A Leisurely Pace: Developing work-life balance
I can imagine a future where it’s uncouth to ask someone “What do you do for work?” at a party. Many of my clients turn up in my office as recovering workaholics, realizing that they are investing more of their time and energy in their paid work than they’d like to, but not sure what to do otherwise. While it’s encouraging that American occupational culture increasingly endorses work-life balance, individuals sometimes feel like all they have is a buzzword without a clear idea of how to bring it about. With a little careful deconstruction, though, leisure can become a regular infusion that makes the mixture sweeter.
Fun and free time have always existed. In fact, hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed much more leisure time than industrialized societies. However, leisure as a distinct category of activities (those pursued solely for pleasure) is a relatively new concept within written history, dating back only to the economic formation of the middle class in the 19th century. Before that, only the extremely wealthy had time to engage in activities that didn’t serve some immediate purpose. Some of these tasks they might have enjoyed and we now do for leisure today, like needlepoint or gardening, were primarily utilitarian pursuits back then.
How you spend your leisure time might be the contributor to happiness that you have the most control of. Current research suggests that genetics account for 50% of our constitutional happiness, and you can’t do much about that. Life circumstances such as one’s economic station account for only 10%. While you can exercise some indirect control over those, the influence of hedonic adaptation or “the hedonic treadmill” means you typically return to baseline happiness after some period of novelty. This leaves 40% of happiness that can be chalked up to the way you spend your free time.
When discussing this crucial ingredient for wellbeing with my clients, I sometimes encounter a blank look: “I don’t know where to start.” Or, someone’s interests are narrow or context-specific enough that they are still left with a lot of unsatisfied time. Birdwatching isn’t something you can easily do in the weekday evenings; wine-tasting isn’t something your budget can accommodate every week; volunteering might be only intermittently possible due to physical constraints or fluctuating pain levels. You need a good spread of options that suit the situations when you are ready to recreate. If it’s hard to think of what to pursue, what have you enjoyed in the past but got lost in the shuffle? What have you always wanted to try? What did you enjoy doing for the hell of it when you were a child or preteen?
Your hours become years become your life. Make them sweet, make them nurturing, and make them particularly yours. As an outdoors lover, I find winter evenings to be particularly challenging to my creativity. This winter, in an effort to diversify my time from the satisfying but passive pattern of books and Netflix, I’ve rediscovered that I love to knit and take on DIY home projects, and that much as I enjoy nesting in a mountain of blankets, I usually feel better if I get up and leave the house. I hope that your leisure time both soothes and empowers you, too.
References
Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: the Architecture of Sustainable Change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), pgs. 111-131.
Sheldon, K. & Lyuborksy, S. (2006.) Achieving sustainable gains in happiness: Change your actions, not your circumstances. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7(1) pgs. 55-86.
Wikipedia contributors. (2018, June 27). Original affluent society. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:32, January 9, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Original_affluent_society&oldid=847775497
