Is it bad to have a lot of free time?

Everyone values ​​having free time, a time that we can occupy with our hobbies, go for a walk, meet friends or simply take the opportunity to rest from the hectic pace that life implies worker.

The relationship between happiness and free time seems to be directly proportional. As our free time grows, so does our sense of well-being, but to what extent? Is there a limit?

Is it bad to have a lot of free time? This has been a question approached experimentally in the last decade and whose revealing data we are going to discover below.

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Is it bad to have a lot of free time?

Most workers live the hectic pace of day to day. Most of our days are occupied by work obligations, which make us feel like we don't have time for anything. We tell ourselves that we need more vacations, that we wish weekends were three days or, fingers crossed, we get out of work earlier.

The word "business" comes from the Latin "nec" and "otium", literally meaning "not leisure", which is why we associate that how many more hours of work we have less time we will have to enjoy our hobbies, family, friends and rest, activities that bring us well-being and satisfaction. It is for this reason that

most have the idea in their heads that having more free time means being happier, but... What is true about this statement? Can it be bad to have too much free time?

It has been this question that has motivated Marissa Sharif's group, made up of researchers from the universities of California and Pennsylvania, conducted research focusing on finding out to what extent free hours involve well-being and happiness.

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Not too much not too little

Although previous research has already pointed out that having too little free time implies dissatisfaction and a lack of well-being, having too much time is not always good. In Sharif's research, titled The Effects of Being Time Poor and Time Rich on Life Satisfaction (The effects of having a lot and little free time on life satisfaction) The researchers analyzed data obtained from a sample of about 35,000 people.

In the first part of this research, data from 21,736 US citizens who participated in the American Time Use Survey between 2012 and 2013, in which participants indicated what they had done in the 24 hours prior to answering the questionnaire, indicating the time of day and the duration of each activity they had carried out, in addition to reporting their degree of wellness.

The researchers found that, as free time increased, so did well-being, but there was a limit: at two hours it was maintained, and when they had five hours of free time it began to be noticeably reduced.

In another phase of their research, Sharif et al. (2018) also analyzed information obtained from 13,639 Americans who participated in the National Study of the Changing Workforce between 1992 and 2008. There were all kinds of work-related questions in the survey, but some were aimed at finding out what was the amount of leisure time that the participants had. Among these questions were:

"On average, the days you are working, how many hours / minutes do you spend in free time activities?"

“All things considered, how do you feel about your life these days? Would you say you feel: 1. Very satisfied, 2. Somewhat satisfied, 3. Somewhat dissatisfied, 4. Very unsatisfied"

Again, Sharif's group found that high levels of free time were significantly associated with high levels of well-being, but there was still a limit. People who exceeded that free time limit did not show greater well-being after that point, meaning that more free time is not synonymous with more happiness. It is like in the story of Goldilocks: neither the small chair nor the big chair make her happy, only the medium one.

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Free time, well-being and productivity

To better understand this phenomenon, the researchers carried out two online experiments involving a sample of more than 6,000 participants. In the first experiment, the volunteers were asked to imagine having a certain number of hours off each day for a period of six months.

Participants were randomly assigned to have little (15 minutes a day), moderate (3.5 hours a day), and a lot (7 hours a day) free time. Participants were asked to indicate what they thought their levels of enjoyment, happiness and satisfaction would be.

Participants in the groups with little and a lot of free time reported that they believed that they would have lower well-being compared to the moderate group. The researchers found that those with little free time felt more stressed than those with moderate free time, contributing to a lower well-being, while those with a lot of free time felt more unproductive than those of the moderate group, which also reduced their subjective well-being.

The second experiment consisted of finding out the potential role of productivity. To do this, they asked the participants to imagine having moderate (3.5 hours) and high (7 hours) per day, but they were also asked to imagine investing that time in productive activities (p. g., exercising, hobbies, or running) and unproductive activities (eg. g., watching television or using the computer).

The researchers found that participants with more free time indicated lower levels of well-being when doing unproductive activities. Instead, those who did productive activities, even when they had been assigned in the group of those who had a lot of free time, felt satisfied and with levels of well-being similar to those of the people in the moderate free time group.

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Retirement and unemployment

Although at first the research had focused on finding what was the relationship between subjective well-being and hours of free time available, the fact of investigating how people spend their leisure time and to what extent it influences their well-being also led to findings revealing. His research suggests that having whole days of free time to fill in can lead to a feeling of unhappiness.

With this in mind, the research highlights the need to learn to properly manage the free time, especially when one is going through periods such as retirement or being in the unemployment.

People who find themselves in these types of situations can run the risk of feeling deeply dissatisfied, unhappy and feeling that they waste their time, which is why it is very It is advisable to fill in the empty time with activities such as attending training courses, signing up for languages, doing sports or doing any activity that an organization has in the weather.