental focus, increased energy, improved mood, decreased blood pressure and stress hormones, and boosted immunity.   

Know where you excel. Every professional organizer and productivity expert will look at your systems and resources and ask some variation of “What’s already working?” The key is to build strategies on the foundation of your success and link future approaches atop them.

Attain (and Explain)

Remember how I said, earlier, that developing routines and going on autopilot helps? But I also said we should do it for part of our days and weeks. But we can’t be on autopilot all the time.

Our brains will atrophy if we don’t keep learning.

If you’re having trouble getting back into a routine, add something to your list that will energize your brain. For me, when I’m in the doldrums, practicing Italian with Duolingo peps me up. If I’m having trouble motivating myself to reply to a frustrating email or draft a blog post, a few challenging lessons in the Italian future perfect tense will have taken me out of the doldrums. (That’s a future perfect tense joke, readers. OK, yeah, more tense than funny.)

What can you do that will shake the cobwebs loose, improve your cognitive function, boost your self esteem, and get you revved up to sit at your desk and do the next important thing?

  • Learn/practice a language.
  • Look ahead in your child’s schoolwork and study the concepts (long division, the parts of a cell, the causes of World War I, the themes in War and Peace) so you can discuss them together.
  • Find something you’re curious about and become an expert on some small element of it. You don’t have to know everything, but if you know one thing really well, it’ll give you confidence to explore all sorts of areas of your current work, and maybe help you consider bold, new options for work and life.
  • Develop a skill, whether it’s silly or serious, visually creative or experiential.

Once you attain this knowledge or skill, you can share it with others. You really know you’ve learned something when you can explain it to someone else. And when someone asks you how you were able to get back into your post-summer, post-pandemic routine so easily, maybe you can answer them in Italian or in Ubbi Dubbi! 

(Shoutout to all my GenX readers for whom “Zoom” will always mean “Boston, Mass 02134” rather than video conferencing.)

Gain

It’s impossible to get excited about doing the same thing every day, day in and day out. There’s a difference between being in a groove and getting stuck in a rut, between having a routine and things being routine. All these years later, I still feel sorry for this guy.

Gain momentum by jump-starting your enthusiasm. The easiest way to do that is to have a goal to look forward to or an achievement toward which you’re striving. As with learning a new skill, I know it seems counterintuitive to add something to your activity list when you’re trying to buckle down and commit to what’s already hard to accomplish

Most of the time, I implore my clients to let go — of excess clutter, obligations that don’t meet their goals and values, outdated ideas that no longer fit who they’re trying to become. That’s logical; cutting down the excess lets you focus on your priorities.

We could eliminate excess, only work on the work tasks and projects we’re assigned (or which we’ve assigned ourselves), and keep our heads down and our noses to the grindstone. But with our heads down, we’ll never see the sun, and with our noses to the grindstone, well, I’m not sure, but I think we’d have sore, pointy noses.

But we’re not robots. Just as learning helps us expand our minds and gain confidence, having aspirations and goals gives our lives purpose. Consider the Japanese concept of Ikigai (sounds like icky guy), or “reason for living,” or Viktor Frankl‘s wisdom in Man’s Search for Meaning

As humans, having something to aspire to in our work and in our lives, beyond a paycheck and the same-old, same-old, imbues our days (and thus our lives) with meaning. Think of something you’d like to achieve and build time into every week, preferably every day, as part of your routine, to move you closer to that goal. Maybe you want to write a book, plan the trip of a lifetime, train to be a Rockette — the what doesn’t matter, as long as it’s your what.

Embracing a gain in your life as you head back into a day/week/life of routines will be easier when you’ve planned space in your schedule for anticipatory joy.

Just be sure to reject perfectionism on the way to spelling out your gain. The key to improving your delight in getting back into a routine is that it will grant you space in your schedule to do everything that matters, including that aspirational entity that gives it all meaning. Think progress, not perfection.

Take action every day. Get back in the saddle. Get back on the horse. It may not be your first rodeo, but it can be your best rodeo yet!

22 Responses

  1. Seana Turner says:

    Well first, love seeing a fellow Whartonite featured here – so good! Flow is a word that immediately resonates in a positive way. All of your “ains” are so helpful for trying to get there. We don’t want to feel like we are constantly fighting to be productive, and want to be able to have times when we are focused and getting things done.

    I’m actually flying today, and if I see those Biscoff cookies you know I’ll be grabbing some. Afraid I won’t be able to get them to you, but I’ll think about you as I munch. Good enough?

    • Julie Bestry says:

      LOL, Seana, you enjoy those Biscoff. I’m hoping if I tag the company in my socials, they’ll appreciate the love. And yes, productivity is a buzzword that always makes me feel like I’m part of late-stage capitalism and the military-industrial complex. But flow has such a different feel about it; I’m immersed in what matters to me!

  2. Great post. I love that you mentioned constraining the area for work. My office is in the basement, and I make sure that I never visit that space on weekends. While I may walk by because I go outback and the door is near my office, I leave paper items, like receipts I collected from errands, on my desk, and when I return on Monday, I deal with them. When working from home, having a place for everything is key to a happy home. Boundaries are important when you have to share our entire home for different activities.

    • Julie Bestry says:

      We are definitely on the same page, Sabrina. I think people often don’t have boundaries because they have unplanned workspace. Things get plopped down wherever they’re used, but if there’s no system, there can be papers and resources all over the place with no rhyme or reason.

  3. Returning to work today after a one-week (10 calendar days) staycation and decided to shake up my routine. Typically I get up, use the bathroom, make a coffee, and go to my desk to check email and get organized before my dog walk, breakfast and shower. On weekends instead of going to my desk, I go back to bed with my coffee and read.

    This morning instead of going to my desk first thing, I grabbed my tablet and took it to bed, where I did my email checking and organizing for the day. It seems to be a nice balance between an easy start to the day and leaving everything till after the rest of my morning routine (which really postpones when I start getting productive). We’ll see how it goes.

  4. Laura Carter says:

    I would imagine that so many people feel stuck in that languishing stage right now, and it’s a hard place to be in. These are great tips to help get us organized and moving in the right direction! Thank you for sharing.

  5. Julie, I never know where to start with your blog posts because you always make SO MANY good points and include SO MANY good illustrations and resources! Kudos for coming up with all those useful brain-rhyming terms. I KNEW there was something I disliked about the phrase “nose to the grindstone” — LOL! And your GenX comment had me spending way too much time studying a timeline of the various generations and reading Wiki pages about the 1990s vs 1970s series of Zoom TV shows.

    • Julie Bestry says:

      I love how you flatter me, Hazel! Thank you!!!

      As for Zoom, I never did master ubbi dubbi, though I can do that thing where you bring your arms together and sort of “flap” them at the elbows to make a mysterious twisty motion!

  6. Great read and so timely. Several clients who have been dealing with working from home as a temporary position are now finding it may be permanent. This makes a whole new brain shift about their working place and their feelings about that space.
    For me under your “retrain” section – I have learned that if I have my coffee and newspaper – even working the sudoku before checking my email – I start my day more centered.

  7. I appreciate your deep dive on languishing, including the Adam Grants wonderful TedTalk. There were so many ideas that resonated from “toxic positivity” to “time confetti,” which I never heard of before, to describing flow’s three elements of mastery, mindfulness, and mattering. But something that really hit me and brought tears to my eyes was, “Love is not the frequency of communication, but the depth of connection.”

    In these past 18+ months, I’ve experienced the intensity life brings with my loved ones- weddings, funerals, births, deaths, illness. I’ve written more than ever, experimented, learned new things, and pivoted my business. I’ve binge-watched, had days that were “meh,” and others that were highly productive. I’ve Zoomed away with yoga, conferences, parties, shivas, casual conversations, and clients. It’s been a time.

    There have been moments of flow, lots of joy, and tremendous sadness- all rolled up into one big ball….LIFE during a pandemic.

    You have shared many ways to re-engage and get back up on that horse, all while extending yourself some self-compassion and grace. Thank you, Julie.

    • Julie Bestry says:

      Thank you for being so thoughtful! I’m so glad you liked the Adam Grant video, Linda. I worry sometimes that people don’t watch videos that are longer than 30 seconds, but there were such great gems in what he had to say! And yes, the depth of connection of one impactful conversation has more meaning than you can get in 100 shallow ones.

      From your blog, I’ve seen that you’ve had a variety of experiences that have almost seemed like fairy tales to me. For the better part of the first year, I didn’t see or hear anyone in person; it was like being on the moon, and after a while, it was like what I imagine the afterlife might be. Boring but ongoing and ceaseless. No wonder the rest of us must deal with languishing!

  8. One way to shake things up is to start reading Julie Bestry’s blog. Sometimes, and very honestly, I really do like to languish. Especially when my pace and my brain need a break. Then, I put together a flow campaign so my languishing habits aren’t maintained. ( I do get inspired by Word Hippo.)

    It really is easy to fall into patterns that we otherwise wouldn’t. Give it a good three days and it just may become a habit. There is a lot to be said about retraining the brain and I’ve been reading about it of late. The science of the mind is unbelievably fascinating.

  9. Lucy Kelly says:

    “As humans, having something to aspire to in our work and in our lives, beyond a paycheck and the same-old, same-old, imbues our days (and thus our lives) with meaning. Think of something you’d like to achieve and build time into every week, preferably every day, as part of your routine, to move you closer to that goal.”

    This really resonated, Julie. I wish I could remember where I saw another similar idea it reminded me of: “You’ll carry an underlying sadness throughout your day until you’ve done something towards your purpose.”

    And the ending tweet you quoted? Ouch!

    • Julie Bestry says:

      I’m really gratified that the passage resonated with you. And I love the sentence you’ve added.

      And oh, yes, those perfect creations we’d destroy if we actually attempted them. That’s a definite ouch!

  10. I love this, Julie. First, I never knew the true meaning of languishing. I like the imagery of it being the forgotten middle child of mental-health. Next, all your ‘ains’ are fabulous. I love the way you encourage and gently remind people that simply sitting doing nothing is going to get them nowhere – fast. I didn’t have time to tune into the TedTalk link but I will go back and watch it tomorrow (notice I didn’t say later – I assigned a day!). My absolute favorite thing you said in this piece though was about scheduling tasks in your day as tasks need a place to belong! So true!! Tasks live in the land of ‘to-dos’ unless they are scheduled appointments that you make with yourself.

    • Julie Bestry says:

      Thank you so much, Diane. Everything Adam Grant wrote and talked about really resonated with me, and I think most people I know (though not all) were languishing, especially in the first year of the pandemic. And I’m glad you’re going to watch the video. (I watch all videos on anything from 1.25x to 1.75x speed, depending on how content-rich they are. You go fast but don’t miss anything.)

      And yes, tasks need homes, too!

  11. I read somewhere (somewhere, I promise!) that one way to make Flow more likely to happen is to gather the resources you need to complete a task. So…Obtain!?!

    • Julie Bestry says:

      You’re so smart, Melissa. I originally went back and forth, but worried that attain and obtain might seem too close to one another…and, as always, the post was really long. But you’re completely right!

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