Done the Wordle yet? Even brief moments of leisure offer benefits, new study says

A new study shows that taking even a brief moment in your everyday life to do something enjoyable can be beneficial — and we can reap those rewards by intentionally cultivating more of those experiences.

The study, published in July in the journal Leisure Studies, examines how everyday moments of leisure happen, what they mean to people and how they affect people.

“It’s easy to discount the little moments of fun or rest or peace,” said lead author Karen Gallant, an associate professor in the school of health and human performance at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

“These kind of short moments of leisure really matter and it’s worth paying attention to them and for people to be receptive to these kinds of moments in their own lives.”

Gallant and co-authors at Dalhousie, Brock University and the University of Waterloo conducted the study by interviewing people in Halifax in 2022 and 2023 about their experiences with everyday moments of leisure.

Participants spoke of watching the sunrise, blowing dandelion fluffs, taking photos, playing with a Rubik’s cube, making a coffee or chatting briefly with a co-worker.

Gallant said the interviews showed that people benefited from the experiences, even though they were very brief.

“People talked about feeling a sense of stress relief. They talked about returning with a new perspective that was often a more optimistic or hopeful or positive kind of perspective.”

Element of spontaneity

Gallant said everyday moments of leisure are not the same as structured or commodified activities that happen in traditional leisure spaces such as gyms and community centres.

Rather, they can occur spontaneously anywhere and at any time — walking along a street, on public transit or in your own backyard.

They are also accessible to almost anyone, regardless of their obligations in the run of a day.

Gallant spoke of one woman who led a busy life as a single mother of teenagers who was also caring for aging parents. The woman would deliberately build an extra five minutes into her morning routine to putter around and take care of her plants.

“She said, you know, just five minutes would help her feel, just set her day off on the right foot and made a big difference to her,” Gallant said.

Participants told the researchers these moments would give them a sense of joy, accomplishment, connection to nature or people, or the pure sensory pleasure of things like feeling the sun on their skin or savouring a piece of chocolate.

While some people may say focusing on brief moments rather than longer bouts of activity is just a compromise in a sped-up world that limits our leisure time, Gallant said that’s not the case.

She said some participants talked about how everyday moments of leisure were a way of “pushing back against capitalist notions of productive time” and allowed them to “reclaim their sense of self at work” and remind themselves that they’re not just a “pencil-pusher.”

Dr. Rebecca Boehm, a Nova Scotia-based psychologist who founded mental health and wellness clinic Mindful Therapies, said it’s important for people to slow down, take notice and stay present as much as possible.

“It really cuts down on cognitive overload that we experience just day-to-day in modern society,” said Boehm, who was not involved in the study. “Having access to so much information on social media and the news and all of that, our systems, our nervous systems and our brains can really get overwhelmed.”

Boehm said she speaks with her clients about taking “micro-moments” of calm, especially to focus on one sensory input.

“If that’s something beautiful that you’re noticing, or it’s a scent that you’re noticing or something soft that you’re touching, whatever that one kind of point of attention is, that’s going to allow the brain and the body to slow down and kind of tune out the rest of the noise.”

How to create more everyday moments of leisure

Gallant said to a certain extent, cellphones now occupy time that otherwise could have led to spontaneous moments of pleasure.

“They’ve definitely taken away from that idea of being receptive to the things that are happening around you. You kind of tune other things out when you’re focused in on your phone,” Gallant said.

But she said phones can also be a source of everyday moments of leisure, such as playing a quick game or taking a photo of something and sharing it with a friend.

Gallant said people can create more moments of leisure by carving out a couple of extra minutes in their day or by taking a different walking route during an everyday commute to allow the opportunity for surprise or spontaneity.

Perhaps contradictorily, being prepared for spontaneity can also help — bringing peanuts in case you see some squirrels to feed, having binoculars at hand in case you spot a bird, or having a subscription so you can read an article or do an online puzzle.

“If you are open, if you are able to experience them, it becomes kind of a self-reinforcing cycle where people start to see them as quite meaningful,” Gallant said. “And then they look for opportunities for those moments to happen.” — Frances Willick