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Age Wise
Stop Trying to Be So Damn Productive
Your mental health depends on knowing how to ease up
People who know me will probably say I’m a pretty productive person, working long hours, weekends, holidays. It’s a disease. Like many Americans, I’m lousy at taking vacations or disengaging from work even for a few waking hours, let alone a few days. I have a lot to do, after all!
Turns out I also have a lot to learn about the dangers of constant productivity.
Taking time off work to relax and rejuvenate — the defiant act of being utterly unproductive — is vital to mental well-being, to happiness, new research finds. Considered from another angle in different studies, working too many hours is responsible for a 29% increase in premature deaths since the year 2000. And in a bit of irony, quality time off is not only vital to health but also crucial to our ultimate productivity.
And yet, hanging over our collective heads is that common cultural belief that productivity is the ultimate virtue, that goofing off is time wasted.
People who buy into this productivity notion most fervently enjoy leisure time less than people who embrace it, naturally, but they also rank worse on measures of mental health, the researchers report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“There is plenty of research which suggests that leisure has mental health benefits and that it can make us more productive and less stressed,” says study team member Selin Malkoc, PhD, an 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 conclusion stems from a series of experiments and surveys. In one, college students were asked how much they enjoy common leisure activities, like exercising, watching TV, or hanging out with friends. Those who said leisure time is wasteful were less likely to enjoy these activities, less likely to be happy, and more likely to express symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression.
In some sort of twisted logic, another experiment in the study found that when leisure activities are framed as…
