Have you been officially diagnosed as a "rat person" on the Internet? The reason may not be laziness, but low energy

Recently, a niche track has become popular on social media, called "Vlog of a Rat Man's Day". These people lie down from morning till night, have no desire for material things or socializing, and just cook something to eat when they are hungry. They spend another day with their eyes open and closed. The "Rat Literature" born from this reflects the living conditions of young people like a mirror. Overnight, countless netizens seemed to have found a group in the comment area and began to actively share their "retirement routines", finding resonance and comfort in self-deprecation.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

01“At the mildest, I’m too lazy to walk; at the worst, I’m too lazy to eat.” What exactly went wrong?

For people who are full of energy every day, it may be difficult to imagine why "rat people" who have to repeatedly prepare themselves mentally even to take a shower or open a package are so lazy. In a deeper sense, they just lack "psychological energy", which is a manifestation of low energy.

In fact, this also reflects to some extent the psychological state of contemporary young people under multiple pressures from studies, family and society. Psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett proposed "emotional granularity" to describe an individual's ability to identify, distinguish and accurately describe emotions. It reflects our ability to distinguish our own emotional experiences - people with high emotional granularity can capture subtle emotional changes like a microscope and separate them clearly; while people with low emotional granularity look at emotions like a blurred filter and can only express "happy" or "unhappy" in general.

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02 How to get out of the low energy state?

When the body that is carrying the burden is compressed into a gray track between two points, what we need is not the excitement of forced blood, but to learn to observe the texture of emotions with a microscope and do a good job of cleaning up the increasingly messy inner room. If you feel that you are trapped in this negative state, you might as well try these simple methods:

(1) Identify the “emotional garbage” that accumulates in your heart

There is often an unknown fire in life that affects your good mood for the whole day. Sometimes you may suddenly feel happy or cry for no reason, but you can't tell it. If you can learn to see the reasons behind it, these emotions will subside by half.

Just like organizing a messy wardrobe requires sorting and storage, emotional management also requires a detailed classification system: when working overtime late at night or suddenly waking up in the early morning, "anxiety" is more specific than "uncomfortable", and worry about project progress is more specific than anxiety. For example, when choosing breakfast at a convenience store, "no appetite" can be broken down into "nausea after staying up late last night" or "boredom with repetitive meals."

(2) Break down tasks and be the master of your emotions

Once this subtle emotion is noticed, solutions can naturally emerge: the former requires clearer work plans and task division; the latter can try new foods to stimulate the taste buds.

When you break down "commuting annoyance" into two specific feelings, "the pain of leather shoes squeezing my feet" and "the harshness of subway broadcasts", the former can be solved by changing into a pair of soft-soled shoes, and the latter can be solved by putting on headphones and listening to light music, and your annoyance will be instantly reduced by half.

When work is a mess, the first thing to do is to make a plan. The same can be done for emotional management:

You may have never thought that the "micro rituals" of lunch breaks also have amazing healing power. For example, brewing a cup of coffee on time in the afternoon will help you form a unique psychological anchor: when the bubbling sound is heard, you can file the revisions from the morning, and drink the coffee after finishing. This deliberately created "time fold" is essentially leaving a "loophole" in the tight timeline. Drinking coffee not only brings wakefulness, but also provides energy for life.

(3) Body language gives us strength

The reverse shaping of emotions by body language is often underestimated. When you hunch over your workstation to eat takeout, you are implicitly sending a self-suggestion that you are “low energy.” Try doing the “Superman pose” for five minutes in the tea room—putting your hands on your hips and your chest and head high in front of the mirror. These seemingly deliberate and childish movements are actually sending a signal to your tired self that “everything is under control.”

(4) The truth is revealed in the details

We cannot see the true face of Mount Lu because we are in it. When we learn not to use some grand labels to roughly classify our inner world, but try to break down fatigue into tiny particles of concrete life, we will have a clear idea of ​​change. After all, the real vitality is often hidden in the most subtle wrinkles of life.

Author: Tang Yicheng, China Science Popularization Expert, Secretary General of the Science Popularization Committee of the Chinese Psychological Society

Produced by: Science Popularization China