Sunday 19th July
I've noticed that many people become frustrated (myself included) by the return of an ordinary, flat week or two after a period of flourishing.
More often, still, people are functioning perfectly well. They're turning up to work, replying to messages, looking after the children, exercising, doing everything that ordinarily signals that life is carrying on. They just don't feel quite like themselves. Nothing is especially wrong, but nothing feels especially right either.
I've found myself wondering whether the internet has become too quick to divide mental health into only two categories. We talk as though people are either flourishing or struggling, resilient or burnt out, regulated, or dysregulated.
It leaves remarkably little room (and acceptance) for the place I suspect many of us spend far more time than we'd like to admit.
In 2002, the sociologist Corey Keyes described this middle ground as languishing. A term that had something of a renaissance about three years ago. Not depression. Not flourishing. Simply the absence of vitality.
Adam Grant later called it "the neglected middle child of mental health", and I think that captures something important. It reminds us that the absence of flourishing is not automatically the presence of illness or disorder.
What interests me most, though, isn't only the experience itself. It's what happens next. The tendency for our beliefs and behaviours to quickly reorganise.
We are remarkably quick to draw conclusions from temporary internal states. A flat week becomes evidence that we're burning out. A difficult morning becomes evidence that we've lost our motivation. A period of emotional distance becomes evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the relationship. The experience is real, but the conclusion often arrives before we have collected enough data about it.
For some people, too, emotions or states can feel permanent when they’re in them, so it makes sense that despair floods in quickly and overhaul is what we might turn to.
As psychologists, we're taught to look for patterns and degree of impairment before drawing conclusions. We don't diagnose from a single conversation or one difficult afternoon. We become interested when something is persistent, pervasive and consistent over time. Yet when it comes to ourselves, we can abandon that principle entirely. A couple of uncomfortable weeks can suddenly become a verdict.
It is very normal, and necessary, to experience ordinary psychological seasons. Weeks that don't ask much of us beyond continuing to turn up. They are rarely exciting, often uninspiring, and easy to mistake for failure. But I wonder whether they play the same role that easier training weeks do in physical performance?
Not every week is designed for progress that you can feel. Some weeks are simply part of sustaining the capacity to keep going.
That feels like a very different proposition to me.
Instead of asking, "Why have I lost myself?", we might ask, "Could this simply be one of those weeks?”
None of this is to suggest that persistent changes in mood should be dismissed. Part of psychological flexibility is knowing when something deserves careful attention. The difficulty is that we often make that decision too early. We interpret a moment as a pattern before we've given it the chance to reveal itself. This letter is about offering a third alternative, the Missing Middle of mental wellness. .
This week, consider creating the conditions for a different kind of learning.
When the immediate conclusion is "this flat week means something is wrong," see what happens if you resist settling on that explanation too quickly.
Our expectations change when we've had enough experiences that no longer fit the old story.
As always, hold it lightly!
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand