Rethinking the Spectrum of Mental Health & Making Room for the Grey

I listened to a podcast this week that left me rethinking my understanding of mental health and well-being…

The episode is about languishing –when you’re feeling “meh"/“blah," or a sense of joylessness and aimlessness. It’s not necessarily the presence of mental illness but rather a missing sense of mental health. Adam Grant, who gave a TED talk on how to stop languishing, describes it as “the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive.” It's like you're "looking at your life through a foggy windshield."

There were so many great takeaways from the episode, but there was one major idea that got my wheels turning.

Mental health is really a massive, messy spectrum. It's not the straight line that I thought it was. I had always envisioned it in a linear way, with depression on one end, happiness on the other, and nothing in between. I had always viewed my own mental health as black and white. But there’s a whole lot of grey. And I realize I now need to make more space for it.

Just because I am not experiencing depression doesn’t mean I am not struggling –it could be that I am living in the grey area. Just because I am not burned out doesn’t mean I am fired up. Again, it could be that I am living in that grey area.

Some of that grey space is filled with that feeling of languishing. Giving it a name, I felt like, "Wow, now I know what to do with this 'meh' feeling." Giving voice to that emotion allows me to feel more confident in my ability to light a path out of the void.
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🎙 Podcast Episode: The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos: "Fighting That 'Meh' Feeling of Languishing"