According to Google search team, people searched “how to heal” more than ever in various languages in 2021. This isn’t surprising considering how this year has been.
We’re in pandemic year #2. Vaccines are here but the Coronavirus continues to evolve, too. The hope that we could go back to the pre-pandemic world after we’re all vaccinated turns out to be unrealistic. And we’re all tired of the world in this seemingly never-ending disaster. I am personally feeling emotionally deflated and exhausted now more than last year. It takes more mental energy to motivate myself to get anything done these days.
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, described this mental state of being as “languishing”. I am not necessarily depressed; but not flourishing either. According to him, languishing is “the neglected middle child of mental health. The void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being”. Human minds are really great at life-threatening events and emergencies. We evolved to manage such situations very well by taking actions in the short-term, as we all did in 2020. Although COVID-19 took away many lives, we learned how to work differently and how to socialize differently. Front-line workers and medical workers took care of so many…
