Mental health and Leisure

TRANSCRIPT

Interviewer:

This is the morning show on Youth Jam with Lachlan Bose broadcasting for you as I do every weekday until noon. And if you listen to the drive show that I was hosting when were youth talk radio, you'll know that each Thursday we have on the show. Dr. Patrick Jones, founder of Perth Psychologist would come on and discuss a different facet of mental health and offer some tips around ensuring that we can retain a healthy mental well-being. He's coming on the Morning Show now each Thursday to continue that trend. So on the other end of the line with me is Dr. Patrick Jones. Patrick, how are you this week? 

Patrick:

I'm good. And I gather we're talking about leisure, amongst other things. 

Interviewer:

We're talking about leisure, amongst other things. And folks can check out the things that we've talked about in the past via the Spotify Playlist. We've put out a few of those around on Facebook. But I thought we'd look at leisure because it seems that across those earlier discussions, that has been somewhat absent. A lot of what we've talked about previously has been quite some of the nitty gritty topics around things like work and relationships and everything like that. But I feel like leisure is a way of opening up to things that people do for fun, so to speak. 

Patrick:

Yeah, for sure. All right, so what have we got? 

Interviewer:

So what benefit does taking the time for leisure have on our mental health? I mean, people know that it's a fun thing to do, but what is the benefit it has on our psychology? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well, there is a model, funnily enough. They call it the effort recovery model. And essentially leisure is a bit of a dark horse in that it's super critical for people, but it's more seen as almost like an optional thing. And yet if people don't have leisure, even though they might have those other ones, like the top five I always talk about in quality of life, relationships, work, money, health, leisure, those five external ones, if you might have a great four out of five, but you don't have any leisure, people don't report good quality of life. So it's a critical part to have that break. And so the effort recovery model essentially is a little bit like the petrol tank that if you have run down the tank through effort, you must have a recovery phase. 

And it's the same, obviously, with all exercise. Recovery is a critical part of building muscle growth or any kind of exercise format. It's the same psychologically with psychological health. So effort recovery model essentially is once you have expended a certain amount of resources, you must simply fill that backup, and then the choice of leisure is based on a few other factors. But just that notion of effort recovery is always essential for not just normal physical health, but also for mental health well. 

Interviewer:

Around the choice of leisure. I know that when people think of what they do for fun or they do for recreation, they can be a host of different things. It can be something they take part in on their own or something they take part in with friends. But what are some of the benefits of individual and group leisure activities respectively? 

Patrick:

Yeah, well individual one is the self-expression opportunity where you can do the thing that you like having it with a group. One of the things it does is not just bring in the leisure bit for yourself, but also the connection that comes. And so again, relationships are seen to be what they call social buffers for stress and all the resilience coping. Research suggests that connection in terms of relationships is a critical part of maintaining our health. So if we have leisure and we combine it with the social part, we almost get two in one. We get the self-expression of being able to just have that time out, but we also get the connection at the same time. So really there are two options but the connection one gives you that sort of extra part of leisure. 

Interviewer:

I feel like people can understand the logistic problems that may arise in focusing solely on what you do for recreation, but highlight any of those problems that may affect someone. What are some of the psychological problems that can arise from indulging solely in leisurely activity? 

Patrick:

Well, one of them is the importance of determining what your leisure is because for example, people who have high-stimulus work, need low-stimulus leisure. And so people are perhaps that are climbing cliffs and whatever else that may not be the best leisure activity if they're super stimulated in terms of extra demands at work. So it's important someone that who might be a bit bored by their work might seek out the challenges. So it's also important to determine what's the relevant leisure. For me, any leisure doesn't kick it's got to be high stimulus work would be low stimulus leisure and simply low stimulus work would be high stimulus leisure, if that makes sense. 

The other bit too is that the research is super strong on this notion called flow, which is where you feel a sense of a match between your interests and your abilities and what you're doing. Sometimes they found that people at work are experiencing a sense of flow more than some of their leisure activities. And if you're experiencing flow, then you get the benefits of leisure because you experience a sense of connection with what you're doing and self-expression. So sometimes people can choose leisure activities where there isn't any flow and that just doesn't give them that recovery. So it's also important to just keep checking if am I in the flow here. Because that's a big part of the. 

Interviewer:

Leisure effect and so if we're using leisure as a bounce back to something that we're doing the bulk of the time through the week, how do we go about discerning how much is an appropriate amount of time to spend on that recreation? 

Patrick:

Well, the quality of life model is a good place to go to answer that one. If you've got those five areas, relationships, work, money, health, and leisure, the question is how's that balance? It's probably worth just looking at that. If you almost segment that pie and say the majority of it or a large chunk of it is leisure, then you're not going to be reporting a good quality of life. The advantage of work is that it's an avenue for what they call the goodness of fit model, which is the expression of your interest, ability education, your personality in a particular thing that you're contributing and getting money from. So like, if you're having so much leisure that you're not able to express yourself through a vocational sort of work environment, then you're not going to be too satisfied. 

Or if all your leisure time is by yourself and you're not allowing for that relationship time with other people, then again, that's too much. So it always comes back to just have I got that quality of life balance? And just to make sure that I've got almost points across those big five if you like. 

And for a lot of people, it's very easy to distinguish or to assert where your leisure time is going to be and where your work time is going to be. Particularly in scenarios where your work is one in which you have to leave the house, go to a different area, and stay at an office or in some cases, a school. But there are instances where your work comes back home with you, like whether it be homework or you get given a task from work that you need to negotiate or you could even have a task that happens around the house that you need to knuckle down on. But in those cases, some of those tasks can be a bit foreboding and a little bit anxiety-inducing. 

Interviewer:

And in that case, it's very easy to fall into the trap of only doing the leisurely activity, particularly when you acknowledge that there is a psychological benefit to it. But how can we negotiate the will to knuckle down over ignoring a task and indulging only in recreation? 

Patrick:

Indeed there is a nice experiment called the Marshmallow Experiment. I think people can find it on YouTube or certainly Google it, and it basically gave kids the opportunity to have one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later, and then they tried to correlate and they've done some longitudinal research over many years, a correlate of those two groups of kids, which ones are a bit more successful later in life? And you found that when they've done this type of research the ability to hold off on now they call delayed gratification so that I can get a better result later, is much more predictive of success overall in life. And there are lots of other studies. 

Another one was where they tried to look at what was the number one or the main predictor of success across important areas like your intelligence or how educated you were, what schools you went to, your personality, your street smarts, all the different things. And one of the things that they found, they couldn't find anything hugely specific, but one thing that they found was quite a constant predictor was the ability to ask this question what impact will what I do now have upon my next moment or the future? And you could almost give two examples which might be like, say, someone who's perhaps living on a park bench going, I've got $5, where can I get my next drink? And so there's no gap there between what I'm doing now and my future while the other person going, I've got $5 now. 

Interviewer:

How's that going to $100? How can I use that to help me when I'm at uni or to get my kids into college was one of the examples I used. So the ability to be able to say in terms of knuckling down, if I don't, what's the impact? And if I do, what's the impact? And I think that really research has found makes a big difference. 

Patrick:

And I suppose you sort of have to negotiate that impulse because, I mean, when I was giving that question, I was thinking very specifically about my time at school, where you'd come home and you'd say, have an assignment that's due in the week. And I used to find it just depressing, the idea of having been at school for 6 hours and then going back into this space that's meant to be your own, in which you can just switch off, but then having to go to a desk again and sit there typing things out. I was like, it's much easier to watch Futurama or the Simpsons or whatever was on at the time right after school. And it's like that almost felt more mentally enriching in a way, and more comfortable than actually doing the work. 

And it's hard to admit that there was a degree to which that was impulsive because it's what I wanted to do. But then I've got to acknowledge that it was probably in some ways what I needed after being out of the house just that moment to switch off. Even now, I find that difficult to fluctuate. And so, yeah, what you were saying there around foreseeing how an action would impact you in the future is something that I think a lot of people I know, myself included, would have to get into the habit of. 

Yeah. The other thing that's I think relevant to that is the fact that some of the things that are required or requested of us are not always hugely natural for us in terms of educational structures. Can be a little bit like a cage or a pen where we have to sort of be in them and then perform when our natural tendency might be just to relax. And so I sort of think about sometimes like the Hot and Tots or those tribes in Africa that are less touched by civilizations' ideas about how they should be spending their day and they have a much more relaxed approach to learning and it's much more kind of organic and connected to nature and so on. And I think sometimes people's difficulties are it's almost like what I would call a system error. 

It's a result of the system requiring a lot from them and some of it is not easy to meet. So I think relaxing is an incredibly important part of the process. So maybe you sometimes have to listen to yourself and then say all right, I've done enough, now it's time to get that balance. 

Interviewer:

And you know, I think particularly I've got it more now that I'm at uni and those breaks are a lot longer. But when it comes to having a wealth of time for leisure, say after about the first month of the holidays, I'm there getting bored, going oh man, I would rather be at work with something to do. And I wonder if maybe it's just that what I'm doing at uni is a little different. And what people do at Uni, where it's usually something that they'd elect to do because they're interested in it, means that they're inclined to do that over being relaxed all the time or relaxing all the time, I should say, or whether that is something that just changes as you get older anyway, as your discipline around working alters. 

Patrick:

Yeah. What have you found over time? Has it changed? 

Interviewer:

It has, and that's what I mean. It's hard for me to say whether it's because what I do at Uni has got a link to what I tend to do for relaxation anyway, in which case it's a much more structured way of going through what I would be doing in my leisure time. And you get introduced to a whole host of different things. But I think my temperament has also changed since leaving school around feeling the worth of working hard on something to reap the benefits in the future. 

Patrick:

Yeah, partly why I asked, I guess, was because I think once we've left school there is a little bit more choice about how we sort of design our life initially. That structure that we're in is very formalized and there is quite a critique of that whole sort of educational model. You have alternative educational systems that are a lot more responsive to the person's natural flow and their needs and it is a very hard one because society is currently geared to support utility or productivity. And therefore, it's like, how am I going to survive in the world and be financially, commercially viable if I don't fully play this game? I think it's also important to ask what is true for me. And sometimes playing that game may not be true for someone. It's important to look at what's their natural expression. 

And one of the distinctions they talk about in the work thing is the difference between the job and the vocation. The job is where they hire your brain and your body and they pay you a fee for it, but you're not too involved in that other than delivering the service or vocation, which is from the Latin Takara to be called, where something of you gets called out in that work. And it's now the self-expression of you. And people value that with this common currency, they call money. And that second one is what we, I think, all need to be heading towards. And I think someone saw on a show recently, someone said, I'd rather not. Something like doing something to save my reputation at the expense of my character. I thought that was a cool line. 

It's a little bit like these commas conscience decisions of what is true for me versus what am I going to get paid for or how people are going to act. And I think it's critical in terms of genuine general happiness to have that listening to oneself and that one's expression in the world is congruent with that true expression of who we are versus what people might be always pushing us to do. 

And the discussion that we've had today is sort of leading in the direction of a discussion of work. And I think that's probably best kept for next week when we'll talk more about mental health and how that fits into what we do for work, whether that be school or an occupation. 

And the link, though, in a sense, is where and we'll drill into this more from a leisure point of view, is that it has to be almost over time, indistinguishable, where I suppose you could say, perhaps professional surfer, is that work or a leisure at that point? And I think ultimately, when I talked before about flow, that's the key ingredient with whatever we're doing, is there a sense of flow there. Because while we create, while we do leisure, ultimately, is to get that flow experience is to get that rejuvenation the effort recovery is to get us kind of reconnected to ourselves and resourced and refueled. In the end, ultimately, our work should be experienced as leisure, ideally. 

Interviewer:

Yeah, of course. Well, Patrick, as always, it's been great chatting with you, and I hope to speak to you again next week. 

Patrick:

Indeed. All right, take it easy. 

Interviewer:

You, too.