Goldilocks’ lesson that you can get a lot of good, even when it comes to chair size, has been applied in fields ranging from astrobiology to economics. Now, it looks like it might rule our spare time.
The researchers found that although levels of subjective well-being initially increase with increased leisure time, this trend does not necessarily hold Entertainment levels are very high.
“The ideal place is a moderate amount of free timeDr. Marisa Sheriff, co-author of the study from the University of Pennsylvania. “We found that having more time was associated with lower subjective well-being due to Lack of sense of productivity and purpose“.
When writing for a magazine Journal of personality and social psychologyIn this study, Sharif and his colleagues spoke about how they analyzed the results of two large-scale surveys, involving a total of more than 35,000 participants.
One of them was the American Time Use Survey, which was conducted between 2012 and 2013 and asked respondents what they had done in the past 24 hours.
After collecting opinions from a group about activities that equated with leisure time and calculating this time for participants, the team found that although subjective well-being increased with the amount of leisure time of approximately two hours, I started coming down after I went over five hours.
Meanwhile, data from the National Study of the Changing Workforce, which ran between 1992 and 2008, revealed that after a certain point Having more free time is no longer associated with greater subjective well-being, but it did not decrease, probably because few participants reported having more than five hours of free time per day.
The team noted that the US Time Use Survey suggested that an important factor is the way people spend their free time.
“Although most of the discretionary time spent by an individual on individual and unproductive activities had a negative effect on subjective well-being, the discretionary time spent in social or productive activities did not have the same effect.”
The team then ran two online trials, using data from 2,565 US participants in one and 4,046 in the other, in an effort to make sure the findings weren’t just limited to, say, a scenario in which people with depression might find themselves infected. Lots of free time.
In both experiments, participants were asked to imagine a specific amount of free time in the day and what they would do with it, and to dedicate an experiment to analyzing whether or not they were spending time on purposeful and productive activities.
The team found it More free time was not necessarily better compared to the feelings of well-being, stress, or imagined productivity. More specifically, imagined well-being stabilized as hypothetically productive leisure increased from medium to high, but was 0.4 points lower on a seven-point scale compared to moderate amounts of unproductive leisure. The effect of the effects was negligible and the optimal amounts of free time were inaccurate.
However, they state that research has suggested that people who feel they have too little free time should not give up all of their commitments, but rather try to find Few free hours a day. Meanwhile, people who have vacation days should try Spend your time with purposeWhether it is about interacting with others or doing something productive.
Andrew Oswald, professor of economics and behavioral sciences at the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the study, praised the research.
“This is valuable research because it provides all kinds of statistical evidence around a very intuitive idea: Humans like to have “discretionary” free time, For leisure, chores, hobbies, etc., in his days, but not much,” he commented. “It is the result of a moderate, timely”.
“Creator. Devoted pop culture specialist. Certified web fanatic. Unapologetic coffee lover.”