Be Leisure Smart, Not Boredom Prone

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“Why is Leisure Important? Let’s start with a premise: using leisure well is a skill. Like all skills, it’s easier to develop if it is taught and improves with practice.

Leisure is critical for well-being. It’s when we relax and blow off stress. We can return to pressing problems with fresh eyes by freeing our minds from pressing problems. It allows us to build new abilities and gain new information. It can help us form and maintain social bonds and relationships. It improves our physical health directly–because we engage in physical activity–and indirectly–because it reduces stress.

Leisure is a time for us to try on new roles and use our imagination and problem-solving skills. For many of us, it’s what defines who we are. We camp and make music and are gamers, artists, bakers, tinkerers, or run the church bazaar or quilt. And that’s much more important to our sense of self than our jobs. And it is critically important to us at all developmental stages–from the cradle to the grave.

Boredom, Leisure, and Flow

People are motivated to stay at an optimal level of arousal: we want to be interested but not stressed. What that means depends on where our heads are at. Sometimes that means staring into space. Sometimes that means hurtling down a ski hill. It depends.

Flow is the state where we are so immersed in what we are doing that we have achieved that optimal level of arousal–completely involved, forgetting ourselves, and happy. When we relax, we aren’t being challenged, but we are content with our current stimulation level.

Like all emotions, boredom has a purpose. When we are under-stimulated–bored–we start looking for things to do. This is where individual differences and skills come into play. The experience of boredom prompts us to increase our level of stimulation. We pick up our phone, scroll or flip on the TV or laptop, and watch a video. It’s easy and solves the immediate problem–we have increased stimulation. Sometimes that’s enough. It may not, ultimately, be satisfying if it doesn’t fulfill other needs that are more effective at relieving boredom–it doesn’t allow us to be creative or to deeply engage in imagination or lose ourselves and move into a flow state. Identifying those other needs and learning to fulfill them is a skill.

Psychologist Linda Caldwell of Penn State University has argued that the last several cohorts of children are under-prepared for using their free time in ways that make them happy. We learn to find things we enjoy through experience–by doing things we like, by noticing that some things make us feel better than others (we like playing kickball or playing video games or reading), and by choosing to do the things we find fun (making a video rather than scrolling Tik Tok). In other words, it follows the same model of behavior that Bandura argues underlies all our behavior: To choose good leisure, we have to want it, know what to do to get it, believe we can do it, and think it’s worth the effort.

One problem, Caldwell has argued, is that often kids don’t know how to create leisure activities for themselves. Many have spent their early years in group settings where their daycare providers and preschool teachers have created fun activities for them. They move to schools with scheduled activities afterward. As teens, they are either scheduled (and don’t need to create leisure for themselves) or dumped into situations where they have lots of free time and don’t know what to do with it. So they fall back on things they know–and things we sometimes do. They scroll and text. They watch videos. They hang out. Good things–but usually effective boredom controls over the long haul."

KEY POINTS

• Leisure and relaxation are critical for our mental and physical well-being. Creating effective leisure is a skill.

• Just as stress tells us we are overstimulated, boredom tells us we are under-stimulated. Use it to spur action.

• You can choose to pay attention to what makes you feel good and bad and choose activities that make you happy.

Read the whole article here

#Boredom #Leisures #Well-being

💬 How do you combat boredom?