Work (as you may have heard) sucks. Everyone’s too busy, burnout stalks the land, open-plan offices are making us miserable, and all that sitting down is killing us. No wonder we dream of escaping the nine to five, perhaps even achieving a four-hour workweek, or running a business from the beach, sand between your laptop keys be damned.
So, uh … how come a newly published study concludes that most people are significantly less stressed at work than they are at home?
In her Wall Street Journal column this week, Elizabeth Bernstein summarizes the research, which involved asking 122 adults in “a midsize north-eastern US city” to swab their cheeks six times a day to monitor levels of cortisol, a hormonal marker of stress levels. (They used handheld timers to stay on schedule.) The result: a majority of people – men and women, parents and non-parents alike – had higher cortisol levels at home than at work.
The research did reveal some gender differences: as well as being less stressed at work, women, but not men, were also more likely to report feeling happier there. That’s presumably because women are still so much more likely than men to return home to a long list of housework and parenting tasks, postponing the point at which they can settle down to truly nourishing, restorative activities, such as spending 45 minutes indecisively browsing Netflix before deciding not to bother.
But the headline finding is the really striking part: huge numbers of us, it suggests, find work less stressful than being at home. Bernstein runs through some of the likely reasons: we get paid at work; paid work is more socially esteemed than housework, parenting, or caring for relatives; it’s usually easier to achieve a satisfying sense of progress in our careers than in our relationships. Moreover, the emotional boundaries of office life mean you rarely have to deal with your colleagues’ troubles or tempers in the way you’re obliged to deal with those of your children or spouse.
Yet the biggest culprit, I'd be willing to bet, is that we tend to think about our free time in a completely self-defeating way.
Work dominates our culture so completely that we can't help but think of "leisure" as a negative idea, defined against work – the part of the day or week when you're finally freed from obligations, when you can relax and kick back and, should you desire it, do nothing at all. But as Winifred Gallagher explains in her 2010 book, Rapt, the apparently delicious strucurelessness of modern leisure is really the enemy of happiness.
Gallagher quotes research showing that “on the job, [people are] much likelier to focus on activities that demand their attention, challenge their abilities, have a clear objective and elicit timely feedback” – conditions conducive to the state of worry-free absorption known as "flow". By contrast, television has that effect only about 13% of the time, according to the leading researcher of flow, Mihalyi Cziksentmihalyi.
We'd almost certainly feel better, then, if we treated leisure as time that needs planning and structuring, no matter how strange that might feel at first. Spontaneity is overrated: if you hold off deciding how to relax until it's time to relax, you're probably going to make the laziest choice, not the most happiness-inducing one.
The great English journalist Arnold Bennett had this all figured out more than a century ago, when he wrote his little book How To Live On 24 Hours A Day. Addressing the burgeoning ranks of suburb-dwelling London commuters, he bemoaned the way the office worker's habits:
[The office worker] persists in looking upon those hours from 10 to 6 as ‘the day’, to which the 10 hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. Such an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in the odd 16 hours, with the result that, even if he does not waste them, he does not count them; he regards them simply as margin."
It's fashionable, these days, to talk about the importance of "downtime", and nobody could disagree – but let's not ignore the somewhat sinister implications of that phrase. It risks defining every minute we're not working, producing value for our employers and their shareholders, as time that exists solely for the purposes of recovering or relaxing or just hanging around until work – "uptime" – begins again. If we gave it the respect it deserved, if we treated it as a different kind of uptime – we'd plan and structure it as carefully as our work lives.
Or, you know, alternatively, feel free to keep scrolling through that Suspenseful Canadian Foreign-Language Documentaries Featuring Horses category on Netflix, if you prefer.
