A recent study found that “feeling like leisure is wasteful and unproductive may lead to less happiness and higher levels of stress and depression.” Personally, I was not surprised at all when I read this, because it’s a feeling I completely relate to. And I know I’m not alone.
Athletes get a double whammy with this: Many of us feel guilty on rest days or family vacations where we’ve agreed to not train as much, and since many of us fall into the Type A category, I know I’m not alone when I say that I feel super guilty when I have a few hours of down time in an evening or weekend.
Recently, I found myself in a weird moment of being completely exhausted from work/training/family/friend “stuff,” but when I tried to veg on the couch and watch some TV, I couldn’t stop my brain from buzzing, and I found myself scrolling my to-do list on my phone aimlessly, moving around tasks for the next couple weeks without much rhyme or reason. I wasn’t accomplishing more, I was just wrecking my ability to actually chill out and enjoy my leisure time while pretending to be productive.
Basically, my relaxation time left me more stressed out and frazzled than I would have felt if I just kept working, but at the same time, I had zero brain power left to get anything done. In fact, I was getting less effective by the minute, just scrolling my endless to-do list and moving things around for the satisfaction of lowering my daily task count, but not making any real progress. Could I have headed out for a walk? Sure—but I absolutely didn’t need to train any more. What I needed was just some simple veg out time. And that’s important too.
Sometimes, I am better at it: DW and I had an afternoon beach hangout last week where we played in the water for a while, then sat on the shore and relaxed for a bit. I didn’t bring my phone. My brain buzzed once we were sitting down, but I tried to turn it off and stop thinking about everything else I needed to do at home. Finally, we headed back so I could work before dinner… when we got in, I realized rather than being gone for a couple of hours as I’d planned, we’d made it 45 minutes before my brain freaked out that I wasn’t being productive enough!
“There is plenty of research which suggests that leisure has mental health benefits and that it can make us more productive and less stressed,” said Selin Malkoc, co-author of the study and associate professor of marketing at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. “But we find that if people start to believe that leisure is wasteful, they may end up being more depressed and more stressed.”
The recommendation? Sounds simple, but start seeing leisure as part of productivity. Easier said than done, but as athletes, maybe we can understand it a little better. We do know that rest and recovery is as important as the training itself when it comes to improving, so perhaps we can start to see that the same holds true for everything in life! As for me, I’m going to work on leaving my phone away from me more often, especially as I’m trying to relax and watch a movie, and I’m going to keep hitting the beach without my phone whenever possible.
(My caveat is that I do have a notebook on hand because sometimes, trying to hold ideas or to-dos in your head is a lot more stressful than pausing and writing them down to come back to later!)
Now, the interesting thing here is that I see some leisure time—the obvious healthy stuff like walking and spending time with Peter and DW—as perfectly productive. Where I (and I suspect, you) struggle is with the leisure time that is 100 percent indulgent leisure time. The Netflix watching, the novel reading. Note that I don’t include scrolling Instagram on this list because I think that’s actually part of the faux productivity issue: We watch TV and think we’re relaxing but we’re also scrolling IG, then feeling worse about ourselves every second. So, here’s my challenge to you: If you’ve been nodding along and you’re in the same boat of struggling to just have a few damn minutes to enjoy a book or show without feeling guilty about it, let’s try to break that loop and see those precious moments for what they are: A chance to unwind. Leisure—as per the research—is actually productive, if you let it be.
Need more healthy habits, including how to take appropriate amounts of time off? Check out our book, Becoming A Consummate Athlete, right here:
