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…
