“Happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.”
ARISTOTLE
When we hear “leisure,” we think “fun.” But not all free time makes people equally happy. Some activities are a blast in the moment but can make you feel like crap the next day (e.g., the things you did for fun in college). Others may nourish your life satisfaction for years but not feel all that fun while you’re doing them. Sometimes finding happiness in your free time is all about getting out of your comfort zone; other times it’s about rolling into your favorite bar with the same people you see almost every day.
So how should you be spending your time to maximize your happiness?
This question is more important than ever as leisure has become a central part of our daily lives. In a comparison of attitudes in 1938 and 2014, the role of leisure as a way to bring happiness to one’s life rose from eighth place to third place (first and second in 2014 were “economic stability” and “good sense of humor,” respectively). We have more free time than we ever had in decades past, but we have more mindless distractions to fill it, so we must choose how to spend our time—and how much of it we spend doing each activity—wisely.
Here are some science-backed ways to do just that.
Choose Happiness-Boosting Activities
Some activities have more impact than others on improving your happiness. That was among the findings in a survey of leisure activities in thirty-three countries and how they affected peoples’ well-being. Of the thirteen different ways to pass the time that were examined, only six were found to be significantly associated with feelings of happiness:
• Shopping
• Reading books
• Attending cultural events
• Getting together with relatives
• Listening to music
• Attending sporting events
Six other activities were found to have no impact on happiness levels: watching TV, going to the movies, getting together with friends, playing cards, going to the gym, and doing handicrafts. Just one activity—spending time on the internet—was found to be negatively associated with happiness.
Make Contacts
Leisure activities can often be ends in themselves. But while having fun does have plenty of benefits, longer-term happiness comes from other aspects of leisure activities than how long they last. The same survey of thirty-three countries found that there was a higher degree of happiness gained from activities in which participants felt they established “useful contacts” and were able to “develop important skills.” The takeaway? Seek out leisure activities that will give you more than just fun—those that will allow you to advance as a person and fulfill larger goals in life.
• Join the company softball team, or take up a hobby where you’re likely to meet others in your career field.
Get Outside
One of the best happiness-enhancing leisure activities is to get into nature. Researchers have found that people who have spent two weeks in the wilderness enjoy a higher level of attention, a greater level of life satisfaction, and a more positive outlook after they return. On top of that, people who have spent time in the wilderness report a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves, and renewed clarity on “what really matters.”
Biologist E. O. Wilson developed a “biophilia hypothesis” that suggests that humans have evolved a need to affiliate with the natural world; this explains why this “nature connectedness” might help foster a greater sense of well-being.
• Go camping for a weekend, or go for a long hike. Immerse yourself in the natural world. For a faster fix, add a ten-minute walk to your daily routine.
Head to the Park
Greenery doesn’t have to be out in the wilderness to reduce your stress and increase your happiness. Evidence shows that even a relatively small amount of vegetation—small parks and urban green spaces close to one’s home—can make a significant impact on well-being. Researchers in Finland found that those who spent as little as twenty minutes walking through a park felt much more relief of their stress levels than those who spent twenty minutes wandering through the center of the city.
Going to a park can also strengthen social connections since, as a researcher reviewing the literature on the subject notes, “natural elements, especially trees, encourage people to spend more time outside, making them more likely to have the accidental face-to-face encounters with their neighbors that create friendships and other social ties.”
• Go for a twenty-minute walk in the park. It will lower your stress level and you might meet someone while you’re there.
Connect with Nature
“People who describe themselves as more connected to nature, who see themselves as a part of nature, also report more happiness—more positive emotions and purpose in life. . . . It’s not that people who live in rural areas, who are surrounded by nature, are off-the-charts happy compared to people in cities. In cities, the people who find themselves near parks where there are some trees, these are the people who are happier. The little things matter: parks, gardens, even bird feeders.”
—John M. Zelenski, professor of psychology, Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario)
. . . Or Sit by a Window
Even just looking at nature can improve your mood. In a classic study at Texas A&M University, 120 subjects were shown a stressful video, then shown a video of one of six natural or urban settings. Those who watched the natural settings showed faster and more complete recovery from stress, as measured in biometrics such as blood pressure and muscle tension.
Join a Sport
Physical activity is great for your health, of course, helping to reduce obesity and boost your physical wellness. But researchers drawing on national survey data of individuals as well as data on access to sports and fitness facilities have also found that participating in physical activity leads to a higher reported quality of life.
The researchers found that regardless of participants’ personal background, those who were more actively involved in sports and physical activity reported higher levels of life satisfaction in general. In fact, participating in physical activity was found to increase happiness at three times the level that one’s feeling of happiness decreases upon becoming unemployed.
Not only do sports association members report being happier than nonsporty people—they also report being happier than those who participate in recreation activities found outside of the realm of sports. Beyond increased health, the happiness value of sports is found in the intimate social relationships formed between players, coaches, and even opponents.
• Sign up for a sports team—any team: baseball, badminton, hopscotch, whatever.
Make Leisure a Habit
Joining a sports team has another advantage: It creates a long-term habit of physical activity. A study compared the benefits of “routine” leisure activities (such as regular meet-ups with friends, or team sports) versus “project-based” ones (such as a volunteer project or one-time competitions). Drawing on responses from 365 college students, the researchers found that routine leisure brings happiness and meaning to life.
• Make consistent physical leisure-time activity part of your life, as opposed to just doing one-off outings. Find some way to make fun activities something you will continue for months or years.
Money can’t buy love—or happiness, it turns out. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Los Angeles used online surveys to poll more than 4,000 people on the question of whether they would rather have more time or more money—and whether they were happy. While 64 percent of respondents said they would prefer to have more money, it was those who preferred more time who reported being the happiest.
Though the researchers acknowledged this may be the case because those with plenty of money may be happier—and also prefer more time since they don’t need the money—they emphasized that “what matters is the value people place on each resource and not necessarily the amount of time or money they have (or feel they have).”
• Stop for a moment and appreciate the moments you have.
Buy Experiences, Not Things
Along the same lines, this money/time dichotomy correlates to the relationship that researchers have consistently found between things and experiences. You’ve heard it before: Paying for experiences (vacations, spa treatments, even trips to the movies) has been found to create more long-term pleasure than buying material goods. But this truth pops up again and again in a number of different ways. In a survey by Harvard University psychology professor Dan Gilbert, 57 percent of respondents reported greater happiness from experiential purchases compared with 34 percent who gained more happiness from material objects.
Beyond that, the emotional benefits you get from buying an experience are likely to exceed your expectations. In a different study, Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University asked participants to rate on a scale from one to seven whether they felt their money would be well spent on different types of purchases. Respondents expected material purchases would bring them an average satisfaction score of 4.41, while experiential purchases only earned a 2.9 rating. Two weeks after making the buy, the higher number flipped: respondents gave material purchases a 4.91 average, and experiential purchases a 5.7 average rating.
To top it off, researchers from Cornell University and the University of Colorado Boulder found in a pair of surveys and a follow-up laboratory experiment that people get more pleasure in anticipating experiences than they do looking forward to making a material purchase. The researchers determined this was the case because experiences are more open to positive reinterpretations, are more closely related to a person’s identity, and contribute more to social relationships (you’re going to tell people about your upcoming vacation more than your upcoming furniture purchase). So before, during, and after purchase, experiences beat things.
• Instead of buying a new pair of shoes, spend that money on a staycation.
Take Eight-Day Vacations
Speaking of vacations, one of the worst feelings in the world is having taken off a few days from work, only to come back feeling like the relaxation didn’t really stick. It may be that the vacation you took wasn’t long enough—or it may have been too long. A group of workers answered a questionnaire about health and well-being prior to and during vacations that averaged 23 days each (yes, these were European workers). Researchers found that feelings of health and well-being increased right away during vacation, then peaked on the eighth day, where they remained until the eleventh day, after which enjoyment levels faded out. From this, the researchers suggest that eight days is about how long it takes to let go of concerns about work responsibilities and stress—but before feelings of homesickness or restlessness set in.
• Tack your next one-week vacation onto a three-day weekend to stretch it to a little more than a week—but just a little.
Plan Vacations Earlier
Sadly, no matter how long a vacation may be, its impact after you return to work is likely to be minimal. The same study found that on the first day of work resumption, the positive health and well-being effects from the time off vanished entirely.
Before you despair that a break will never truly refresh you, the secret might be to put greater weight on what happens before the vacation itself. Beyond actually going on an extended holiday, simply planning or thinking about taking a trip can boost your overall happiness. That was the finding of a team of researchers in the Netherlands who surveyed 1,530 Dutch adults about their feelings of happiness before and after taking a vacation. While they similarly found that feelings of happiness and relaxation dropped off after a trip, they discovered that the largest boost in happiness came in the planning stages of a getaway. Vacationers displayed higher levels of happiness than nonvacationers for weeks, and sometimes even months, before the holiday began.
• Start planning your next trip months in advance. You’ll give yourself plenty of time to imagine lying on the beach, wandering historic city streets, or whatever else your ideal escape involves (plus save money on the flight).
Have Fun First
Sometimes it may be better to have your dessert before dinner. We often think that we will enjoy a leisure activity or vacation as a reward for getting our work done, but it turns out we’ll have just as much fun playing before working. Researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business tapped 181 adults from a wide range of employment backgrounds to complete two activities: a set of cognitive tests (aka work) and an iPad game in which participants created and listened to music (aka play). While participants expected that having fun first would decrease their enjoyment of playing the game, in fact there turned out to be no difference between the two.
The researchers got the same results with an experiment in which 259 college students had a choice to enjoy a spa treatment either before their midterms or as a destressing experience after taking their tests. Again, the enjoyment was the same whether before or after. Ed O’Brien, coauthor of the study, said the findings “suggest we may be over-worrying and over-working for future rewards that could be just as pleasurable in the present.”
• Stop postponing play. Take that vacation or go out for the day, even if you haven’t finished that project you’ve been stressing about.
Don’t Expect Balance Every Day
“Most people think of ‘work/life balance’ as reflecting an ability to balance work and home life on a daily basis, by, for example, working an adequate amount of time but then having enough time each day to unwind, relax, and engage in enjoyable leisure activities. That’s great, but sometimes unachievable. For example, I’m currently working on a book and for the last seven months or so, pretty much if I’m awake, I’m working. There’s no balance. But, I do expect to slow down and find some recovery time once the book is done. Sometimes you can achieve balance every day or every week, and sometimes balance gets put on the back shelf and waits until the time is right.”
—Jamie Gruman, associate professor of organizational behavior, University of Guelph (Guelph, Ontario)
You’re More Competent on the Weekend
Just as breaks during the day are found to correlate with higher levels of happiness and productivity, weekends are key to helping raise your level of happiness. Research finds a “weekend effect” among workers in every field, in which their mood improves from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening.
A study tracked the moods of participants over a three-week period and consistently found that respondents reported feeling both mentally and physically better on the weekend, regardless of age, marital status, or other factors. The subjects also reported feeling more competent on the weekend than during the week, likely because they had more freedom to choose the activities they wanted to do. “Far from frivolous, the relatively unfettered time on weekends provides critical opportunities for bonding with others, exploring interests and relaxing—basic psychological needs that people should be careful not to crowd out with overwork,” said Richard Ryan, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, who authored the study.
Go with the Flow
One good litmus test for whether your leisure activities will bring you happiness is to ask yourself, “Does it put me in a flow state?” Positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow to describe the kind of hyperfocus that he defines as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies.” You know what he’s talking about: Maybe you were totally engrossed in a great book or rode your bike all afternoon and lost track of the day. You were “in the zone” and went on a kind of euphoric autopilot. In this flow state, you can accomplish more creative work and do so much more effectively or creatively than in your typical distracted state—all while being more relaxed and positive.
Csíkszentmihályi laid out the factors that contribute to a sense of flow, including intense focus and concentration, a feeling of personal control over what you are working on, a distorted experience of time (i.e., time flies), and a loss of the sense of self-consciousness. To enter the flow state, the key is engaging in a task that balances with your skills. Something too simple leads to boredom; something too challenging leads to anxiety. While the flow state can happen in any area of life, sports and outdoor activities are often where it can be seen at its clearest.
• Aim to reach flow state when having fun: Seek out activities that challenge your skills but won’t overwhelm you, and cut out distractions while you’re having fun.
Flow in Teams
Getting into flow is not something that has to be done solo. A research team from St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York asked subjects to participate in a paddleball activity, both by themselves and with a team, meant to trigger a sense of flow individually and as part of a group. It turned out that students got greater satisfaction from “social flow” than from “solitary flow.”
• Turn your hobbies into group activities: If you like playing guitar, start a band; if you love jogging, run races.
Find an Adventure
Adventure outings have been found to be particularly effective at creating this sense of flow—even when generating feelings of anxiety at the same time. One study surveyed fifty-two white-water kayakers, analyzing their experiences with kayaking and subsequent feelings. It found that even when subjects expressed feeling anxious due to the difficulty of the river, these emotions were counterbalanced by subjective experiences of flow, “suggesting that white-water kayakers may have positive experiences even when their abilities are exceeded by the difficulty of the river,” as the researchers put it. They also found that those who experienced a flow state continued to feel its effects even after the more difficult parts of the rapids had passed, making it seem that “benefits from the flow experience may be taken away from the river into everyday life.”
• Challenge yourself with an adventurous outing. The butterflies you feel can create long-term mood improvement.
Knit . . . or Quilt
But you don’t have to put yourself in harm’s way to improve your sense of happiness. It turns out that knitting is an effective way to boost your mood. A survey of 3,545 knitters found a notable connection between how frequently someone knitted and their feelings of calm and happiness. Those who knitted more frequently also reported sharper concentration and memory.
Part of that might be yarn itself: Some respondents reported that the color they used while knitting influenced their mood. About half of respondents said the texture—what some referred to as “tactile pleasures in fibers” and “touchable feelable result”—impacted their mood.
Similar findings came from a survey of quilters. Those taking part in a survey about quilting and well-being reported higher levels of concentration and emotional benefits, thanks to the strong social network generated from interacting with others in a quilting circle.
• Visit a craft store and start a new hobby—with friends, if possible.
Get Playful
Playfulness—reframing a situation to be more amusing or fun—is something we have an instinct for as children (who hasn’t turned couch cushions into an impenetrable fort or a jungle gym into a castle?), even if as adults we can lose our appreciation of play. But it turns out that reactivating it is a great way to bolster happiness.
In a study of 255 adults, subjects rated their playfulness (using the five-question Short Measure of Adult Playfulness survey, as well as the thirty-two-adjective Adult Playfulness Scale) and their life satisfaction, and stated how often they engaged in activities they enjoyed. The researchers found a correlation between playfulness and both high levels of life satisfaction and an inclination to take part in enjoyable activities and to live an active lifestyle.
• Turn something boring into a game: Give a goofy name when your barista asks, or imagine your commute as a high-stakes obstacle course.
Drop the “Not Enough Time” Excuse
“Most people in our research over the years give the major reason for not participating in leisure activities as ‘not enough time.’ However, we should distrust this explanation and more often than not treat it as an ‘excuse.’ In our time-use studies, we have found that when people say they don’t have enough time to engage in physically active leisure or other more demanding and potentially satisfying activities, for example, they are watching three to four hours of television a day. Time constraints do not really seem to be the issue, rather it’s a question of priorities.”
—Roger C. Mannell, Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former dean, Faculty of Applied Health Sciences, University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario)
Crack a Joke
Just like playfulness, laughter really can be powerful medicine. Paul McGhee, who has spent two decades researching humor and laughter, has found lots of evidence that humor boosts emotional resilience and helps people cope with stress, even reducing pain and strengthening people’s immune systems. Even better—he’s found that a sense of humor is something that can be learned and improved with practice. McGhee lays out a program of “7 Humor Habits” that have been found to strengthen a person’s funny muscles, including “surround yourself with humor,” “laugh more often and more heartily,” and “laugh at yourself.” He maintains that adding humor to one’s life creates a cognitive shift in perspective and provides individuals with a greater sense of control and feeling of empowerment.
Researchers at the James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, sought to test these assertions, randomly assigning fifty-five participants to three groups: one that followed McGhee’s eight-week humor skills program (complete with a handbook of jokes and funny stories), one that met weekly for social gatherings, and a control group. Far more than the other two groups, those who went through the program of learning to laugh more and find humor in difficult situations showed a significant increase in positive affect, optimism, and perception of control over their surroundings. They also reported decreases in perceived stress, depression, and anxiety levels.
• Take an improv class or pick up a joke book. You don’t have to be a natural class clown to improve your sense of humor.
. . . But Not at Someone Else’s Expense
One of the most attractive traits anyone can have is a sense of humor, but some types of funny are less healthy than others. Researchers asked forty-three males and sixty-six females to complete questionnaires about their humor styles, subjective happiness, and affective styles. The results indicated that practicing aggressive or “self-defeating” humor used to belittle or tease correlated with lower levels of happiness, while positive or “self-enhancing” humor led to higher happiness levels. “Self-directed humor” also had a stronger correlation with happiness ratings than did humor directed toward others.
• Skip the sarcastic, aggressive, negative humor focusing on other people’s weaknesses.
Limit Your Options
Being able to choose what to do or what to buy is usually a good thing. But too many choices can be a bummer. Anyone who has felt overwhelmed trying to decide how to spend a day off or what to order from one of those thirty-page diner menus can appreciate that having a lot of options can sometimes feel the opposite of liberating. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Researchers at Stanford and Columbia Universities looked into why this might be the case by offering one group of subjects thirty different types of chocolates from which they could choose a sample, and another group just six types of chocolate. The subjects then answered a few questions about how much satisfaction they felt about their selection. Those choosing from the larger variety reported more regret and dissatisfaction with their final decision. When given the option, they said they were less likely to choose chocolates instead of money as compensation for participating in the study, while those with fewer to choose from were more eager for more chocolate.
The researchers suggest that “[p]erhaps it is not that people are made unhappy by the decisions they make in the face of abundant options, but that they are instead unsure—that they are burdened by the responsibility of distinguishing good from bad decisions.”
• Use a bracket approach when making a decision between many options, cutting down each choice to a selection between two things: Do you like A or B more? If you like A more, how does it stack up to C? And so on.
Become a Bar Regular
Speaking of finding happiness in limited options, you don’t have to travel to far-flung places to boost your well-being. Happy hour at your favorite bar might be a more accurate term than you realized. A team of Oxford psychologists and anthropologists in England found that people who have a “local” that they frequent had more close friends on whom they could count for support, and were found to be happier with their lives, more embedded in their communities, and more trusting of others. These conclusions drew on a poll from UK-based data analytics firm YouGov of 2,254 UK adults, in which the 22 percent of respondents who said they had a favorite pub had an average of 7.2 close friends, compared with the average of 6.0 friends for those who did not have a favorite bar.
Lead researcher Robin Dunbar chalked it up to the personal connections created at the local watering hole, stating that making and maintaining friendships is “done face-to-face: the digital world is simply no substitute.”
• Find your own Cheers in your neighborhood and get to know everybody’s name.
Listen with Intention
Positive music can help you feel happier—if you want it to. A pair of psychology professors looked at how music affects happiness levels. They asked a group of subjects to listen to twelve minutes of music, including the “positive” (i.e., upbeat) Rodeo by Aaron Copland and the less-cheery Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, noting how the music impacted their moods. The more positive music did indeed boost the subjects’ happiness levels—but only when listeners put “intention” behind their listening.
Over the two-week period the test was conducted, those who listened to the positive music after being asked to try to feel happier reported a more positive mood. Those participants who listened to Stravinsky’s piece, regardless of instructions, and those who listened to Copland without being told to think happy thoughts, had no significant change of mood. The researchers concluded that the combination of the right music and the right thoughts is important in increasing positive feelings. One without the other is not enough.
• Listen to upbeat music to increase your happiness level—but pause to think positive thoughts before pressing play.
Cool Down
Sunshine on your face feels great, but a researcher at Osaka University in Japan has found that happiness is likely to be maxed out at a slightly cool temperature, specifically 57 degrees Fahrenheit (13.9 degrees Celsius). Examining the effect of weather on well-being, the researcher gathered data on seventy-five students over a period of 516 days, controlling for individual characteristics and outside events. He found that while wind speed and precipitation did not impact respondents’ well-being, subjective happiness was negatively related to temperature and humidity, with subjects at their happiest at 57 degrees Fahrenheit.
• If you’re feeling down, turn up the air conditioner.
Do Something for Someone Else
Enough about you. Instead of doing things for your own happiness, you should set aside some time each month to do something that helps someone else. Why? It will make you happier. Tons of psychological studies have found evidence of the paradoxical relationship between selflessness and happiness—that is, by giving to others and avoiding selfish behavior, you end up gaining in the process.
In a series of studies, researchers found that “prosocial behavior” (actions focused on others, such as giving money to those in need) boosted a person’s feelings of happiness upon recalling it later. Researchers conducted three experiments to test this. One involved getting eighty-six participants to recall a memory of their choice that involved spending twenty dollars, either on themselves or for someone else. After recalling the memory, they completed a survey on how they felt—and those who recalled spending for others reported more positive emotions.
• Designate two hours each month to serve at a soup kitchen or do some other kind of volunteer work. You’ll end up feeling better as a result—but remember: It’s not about you.