Intuitively, we feel that work and leisure are different experiences. Work requires effort, concentration of attention, expenditure of physical and mental energy. At the end of the day, this leads to a feeling of fatigue and a desire to have some period when the hormonal background, heart rate, and other physiological processes can return to their original level.
If this does not happen, our fatigue increases, the body is exhausted, which affects our health. It’s not normal when at the end of the day you can’t relax, you can’t focus on current affairs, and you start the next working day already tired.
People who remain without rest complain of fatigue, psychological distress and cardiovascular problems. A teacher at the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, told what kind of rest contributes to quality recovery:
Most of the things we do can be divided into those that make more and less demands on us. Things that don’t make special demands on our psychobiological systems, like lying on the couch and watching TV, will promote recovery the most. But not everything is so simple – passive rest correlates with boredom and apathy.
Research has shown that low-effort activities have little or no effect on recovery: people don’t always feel rested and ready to go after them.
There is also an assumption that what exactly a person does in his spare time is not too fundamental. But it is important that this experience allows you to completely distract yourself from work, relax, promote self-development and return a sense of control over the distribution of your own time.
If you can answer the following 4 questions in the affirmative, your vacation can be considered complete.
In my free time from work, I…
forget about work?
do I have time to rest?
expanding my horizons?
manage my time independently?
The ability to distract yourself is especially important during busy and oversaturated working days.
Activities that help you relax, such as listening to music, walking in nature, and taking a warm bath, are directly related to life satisfaction scores and inversely related to health complaints, exhaustion, and sleep problems.
Research has shown that the experience of meditation or prayer at the end of the day promotes recovery, reduces fatigue, and improves sleep quality. Sleep is also a period of deep relaxation and recovery. It is important for an adult to sleep an average of 7-9 hours a day.
Strenuous work does not increase the duration of sleep, but worsens its quality. The more exhausted a person is, the worse he sleeps.
Sports and hobbies of all kinds can also help with recovery, and in addition, promote self-development and have many accompanying benefits for our health. Sports activities contribute to the production of endorphins, increase the secretion of norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine, which have an antidepressant effect. Also, intensive exercises allow you to distract yourself from thoughts.
