I’m feeling Zjierb.

Zjierbness.

Zjierb: feeling or showing hyperactive drowsiness. Zjierb roughly describes a mismatch between mental and physical energy. It can feel like a racing mind that struggles to linger on coherent thoughts combined with a muted numbness through the body.

Zjierbness: the state of feeling zjierb.

From the inside, zjierbness feels like a frantic sense of agitation and scrabbling for stimulus hidden behind a set of dull cow eyes.¹ It’s how I feel at the end of a scrolling session: exhausted, not tired enough to sleep or nap, and still feeling the inexorable pull to scroll more. It’s also how I often feel after coming back from my 9-5 office job; I really want to sit or lie down but neither seem to rejuvenate me for some reason, and I often have things to do but can’t bear to even contemplate doing anything that requires real focus and mental effort.

As I’ve gotten better at meditation, I’ve begun noticing that zjierbness’ supposed numbness often masks slight tensions hidden just beyond the scope of conscious perception, which itself contributes to feeling more zjierbness.

I’m feeling zjierb. How do I deal with it?

I’m still working on this myself. I hope to eventually write about post-office zjierbness specifically: it’s been on my mind for a while now (for obvious reasons). In general, my best advice comes from a combination of years of trial-and-error and also this chill meditation guide I found recently.

Here are some simple non-comprehensive suggestions:

1. Relax the parts of you that need relaxation.

   1. Remove excess mental stimuli where you can. For me, this often looks like finding a quiet space and loosening into the silence until the buzz and agitation in my mind slowly starts to fade away.

   2. Release physical tension where you can. For me, this often looks like noticing tense muscles and explicitly letting them relax. Alternatively, it can feel like focusing on non-tense areas and widening that feeling into the rest of your body (this instruction doesn’t do much for me personally).

2. Energize the parts of you that need more energy.

   1. Give yourself some wholesome mental stimulus. For me, this often means meditating, talking to people, or journaling. I will once again plug How We Feel here.

   2. Engage in wholesome physical activity. For me, this often means walking—walking outside is ideal but walking on an indoor treadmill is almost as effective—or actively exercising. You can also try doing a rote chore that is mentally unstimulating like folding laundry or washing dishes.

Also, if you aren’t always on top of taking care of yourself physically and mentally and want some handholding, check out this cool interactive website.

Why zjierb?

I’ve been using the app How We Feel to log my emotions, journal, and get better at mental interoception and emotional awareness / regulation for several years now. It’s a great app and I highly recommend it. That being said, it doesn’t have an analogue for zjierb, probably because the word doesn’t exist yet. The closest I’ve been able to get is logging two feelings, “agitated” and “exhausted,” but zjierbness is its own distinct experience and feels a new flavor of what it is like to be human. So I started logging it as a custom emotion and then decided to write about it.

Image from How We Feel, which I highly recommend

I don’t think our distant ancestors were able to overstimulate their brains without also engaging their bodies or at least participating in some kind of community. I do think zjierbness has a precursor in the form of automation-induced exhaustedness and probably took off when mass automation first separated skillfulness from knowledge and attention. Automation-induced exhaustedness is a kind of proto-zjierbness, as it shares the unique gap between mental and physical exhaustion but lacks the “scrabbling for stimulus” facet of zjierbness that is so unique to the modern day. Still, both are newer than agitation, happiness, grief, etc etc.

No but seriously, why zjierb?

Oh, uh, I needed a word that sounded anachronistic when compared to the other feeling words, since zjierbness is something of a modern phenomenon. I also wanted something that would remind me to stop being so austere about this whole thing.

Zjierb sounds familiar…

That’s probably because I stole it from Brian David Gilbert’s classic video, that feeling when you bite into a pickle and it’s a little squishier than you expected.

BDG, if you’re seeing this, I apologize for stealing your word. It just showed up in my brain this morning and told me it was the specific feeling that I was feeling right now, so I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me.

1. “Dull cow eyes” comes from this clip:

I still need to watch the rest of the trilogy lol