As a licensed mental health counselor, I am hearing many of my clients tell me that they are ready to go stir-crazy because of an abundance of free time combined with greater stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many states are reopening their leisure industries, many of my clients feel the safer route — and more thoughtful route toward health care workers and preventing the spread of COVID-19 — is to follow epidemiological and scientific advice by staying home.
Some of my clients are experiencing depression because they have lost their jobs, spend most of their days bored and ruminate on fear-based thoughts. The purpose of this short article is to suggest two interrelated ideas about how to create a psychological breather of positive emotion during your day that can also distract you from worry and stress.
First, develop a home-based optimal leisure lifestyle (OLL), which consists of one serious leisure activity, supplemented by casual and project-based leisure. Serious leisure is centered on acquiring and expressing special skills, knowledge and experience that take months, and sometimes years, to develop. Often, in everyday life, this is known as developing a hobby and is based on mastery gained through hard work and much effort.
My youngest son has taken the extra free time he now has and developed a serious skill-based hobby: He has purchased a watch repair kit and is tinkering away at repairing old watches. I am learning how to play the harmonica to Bruce Springsteen songs.
The Wikipedia page on hobbies identifies hundreds of skill-based hobbies to pursue, many of which are home-based. The internet can help with education and skill development. Often, there are online communities full of people who will welcome and mentor you toward your new serious leisure pursuits.
Casual leisure involves short-lived activities that require little or no specialized training. This type of leisure is based in hedonistic pleasure that requires little effort. For instance, my wife and I are currently watching comedies and documentaries on Netflix and enjoying it.
Project-based leisure is a short-term, one-shot or occasional creative undertaking. My wife is serving her community through her sewing projects and is serving a local nonprofit agency. When our kids were young, they picked a project of leisure learning each week (often it was insects), and we all had fun as we learned together. Just like with serious leisure, you can use the internet to find projects in your community. Often, nonprofit organizations are more than ready to link your personal strengths, passions and skills to a project they are working on.
Developing an OLL will provide transient moments in your day for positive emotion — a psychological breather from going stir-crazy and experiencing brain-numbing boredom. To learn more about OLL and the three forms of leisure I have just described, visit the Serious Leisure Perspective website. There you can learn about Robert Stebbins, who pioneered the academic work over a span of 40-plus years that led to development of the serious leisure perspective and the OLL framework. In addition, this website lists hundreds of studies that provide evidence of how individuals’ positive emotion is increased when involved in serious, casual and project-based leisure.
Research demonstrates that people can remedy stress if they laugh more (casual leisure), find a hobby (serious leisure) and engage in meaning-making activities such as volunteering in their communities or toward social causes (project-based leisure).
Behavioral activation involves having people/clients become more active and involved in life by scheduling activities with the potential to improve their mood. Counselors can help those clients who have an abundance of free time on their hands, whether due to unemployment or wanting to continue self-quarantining, by working with them to create a daily schedule based on developing an OLL. This involves using free time to engage in one serious leisure activity (e.g., starting a new hobby such as digital art, nail painting, cartoon drawing or bird watching), one casual leisure activity (e.g., reading, exploring new musical genres, watching comedies, hanging out with friends virtually) and one project-based leisure activity (e.g., sewing high-grade face masks for health care workers, volunteering at the Humane Society or with a political party, helping a nonprofit with fundraising efforts, creating a family history book by interviewing uncles, aunts and cousins) every day.
Behavioral activation is an evidence-based treatment for depression that has been found to be very effective. In everyday language, it is simply getting people more active and involved in life by scheduling activities that can improve mood. Cultivating an OLL and getting involved in serious, casual and project-based leisure when homebound is one way to create a psychological breather of positive emotion during your day that can also distract you from worry and stress.
Self-disclosure of my OLL
The following is a self-disclosure of my OLL during a three-month-plus self-imposed lockdown at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is provided so that readers can gain a gestalt of how an OLL can be inserted into everyday life that now may feature much more free time.
Serious leisure: Developing and expressing special skills, knowledge and experience; acquires much effort and is linked to enjoyment.
My daily activities
- Learning to play harmonica to Bruce Springsteen songs
- Studying creative writing and attempting to write short stories
Casual leisure: Low skills set focused on distracting; linked to pleasure.
My daily activities
- Watching more documentaries and comedies on Netflix
- Reconnecting with “forgotten musicians” of my past (what I used to listen to as a young man). Includes learning about and appreciating musical narrations and sonic arrangements of different genres of music. Examples: Chris de Burgh, James Taylor, Al Stewart, April Wine, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Thin Lizzy, Supertramp, Triumph and Neil Young. I extended this to the music that my father and mother (both deceased) liked. This included Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, Stompin’ Tom Connors, Hank Snow and Freddy Fender.
- Reading the “classics” in literature, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Project leisure: Short-term activity focused on completing a project
My daily activities
- Cleaning out parts of the house that have not been cleaned out for years and donating much to Goodwill Industries
- Gardening
- Weekly project of exercise for health: Taking a 5- to 15-mile bike ride three days a week; running sprints at an outdoor track one day a week; working out on a Bowflex twice a week
Note: I used my stimulus check to purchase a Bowflex online and set it up in the garage. That piece of exercise equipment, gardening plants/seeds and used books (also bought online) are the only leisure resources I have purchased during the pandemic. Many of my leisure activities, such as playing the harmonica, engaging in creative writing and developing my appreciation of past musicians, have been learned or enhanced through resources on the internet.
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Related reading, from the Counseling Today archives (co-written by Rodney B. Dieser): “The serious leisure perspective in mental health counseling”
A USA Today opinion piece written by Dieser: “Coronavirus pause: People need people, but it’s risky to resume social activities so soon”
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Rodney B. Dieser is the author of five textbooks and more than 100 articles on the topic of leisure. His writing about leisure has appeared in USA Today and the Mayo Clinic Proceedings journal. He is a professor of recreation, tourism and nonprofit leadership and an affiliate faculty member in professional counseling at the University of Northern Iowa. He works 10 hours a week as a licensed mental health counselor for Covenant Family Solutions in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Contact him at rodney.dieser@uni.edu.
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Opinions expressed and statements made in articles appearing on CT Online should not be assumed to represent the opinions of the editors or policies of the American Counseling Association.