Your Mental Health: Using Rest, Relaxation and Leisure to Achieve Greatness
All work and no play makes you a dull human. Right? Some may disagree. Here's the case for rest and relaxation as a mental health-supplement.
Good Morning.
Happy Tuesday.
I hope you had a great long weekend. This week I’m reflecting on what it means to be productive. I’m two months into entrepreneurship, and I’m coming off my first mini-vacation to Killington, Vermont.
I’ve recently shifted my mindset around what it means to be busy and work smarter. I think that millennials like myself (and Gen Z, too, for that matter) — who make up the new majority in the workforce — have to draw a line when it comes to work-life balance.
Previous generations glorify sleepless nights, extended office hours, and overtime. It’s been thrust upon us by the Gary Vaynerchuks and Andy Frisellas of the world. Despite all this, I still don’t see a benefit to sacrificing sleep, or even the occasional leisure activity, for work. I highly doubt that any successful rags-to-riches story involved all work and no play.
My argument today is that your leisure time can (and should) supplement your long-term goals when implemented appropriately. It’s like resting between exercise sets or drinking water throughout the day. There is a “sweet spot” for the amount of leisure time that can contribute to your most productive self (more on this in a minute).
To Be Clear
Before continuing with suggestions on budgeting your rest, relaxation, and leisure time, a word on procrastination: yes, it is a problem many people have. It’s also hard for those procrastinating to distinguish between their bad habits and leisure time. This week’s newsletter is not proposing you put aside important tasks with urgent deadlines in the name of enjoying yourself. But I want to make a quick footnote about slacking off since the common trope these days is “no one wants to work anymore.”
I believe the young adults of today struggle so much with procrastination and leisure time because of both the expectations placed upon us by our elders and the rise of social media. These two factors contribute immensely to feelings of perfectionism and fear of failure. Both of these feelings have causal relationships to procrastination.
It’s no wonder to me that there is also a correlation between depression and procrastination. So when I hear talks about millennial laziness, unwillingness to accept responsibility or entitlement, I often try to remember that other generations did not grow up the way we did (and maybe we both benefit from those differences).
Also, one meta-analysis on procrastinators and intent workers showed that procrastinators often tend to work as hard or harder than non-procrastinators. It’s just one meta-analysis, but I thought it was pretty interesting. If you’ve ever crammed on a school assignment and gotten a better score than your studious peers, you can probably relate.

How We Work: The Levels of Leisure-Taking
With every critical task comes a process on how to get it done. The process for completing this task is different for every individual. Some Type A individuals might tackle every task as quickly as possible. A more laid-back person sometimes called a Type B individual, may take their time, not placing as much emphasis or importance on their outcome.
“Type A” is most commonly thrown around in pop culture — sometimes with a negative connotation — as the hardest worker. A recent Time Magazine article pointed out that psychology has helped identify specific personality traits but not types.
These “types” matter because they’ll help you decide how you work and how to budget leisure time. Type A’s may be more prone to overwork themselves and burn out. Type B may be more susceptible to the procrastination above and take too much leisure time. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, know
Rest Relaxation and Leisure = Productivity?
Okay, now for that “sweet spot” I mentioned earlier. A 2018 study determined an actual, quantifiable number of hours during the year (5813, to be exact) that is optimal for productivity. This number was deduced from empirical data from 21 countries. Once we breach that level, the study found such amounts of leisure can complement work. But if we exceed or go too far beyond this time, it can negatively impact our productivity.
Of course, there’s still more work to be done on this subject, and the paper acknowledges that many economic studies still don’t take leisure time into account when studying productivity. Still, 5813 hours is a lot of time. That’s more than two-thirds of our year. Assuming that this measure of leisure time accounts for our sleep, let’s determine how much actual waking time we have first.
Let’s say we aim to sleep 7 hours a night, 365 days a year. That’s 2,555 hours of sleep. So subtracting leaves us with 3,258 waking hours of potential leisure, or 8.9 hours a day. To be realistic, let’s subtract 4.9 of those hours for daily non-fun things like commuting, cooking (although some might enjoy it), household chores, and wake-up and before-bed routines. We now have 3-4 hours a day to enjoy.
Hopefully, that is (I hate math, so I must really care about you guys for having crunched those numbers).
Here are some of my suggestions.
Drawing and/or sketching — I highly recommend investing in a canvas, a notebook, or some sort of whiteboard to doodle or create stuff with. Drawing things at home is a low-stakes activity that helps to escape from things for a bit. Whether you care about improving your sketches is up to you, but this is the first creative expression option that always comes to mind for me as something that has a low baseline, to begin with.
Writing and journaling — Next on the list, and maybe requiring a bit more effort, is writing. As a writer, I’m biased toward it, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be creative writing. Writing down thoughts, ideas for projects and reflections on your day or plans for the weekend can be your springboard for this activity. Your time spent writing will likely depend on how enjoyable you find it. Having at least 10 minutes to jot down thoughts can still be a vehicle for more consistent action.
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