Busy ?

If you want to feel better, keep busy.  No!  Relax and take it easy, then you’ll feel better.  So which approach is correct?  As always, it depends on what are you doing when you are busy and on the outcome that you seek to obtain.

One can be busy in a positive or in a negative manner.  Kahneman et al. (2004) found, for instance, that women in their study spent more time being busy performing activities associated with negative than with positive emotion.   For instance, on a scale of 1 to 6 with 6 being most pleasurable and I being least pleasurable, the women reported spending most time in employment (6.9 hours with a negativity rating of .97), commuting (1.6 hours with a negativity rating of .89) and housework (1.1 hours with a negativity rating of .77).  That contrasted with their spending least time in intimate interaction (.2 hours with a positivity rating of 5.10), exercising (.2 hours with a positivity rating of 4.31), and praying/worshiping/meditating (.4 hours with a positivity rating of 4.35).

Suzanne C. Segerstrom and Daniel R. Evans (2016) wondered about those results, however, and decided to conduct a more thorough analysis of women’s time in pleasurable versus unpleasurable activities.  They concluded first the Kahneman results were misleading in that women spent most of their time at work, and it was work that accounted for most of the negative emotion ratings.  They showed that women were more likely to engage in activities that they considered pleasurable or that yielded the most resources, such as money or acclaim.  It was not just a matter of keeping busy, but keeping busy when busyness either provided its own intrinsic reward or an extrinsic reward that was prized by a specific individual.

Busyness also received a positive endorsement from Sara B. Festini, Ian M. McDonough and Denise C. Park (2016) who looked at its cognitive benefits.  They concurred with previous studies revealing that busier older adults (ages 50 to 89) also were more intellectually astute.  In this case, busyness was determined by asking study subjects questions such as: “How often do you have so many things to do that you go to bed later than your regular bedtime?” and “How often do you have too many things to do each day to actually get them all done?”

Since the Festini study relied on their participants’ self-report which was deficient in indicating the precise nature of their busyness, one cannot know which activities occupied them. Extrapolating from Segerstrom and Evans, we reasonably can assume, but not be sure that the preoccupying activities were ones that provided pleasure, resources, or both.

Gorry Aspen and associates (2015) also had something to say about activities, scrutinizing employment versus retirement.  They found retirement to be superior to employment in promoting both life satisfaction and health.  Moreover, they asserted that although the benefits were most obvious in the first four years after beginning retirement, they continued for at least four more years.

From my point of view, I say now what I said before in my Don’t Rest in Peace book: busyness and relaxation are equally important.  One only can be busy in a positive sense versus relaxed in a positive sense for so long before the two polarities must be switched.  A healthy body and mind will invariably exert their demands on us to maintain an adaptive balance.

References:

Aspen Gorry, Devon Gorry, and Sita Slavov (2015).  Does retirement improve health and life satisfaction?  National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Number 21326, July.  Retrieved from online.

D. Kahneman, et al. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science, 306, 1776 –1780.  http://dx.doi .org/10.1126/science.1103572.

Sara B. Festini, Ian M. McDonough, and Denise C. Park (2016).  The busier the better: Greater busyness is associated with better cognition.  Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 17 May.  No pagination specified.  dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2016.00098.

Suzanne C. Segerstrom and Daniel R. Evans (2016).   Happy all the time?  Affect, resources, and time use.  Emotion, May 23.  No pagination specified.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000187.