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You didn’t think I’d stop telling you how to live your life just because you are on a break did you? I’ve been meaning to write about leisure for a while. I finally got around to it.

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Nothing says “I’m ready to have some fun” quite like reading an article about how to have fun.

Okay, that’s probably not true.

With that in mind, I’ll keep this reasonably short. I’m genuinely happy for you to not be reading this blog and instead using the holiday break to enjoy your life.

You might reasonably ask why I am spending part of the holiday break writing a blog post about leisure instead of, you know, having some leisure myself.
And you’d have a point.
A sharp one.
But here we are.

With the help of my AI research assistant (NotebookLM, today), I fed a pile of academic articles about leisure into the digital soup and asked it to spit back some wisdom. I then applied what remains of my human writing skills to turn that into something vaguely readable.

If this helps you use your break a little better, we all win.

 

What Do We Mean by “Leisure”?

Leisure isn’t a word the collective ‘we’ seem to use much anymore. We’ve been marinating in grind-and-hustle culture for so long that we’ve almost lost the language for enjoying life.

But leisure is both an important word and a more important activity.

At its simplest, leisure refers to the voluntary activities we choose to do in our free time for enjoyment. Over the years, my own leisure activities have included playing guitar, building computers, hitting a ball against a wall, gardening, photography, art, making terrible websites, starting projects I never finish, and a very short-lived interest in stir-fries.

At a deeper level, leisure is one of the quiet building blocks of a life that feels worth living.

We often assume that meaning and purpose mostly come from work or study, because that’s where income, contribution, and status live. But research consistently shows that leisure meets many of the same psychological needs as work:

• Autonomy – choosing what you do

• Competence – getting better at something and expressing strengths

• Relatedness – feeling connected to others

The difference is that leisure delivers these benefits with a much higher dose of enjoyment and far less pressure for outcomes. You get many of the same psychological nutrients but with more play and less performance.

If you’re on break, you probably have at least some time that isn’t already spoken for by work, study, or obligations.

So the question becomes:

How might you use that time in ways that actually restore you?

 

The Situation You’re In

It’s the holiday break.

You wake up.
You put on something resembling clothing.
You brush your teeth.

The day stretches out in front of you, largely unclaimed.

Your responsibilities are fewer than usual.
You are, for once, the architect of your day.

So, how do you design it for leisure?

 

Tip 1: Choose Activities You’ll Feel Good About Afterwards

Most of us know the difference between ending a day feeling like we did something that mattered, versus ending it wondering where the time went.

To be clear: I’m not against wasting a day. They can be a necessary antidote to constant optimisation. Sometimes lying around doing very little is exactly what’s needed (i’m a master of it if anyone needs tips).

But there’s a healthy middle ground – where you’re just intentional enough at the start of the day to choose a few things you’ll feel quietly glad you did by the end.

So what kinds of leisure tend to leave people feeling good about themselves?

Broadly speaking, activities that satisfy core psychological needs:

• Autonomy: You chose it freely

• Competence: You’re learning, practising, or improving

• Relatedness: You’re connecting with people who matter

• Beneficence: You’re helping someone or contributing beyond yourself

This is sometimes called active or “serious” leisure. It includes things like hobbies, creative pursuits, skill-building, or volunteering. These activities often take effort, but they reliably increase people’s sense of meaning: my life makes sense, feels worthwhile, and connects to something larger.

At the other end of the spectrum is passive leisure. The archetype of this is sitting back and being entertained, like a Netflix binge. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but on its own it tends to be less satisfying over time.

Some activities sit in the middle. Reading, for example, is partly passive (someone else wrote the book) but also cognitively and emotionally active. You’re engaged, learning, and often absorbed in a way that feels restorative rather than numbing.

 

Tip 2: Prioritise Nature and Restoration

After a long or intense work period, my default move is to retreat indoors, find a new TV series, and make a serious dent in it. Chocolate may or may not be involved. (It is.)

I like to explain this as my pale Celtic skin being afraid of the sun.

But I’ve lived long enough to notice a pattern:
when I spend at least some time outside (even just in my garden) I end the day in a noticeably better headspace.

A short ride on my ridiculous e-bike along the coast.
A visit to a nursery and the purchasing of my 300th plant.
Seeing an animal doing something mildly interesting (I’m partial to echidnas, but I rarely see them)

Research is very clear here: contact with nature reliably restores mental energy, reduces stress, and supports recovery from sustained cognitive effort. Green spaces (parks, forests) and blue spaces (coasts, rivers, lakes) are particularly powerful.

If you’re low-energy (like me), this can be very simple: reading in a park, listening to music outdoors, or taking a gentle walk.

If you’re more active, “green exercise” which is physical activity in natural environments amplifies the benefits of movement alone. Hiking, cycling, kayaking, or anything mildly adventurous tends to deliver both physical and mental benefits.

Whilst the connection with nature is critical, a key part of this is disconnection from the built, work-coded environment. Switch the phone off. Get away from screens. Give your nervous system a break from cues associated with deadlines, productivity, and performance.

 

Tip 3: Add Just Enough Structure

It feels slightly wrong to talk about planning your fun.

But some structure turns out to be surprisingly helpful.

Across many studies, one of the strongest predictors of actually engaging in leisure (especially physical activity) is the simple ability to plan and prioritise it. You already know this from study and work: imperfect planning works better than no planning at all.

Planning also sends a subtle message to yourself that leisure matters. In fact, one common wellbeing hack is to take your work diary/calendar and make sure you include leisure activities in there, not just work ones.

It doesn’t have to be rigid. In fact, over-planning often backfires. For example, I have a fairly mild inner rebel who likes to take my over-planned day and ruin it.

But under-planning tends to mean the day fills itself with whatever is easiest or loudest.

For me, a good day usually involves identifying around three things that would make me feel satisfied if I did them. Some days that number is higher. Some days it’s lower. But asking the question in the morning makes a difference.

Planning also allows you to use leisure intentionally as a type of social glue. Lining up future leisure time with the availability of friends, family and community allows you get them involved. And given that connection remains one of the most reliable sources of positive emotion and wellbeing across cultures.

And importantly: planning leisure is also a deliberate choice not to plan work or study. That boundary matters.

 

A Final Thought

So there you have it – a simple three-part approach to using your break in ways that are more likely to restore you.

That said, if your plan is to lie around doing very little and scratching various body parts, I won’t stop you. In fact, I’ll defend your right to really own that scratch.

If you’d like to read a little more on the topic, I think this article about ‘rest’ dovetails nicely with the content from this post.

One last finding from the research is worth mentioning:
ideas about leisure aren’t universal.

In many cultures, leisure isn’t just “free time for me,” but more like a state of being (tranquillity, absorption, connection) achieved through deep connection with family, community, land, culture, and ancestry.

The very individualistic idea of leisure as self-focused pleasure is culturally specific.

One way to correct for this is to choose leisure that is relational in nature:
activities that express care for people, places, culture, country, and community (alongside activities care for your body and mind).

Relational leisure doesn’t just help you recover; it helps you remember the important things you are a part of.

 

References

These are the references that I piled into NotebookLM in order to write this piece. Most came from a 2020 special issue in Leisure Studies.