Too much free time can harm your well-being
EVERYTHING, it is often said, is good in moderation, and a study has found that adage is accurate when it comes to how much “me” time we award ourselves.
Analysis of the selfreported lifestyles of more than 21,000 Americans found that having more free time was linked to increased feelings of well-being, but only up to a point, because when people have more than five hours of free time per day, their state of mind declines.
The study’s lead author, Dr Marissa Sharif of the University of Pennsylvania, said: “People often complain about being too busy and express wanting more time. We found that having a dearth of discretionary hours in one’s day results in greater stress. However, while too little time is bad, more time is not always better.”
Participants in the study, who were all employed, were asked to reveal what they had been doing in the past 24 hours and how they felt.
Researchers found they reported a decline in happiness as their free time exceeded around five hours a day and investigated with their own follow-up experiments, according to the paper, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Two experiments were designed to look at how various amounts of free time – low, 15 minutes per day; moderate, 3.5 hours per day; and high, seven hours per day – influenced participants’ emotions.
In the first experiment, participants were asked to report the extent to which they would experience enjoyment, happiness and satisfaction after having a given amount of discretionary time every day for at least six months.
The moderate group scored highest for well-being and the low group felt stressed, while the high group suffered from a lack of productivity.
The researchers noted potential well-being improved as people had more time to themselves and peaked at two hours a day, with a plateau from two to five hours. Mental well-being was found to be worse in people with more than five hours of free time a day and the researchers designed the studies to see why this was.