The joy of staying at home during the May Day holiday can only last for a short 5 hours?

Audit expert: Li Xianhong

National Level 2 Psychological Counselor

The May Day holiday is approaching. Due to changes in the epidemic situation, everyone may have to give up travel plans and be forced to stay at home.

Source: Internet

But there are also many people who are eager to have a few days off to have a good rest. With the quickening pace of life, people are busy with work. During this rare holiday, the "lying down youth" will of course choose to lie at home and happily "fish"!

But is it true that “the more you lie down, the happier you will be”? Is it true that as long as you stay away from busyness and have more free time, you will become happier and happier?

The fact is, the less time you have, the less happy you are likely to be!

Recently, a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology specifically discussed the relationship between free time and human happiness. Through the analysis of tens of thousands of people, the research team found that people's happiness is not directly proportional to their free time. Beyond a certain limit, it will be counterproductive.

Source of paper title丨pubmed official website

The more free time you have, the happier you are? I believe everyone knows the happiness of "taking some time off from work". During busy workdays, you can feel extremely happy by taking a break or watching a TV series. However, when we have more free time, will our happiness increase?

Source: bixabay

To answer this question, the research team analyzed 21,736 data points from the 2012-2013 "American Time Use Survey". The data providers were in the age range of 15-85 and were divided into two groups, namely "full-time workers" and "non-workers".

In the experiment, the researchers asked the subjects what they had done in the past day, including specific events and time spent, in order to calculate each person's free time in a day. At the same time, the researchers also collected data on the subjects' happiness experience when spending their free time, so as to conduct quantitative analysis.

The experimental results found that there is a negative quadratic relationship between free time and subjective well-being. Although too little time is indeed related to the decrease in subjective well-being caused by stress, too much time cannot be continuously converted into an increase in subjective well-being. The image presented by the data is like a parabola. In 0-2 hours, happiness will increase with the increase of free time; 2-5 hours, the relationship between the two tends to be stable; and after 5 hours, happiness gradually decreases with the increase of free time.

The relationship between happiness and free time Source: Paper "Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being"

In addition, the researchers also found that the relationship between free time and personal happiness remained the same whether it was on weekdays or weekends. So, although having your own free time is indeed a desirable and happy thing, if you have too much free time, you will not be happy.

I believe that everyone has had this experience. When you have nothing to do for a long time, you will feel empty, bored, without passion, and depressed... So what can you do to break this bondage and gain more happiness?

The true meaning of happiness is "fulfillment". "Happiness" is a kind of pleasant feeling in people's spirit and spiritual satisfaction. In order to find out how to get real happiness, the research team recruited 2,550 volunteers and asked them to imagine and describe three groups of free time: long, medium and short. Imagine what they would do and what experiences they would have if they had so much free time every day for half a year. But the results show that although this is just imagination, too much free time will still reduce people's sense of happiness.

On this basis, the researchers recruited another 5,000 volunteers and asked them to imagine how they would spend their free time, long, medium, and short. But this time, each group of volunteers was divided into two groups: one group imagined that they would use the time to do meaningful and useful things, while the other group imagined that they would do something useless and meaningless.

By analyzing the results of this group of experiments, the researchers found that when people use their free time for productive activities, that is, to do more meaningful things, the negative effects of having too much free time can be weakened, people will feel happier psychologically, and their sense of happiness will gradually increase over time. On the contrary, they will fall back into the previous "parabola".

Data comparison source: Paper "Having too little or too much time is linked to lower subjective well-being"

How to get more happiness in your free time? The self-determination theory in social psychology believes that if a person wants to achieve a high level of happiness, he or she must meet three basic psychological needs: autonomy needs, competence needs, and relationship needs.

Self-determination theory source: Tencent

"Autonomy needs" can be understood as an internal driving force, that is, one wants to do something from the bottom of one's heart, rather than being asked or dominated to do something; "competence needs" means people want to complete some challenging things in order to enjoy the sense of accomplishment after completion. This sense of accomplishment will bring people great psychological satisfaction; "relationship needs" means the need to establish social relationships with others, which is a process for individuals to gain recognition in social interactions.

Combining these three needs, we can see that if we want to avoid feeling empty and decadent in our free time, we must actively do something we like and meaningful, or use our free time to socialize, so that we can have a sharply rising sense of happiness.

Simply "lying down" and "playing badly" seems to be complete happiness, but when it really comes, we will only feel emptiness in our hearts and have no self-worth at all.

Social source: pixabay

So, even though we may not be able to go out and meet friends on May Day, we can still do something meaningful at home, and don’t just lie down for five days~