Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a severe blow to all areas of human life, particularly affecting the physical well-being of a nation. Mass mortality and damage to health are irreversible consequences of COVID-19, but equally important is the damage the pandemic has done to the mental well-being of individuals. As a result of third-party pressures, first-year university students began to experience a variety of states, among which languishing and flourishing stood out in particular. First-year students were chosen for this research paper because of their extreme vulnerability: they are an adaptable class that is just getting used to a new academic environment. Languishing and flourishing are two mental states that are in many ways opposites. Languishing refers to a sense of hopelessness, lack of motivation, and low interest in everything around them. On the other hand, flourishing is a complex feeling of high productivity, engagement, and inspiration. Each of these states has relative implications for student well-being, which are detailed in this research paper.
Introduction
Learning in educational centers, schools, colleges, and universities is always closely associated with stress due to learning and acquiring new knowledge as well as the need to put it into practice. Although teachers, during the educational process, strive to minimize the perceived stress on the student, any tests, exams, and homework are not exclusive in any case. It is important to emphasize that this stress is a very natural mechanism of learning, which is precisely what allows the student to develop (Rudland et al., 2020). However, the individual begins to feel extreme pressure when he or she transitions to an entirely new environment, namely the university. Learning at universities as the highest level of education is qualitatively different from what the student has used for many years. New buildings, new teachers, new classmates, and even new types of assignments tend to be stressful factors for the individual, which take time to get used to. For this reason, the first year at university is one of the most difficult because it requires adaptation.
The situation is much more difficult for 2020-2021 first-year students, as they experience a pandemic combined with the familiar transition to university after high school or college for many generations. It is true that the global COVID-19 pandemic came as a surprise to the world, and absolutely everyone had to adapt to it. Psychology has developed two specific terms for fears, fears, and anxieties about the pandemic: these are languishing and flourishing. In a general sense, both terms discuss the mental state of a person who has experienced stress. In the context of the current study, these terms are applicable to first-year university students experiencing the dual stresses of entering university and the pandemic. The present research paper aims to analyze the Languishing and flourishing states in first-year students critically and to determine the theoretical and practical applicability of these terms.
The Impact of Pandemic on Perceived Stress
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic brought irreversible effects to the world and showed the imperfections of multiple systems of social defenses. Among the most obvious failures of government work was the unpreparedness of the health care system for disasters of this magnitude, resulting in overcrowded hospitals and the death of sick people due to the inability of clinical facilities to take care of them. Combined with the severe damage to the physical health of an entire nation, the COVID-19 pandemic also caused irreparable damage to the mental well-being of the entire human race. Fear of the unknown, a sense of uncertainty, and lack of certainty about the future brought people discomfort on a daily basis and led them to a state that psychologists confidently call languishing today.
The difficult period of adaptation to the new university realities, even despite the distance learning format, was in itself a strong stressor for young students. At the same time, the pandemic dealt a second blow, which, coupled with adaptation, served as a severe test. In many ways, the unique combination of these two factors led to a state of languishing among American first-year students (Grant, 2021). Languishing students could not make long-term plans, plan vacations, or think about internships with actual companies because the pandemic crushed these desires. Severe social restrictions and contraindicated contact as additions to the need to wear protective masks and, in some cases, gloves made students feel stuck and empty (Grant, 2021). Personal opinions show that languishing students began to experience a loss of concentration and lost their sense of the significance of anything when any certainty was absent (Wixom, 2021). Notably, the state of languishing exhibited by first-year students was not depression or burnout: individuals still had the energy to learn, there was optimism, but there was no goal and no motivation to achieve that goal in the face of an inability to make plans.
Burnout could be seen not as a one-time event but as a prolonged action with a cumulative effect. Thus, at the beginning of the pandemic, the freshmen did not yet experience languishing, but rather, in some senses, it was excitement and interest mixed with consternation. Indeed, pandemics do not often happen, so the emergence of COVID-19 in 2019-2020 was a new unexplored experience for most generations, including the younger generation of students. However, it soon became apparent that each day throughout the school year would be a repetition of another: wake up early, plug into Zoom, complete assignments, sleep again (Grant, 2021). This endless succession of repetitive activities drove young inexperienced students into a rigid pandemic cycle but provided no answer as to when it would end or what would happen next.
The opposite mental effect was pronounced among flourishing students whose aspirations, attitudes, and motives were not related to anxiety or depression. Although the pandemic changed the structure of the world, it opened up many opportunities for the most enterprising and active individuals. For example, not all of their young freshmen were susceptible to languishing: many of them were able to flourish. Feeling motivated and eager to do something helped students enjoy the moment. Thus, even in the midst of the humdrum routine of repetitive events, the flourishing freshmen were able to find advantages. For example, because of the distance learning format, they freed up much time that they spent learning something new or just for leisure time (Farabaugh, 2021). Flourishing students were able to know themselves at the moment and understand what they really enjoyed and what made them uncomfortable; in turn, this allowed them to manage their lives more intelligently. Furthermore, while the languishing students saw the pandemic as hollow and uncertain, the flourishing ones saw opportunity and strength.
A Detailed Description of Languishing and Flourishing
Remarkably, both languishing and flourishing students were not unique in their own way. While it is essential to recognize the individuality of each individual’s mental state, practice shows that, in general, many of the first-year university students experienced similar feelings associated with either languishing or flourishing. This, in turn, becomes reliable evidence of the fact that both states are not caused by human desire and are hardly under the control of reason; instead, they are both provoked from outside by pandemonium. It should also be noted that neither of these states should be perceived as character weaknesses or excessive hyperactivity and certainly not as a pathology. Contemporary psychology evaluates languishing and flourishing as natural states on the mental health spectrum of the individual, the boundaries of which lie from depression to well-being (Grant, 2021; Blum, 2021). Thus, both of these states need to be discussed in more detail in order to understand their essence.
The term “languishing” is comparatively new to clinical psychology and was introduced by Corey Keys. It is quite a difficult concept to interpret unambiguously, so experts often resort to its symptomatic description in order to convey the desired condition. For example, languishing is defined as a mental phase in which the world seems empty and yet extremely fascinating but lacks the motivation to perform any action (Grant, 2021; Fielding, 2021). When combined with waves of pandemonium, the individual in the state of languishing feels depressed and inferior. Remarkably, this state is amplified by the emotional swings that life dictates: closer to the summer of 2021, hope for a speedy recovery was palpable, and then came a new wave of coronavirus with new strains. Thus, it can be summarized that languishing is a feeling of apathy and anxiety, anxiety and uncertainty, as well as a partial or complete lack of interest in what was previously joyous.
It is crucial to note that ennui is not a mental illness on the level of depression or schizophrenia. Instead, it is rather a spectrum of emotion that leads to specific patterns of behavior. Although some sources, whether Fielding (2021) or Grant (2021), have found a link between depressive states and languishing, it is not the same. People who are genetically or socioculturally predisposed to depression are most likely to experience languishing at times, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The same is true for extroverts who have faced limited socialization and, as a consequence, have been more prone to languishing. Thus, languishing students are characterized by a sense of monotony and emptiness, which leaves them with no energy for action. Insomnia and disrupted biorhythm, reluctance to get out of bed and do anything, complete lack of interest, and decreased appetite, which poured into weight loss, were typical behaviors for students experiencing languishing. At the same time, they were still forced to study and listen to lectures, which put an additional strain on this condition. Many of the students may have become disillusioned with learning, even though they were in fact just mentally unprepared to receive new information.
The thought processes of languishing students also underwent a change. Where once individuals were outgoing and ready to interact with others, the pandemic has made them closed and withdrawn. This is not surprising if one considers the very essence of restrictive measures: isolation, setting boundaries, distance. The hope of salvation was often the still open stores and community centers, which continued to operate in person even during the most restrictive COVID-19 period. Even there, however, restrictive tape and signs were often used, urging people to distance and masking. All of this led to a permanent encapsulation of the personality, a closing of channels, and a centering on oneself. Under such conditions, any thought activity that was related to one’s former life in the context of the study, whether it was doing a project together or listening to online lectures collectively, seemed like a complex, difficult act. One cannot say unequivocally that there has been a decline in the intellectual powers of a generation, but one can state that the nature of thinking has changed, and the features of typical social interaction have changed.
The antithesis to the languishing was the flourishing that people also experienced during the pandemic. It should be pointed out at once that under COVID-19, society was not divided into two camps — languishing and flourishing — and in many ways, they were not even different people. In fact, both languishing and flourishing could have been experienced by the same student at different times of the pandemic. It no longer depended only on external conditions but also on the inner forces, resources, and embedded sociocultural and behavioral attitudes of the individual. Positive psychology has no unambiguous interpretations of what flourishing actually means, as it is a highly individual, subjectively perceived experience. However, one can definitely say that flourishing is not only about financial stability and career opportunities, it is not only about a happy family or travel: flourishing is a more complex concept that describes many aspects at once (Blum, 2021). In fact, flourishing should not be confused with happiness or even more so with well-being since flourishing is generally considered a broader parameter. It should also be recognized that flourishing is not a disease or a personality trait: this state can come and go. The author of the idea of flourishing, Martin Seligman, associates this state with the PERMA model, during which the individual tends to feel and have positive emotions, engagement, relationships, values, and achievements (Pennock, 2021). Thus, flourishing should be understood as a state of personal well-being in which all components of mental health are replenished.
Interestingly, in this state, the individual’s behavior patterns are very different from those observed during languishing. A student in this state is ready for productive work and study, eager to attend classes and to set shorter-term goals for his or her life. From the outside, this person appears inspired and motivated, ready to work and create (Ackerman, 2021). This is often accompanied by financial, career, and spiritual stability, as well as the establishment of healthy relationships with others. In addition, such a person may appear to be in harmony with himself or herself: in public, he or she rarely experiences negative emotions and builds constructive dialogue. As far as learning is concerned, such a student has an aura of productivity and motivation. The freshman student does his or her homework, solves tests, and actively participates in the social life of the class. Notably, test scores do not have to be high since flourishing is not the equivalent of high erudition and academic achievement.
Relative Implications
It is paramount to recognize that since languishing and flourishing are not abstract, irrelevant concepts, their effects on personality are tangible. It is safe to assume that every first-year student has experienced feelings close to the described states at least once during the entire pandemic, which means that the scale of the relevance of their consequences is extremely broad. It must be said, however, that the effects of any mental state are individual, unique, and thus it is impossible to assert any effects that have affected absolutely everyone. Therefore, the relative effects of languishing and flourishing described in this section are probabilistic, predictive in nature but should not be taken as direct instructions or guidelines.
The overly productive, positive, and inspired mental stage commonly referred to as flourishing has both positive and negative features. On the one hand, the beneficial effects of flourishing are apparent: The individual puts himself or herself out there to create, work, and be productive (Blum, 2021). This has a great effect on career opportunities and gives the individual self-confidence. It is for this reason that in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dramatic increase in the number of bloggers and Influencers among those people who had the strength and motivation to produce something (Djuraskovic, 2021). In flourishing, the student has an increased number of connections; he or she is willing to interact and work together to feed off shared emotions and give people something from their side. Eventually, the new relationships built can be beneficial for future life, which means flourishing is good for networking (Blum, 2021). One also cannot rule out the fact that during the pandemic, students, especially freshmen, had much free time to spend on learning something new. This allowed them to get to know themselves better and figure out which areas of creativity were of genuine interest and which were not. However, such hyperactivity and over-inspiration could lead to a rapid burnout of the individual. As a result of constant work of consciousness and focusing on the moment, there could also be a withdrawal of self-care. For example, a preoccupation with a project became the cause of sleep disturbance, and a deep interest in a hobby interfered with normal functioning.
Although languishing and flourishing are different sides of the same spectrum of mental states, they generally have common implications. Languishing also does not have strictly negative aspects for the body. For example, because of profound isolation and withdrawal, an individual may gain a deeper understanding of the facets of his or her personality and discard anything unnecessary (Grant, 2021). If a student finds himself or herself troubled by his or her languishing state, he or she can see a psychologist, which in turn is also a positive consequence for mental health: it is very likely that the psychologist will help him or her to feel out and come to the right decisions. At the same time, languishing in itself is highly debilitating for the body: loss of interest leads to disorders of physical health, disconnection, and isolation from the world. A student who has been sitting in a room for a long time may find it challenging to go to public places because there has been weaning from society. In addition, it is not uncommon for the mind to try to find some sphere to make up for the lack of emotion. This is probably the reason the number of anime fans also increased during the pandemic, which presents hyperbolized emotions to the public (Tsuneoka, 2020). Eventually, over-indulging in one aspect can become a problem.
Finally, in this context, it is worth stating that there is a gap between flourishing and longing, which, however, is not fixed. It is true that a person cannot experience two states at the same time since they are opposites. However, overall, one of the phases may be replaced by the other, and these transitions are painfully perceived. For example, a cheerful, extroverted, and inspired individual, broken by endless waves of pandemonium, may enter a phase of longing and experience that he or she is in decline (Wixom, 2021). This feeling may be compounded by a desire to reach a former state and an inability to do so, resulting in the individual additionally experiencing hopelessness and despair. On the contrary, if the student has been in a state of longing for a long time, he or she may find some new reference points or motivators to help get out of this state. As a result, the period of feeling empty and withdrawn will be replaced by a period of productivity and inspiration.
It is noteworthy that neither languishing nor flourishing among first-year students are unambiguous states. Experiencing each is neither good nor bad; it is normal. It should be understood as a natural reaction of the human mind to events on a global scale that cannot be influenced. The need to distance oneself, the absence of real travel, the need for masks and sanitizers, the closing of restaurants and clubs-all of these have left a mark on the mental health of all humanity in one way or another. The physical threat is critical in itself, but when combined with the mental damage, it makes the student even more uncomfortable. It is to be expected that individuals precisely in transitional, adapting conditions are at their most vulnerable. Thus, unemployed people, retirees, first-year students, graduates, and all other classes of the population who have just entered a new role have found themselves sharply placed in an environment of global pressure.
References
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