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Stress instead of relaxation: How many people rate their free time
Many people often feel stressed even in their free time. photo
© Thomas Warnack/dpa
How often do you feel like you can do more useful things with your free time? How often do you feel stressed even after you finish work? According to a survey, you are not alone.
You don’t find real relaxation, you don’t sleep or feel restful Stress in your free time: This is how many people feel, according to a survey by the opinion research institute Yougov on behalf of the German Press Agency.
41 percent find their sleep to be not or not at all restful. According to their own assessment, 37 percent cannot relax at all or not well. According to Yougov, 45 percent said that they have very little or rather little time for themselves and their personal interests.
Professor Ulrich Reinhardt, who researches leisure behavior and quality of life, considers such feelings to be “relatively normal” – and not a sign of our times. “Of course the stress has increased in some situations, but in other areas of stress it has also decreased,” says Reinhardt. He bases this on comparisons from the Leisure Monitor of the Foundation for Future Issues, which has been collected for 40 years.
Many people are driven in their free time
However, Reinhardt also notes that many people are active in their free time. “Leisure is defined by voluntariness – when you do something without having to do it. But in our free time we never manage to do that.” The Yougov survey also shows this: 50 percent of those surveyed sometimes or very often feel leisure stress – that is, pressure or time pressure in moments when they do not have to work.
When asked how often they felt that they would rather spend their free time more sensibly than they actually did, 6 percent agreed with the statement “very often”, 16 percent “often” and 33 percent “sometimes”.
According to Reinhardt, free time is often filled with activities such as watching television, making phone calls, and surfing the Internet or social networks. “But if you ask, what would you like to do more often, then yes, many people would like to attend more cultural events, would meet up with friends more often, would do more sports, would do more social activities, would relax more,” counts the researcher.
About the joy of missing something
That is “a bit of a sign of our times,” says Reinhardt. “There is this American term: Fomo – fear of missing out (German: fear of missing something). But in itself it should be called Jomo – joy of missing out. So that you like to miss something rather than constantly having this feeling “You have to be there everywhere.”
And just to make this clear again: leisure time is originally there for the regeneration of and for everyday life, explains researcher Reinhardt. “Of course we would have to take this into account more and not have this feeling that we have to constantly perform in our free time. We don’t just want to optimize our working hours, we don’t just want to optimize our bodies, now we’re also trying to optimize our free time . That’s complete nonsense. You shouldn’t do that under any circumstances.”
How about just being bored instead? Many people don’t currently experience this feeling in their free time: 35 percent of those surveyed said they were rarely or never bored.
But there is also the other side of these numbers: a group of people, usually just as large, experiences their relaxation and leisure time completely differently. 50 percent of those surveyed stated that they had a lot or a lot of time for themselves and their interests. 60 percent can relax well to very well and 55 percent rate their sleep as very or somewhat restful.
For YouGov’s representative online survey, 2,042 people were surveyed between December 19th and 21st. The results were weighted and are representative of the German population aged 18 to 75.