What is it?

Brain Recovery, Leisure, and Play put the “life” in work-life balance. These are the things you do in your free time that keep you excited and recharged.

Leisure and Play can refer to similar activities, but they carry different motivations.

Leisure usually refers to how you spend your time free from obligations--work, housework, eating, sleep. Leisure activities serve the purpose of relaxation, competition, or growth. Reading, meditating, art, athletics, and socializing are all leisure activities.

Play is imaginative, intrinsically motivated, nonserious, freely chosen, and actively engaging. Play is motivated by fun and socialization.

Brain Recovery is intentionally engaging in leisure or play to activate or rest part of your brain. If your job is to code all day, brain recovery may be stepping away from the screens and reading a book. If you’re a publisher who reads all day, brain recovery may be playing a video game.

Research Findings

What happens when we engage in Play and Leisure activities is that our brains really do recover. It is good for you to take a break, to use a different part of your brain, to devote time to relaxation, competition, and personal growth. The positive effects are numerous.

Leisure correlates strongly with work ethic and problem solving. Performance, satisfaction, and creativity are optimized with a healthy balance of work and leisure. Spending time playing and especially reading has strong positive effects on socio-behavioral skills.

More broadly, leisure and play have a notable impact on psychological and cognitive well-being. Coping mechanisms, creativity, and motivation are all learned through practice.

Leisure and Play are also shown to have positive effects on memory, decisiveness, physical health, and overall quality of life.

Getting Started

The great thing about leisure and play is that you can get started however you like. The more you engage in an activity for leisure or play, the more it will stimulate Brain Recovery.

Sign up for an improv class. Get a library card (and check our bookshelf for recommendations.) Pick up an instrument. Find your city’s recreational sports league. Doodle. Search YouTube for tutorials on knitting, coding, ballet, how to beat the computer in chess.

What is it?

“Environment” in this section refers to the environment in which you grow up and live. Not the great outdoors, but your home and surroundings throughout your childhood and formative years. Not nature, but nurture.

Unsurprisingly, your environment has a significant impact on the person you become and the habits you form. The impacts may be even deeper and more specific than you thought. If your parents were smokers, you’re more likely to smoke. On the positive side, if you grew up with a family of entrepreneurs, you’re more likely to start your own business. If you saw pro-conservation behavior at home, you’re more likely to recycle.

Research Findings

The environment your family and community created for you can basically impact every corner of your identity. Which also means that the environment you create for your children will strongly shape their identity.

The strongest relationships shown in our research between environment and identity are risk taking & addictive behaviors, housing & urban sociology, recycling & pro-environmental actions, and activity choices. These are the categories where you are very, very likely to mimic your parents.

You’re moderately likely to behave as a product of your environment with regards to purchasing behavior and consumption of goods. The things your family spends money on will become the things you spend money on with a notable correlation. A moderate relationship also exists with poverty. Negative mental health and poor housing are interrelated with socioeconomic status and environmental-behavioral relationships.

Minor relationships between environment and behavior with regards to entrepreneurship, organizational citizenship, physical activity, and work performance. These parts of your personality are formed reflecting your surroundings, but they are less likely to mirror your parents’ personalities exactly.

Getting Started

Of course, there isn’t much you can do to change the way you were brought up. What you can do is learn how your environment might have formed the person you are today. If you are likely to experience negative behaviors, like addiction, knowing from where that behavior comes may help you combat it.

You can also dig into this research and be proactive about the environment you are creating for your children and other impressionable people around you. If you hope your kids grow up to exhibit certain behaviors, the best thing you can do is start practicing those behaviors yourself.

What is it?

Being in a state of Flow is nearly synonymous with being “in the zone.” When you are so immersed in a task that it holds all of your concentration, time might move by very quickly, and you are uninterrupted by stray thoughts.

Flow states often occur when you are competing in athletics, focusing on a puzzle like sudoku, or engaging in a project like writing or drawing.

The term Flow was popularized by Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi, who calls it “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Research Findings

People who regularly experience Flow show notable increases in their focus, confidence, athletic and artistic performance, and competitive mindsets.

Athletic performance and physical activity are the strongest benefactors of Flow States. The flow states of athletes are commonly studied to further the understanding of flow state in sports psychology.

Performance and productivity are increased while individuals are experiencing flow states, but also after. People experience higher levels of productivity, creativity, and happiness for up to three days after experiencing a flow state.

Teaching, learning, and creativity also increase in individuals who experience Flow, as do mindfulness, self-awareness, and inspiration. Individuals who experience Flow States also struggle less with procrastination and addiction, and have better overall emotional and cognitive well-being.

Getting Started

The two main psychological conditions that must be present to experience Flow are

1. Seeing challenges as things that you can deal with and overcome
2. Having the skills to a actually do something about the challenge

“Flow also happens when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable, so it acts as a magnet for learning new skills and increasing challenges,” Csíkszentmihályi explains. “If challenges are too low, one gets back to flow by increasing them. If challenges are too great, one can return to the flow state by learning new skills.”

Create tasks and goals for yourself that are just out of reach. You are capable of attaining them, but it will take effort and skill to do so. Intentionally put yourself in positions where you are likely to experience Flow. You will see positive results not only in your productivity and creativity in those tasks, but also in the rest of your life.

What is it?

To forgive is to let go of past grievances, release anger, and stop feeling resentful. Forgiveness is the mender of relationships after a fight.

In this section, we’re speaking not just of externally forgiving - saying “it’s okay” - but of internally finding peace and releasing vengefulness, anger, and resentment.

Driven by empathy, forgiveness toward someone who has hurt you is overwhelmingly positive, not just for them or your relationship, but for you yourself.

Research Findings

Forgiveness improves psychological well being, self-esteem, and lowers stress levels so strongly that the mental improvement leads to physical improvement. Forgiveness has been shown to lower blood pressure, improve heart function, improve immune system function, and improve overall physiological well-being.

Forgiveness greatly reduces anxiety and stress, even in cases of PTSD, which correlates to reduced feelings of depression.

Greater forgiveness shows ties to increased hope, cognitive flexibility, empathy, and neural activity, and decreased grief, anger, and vengefulness.

Some predictors of forgiveness are commitment, empathy, relationship strength, self-improvement, remorse, and age. If the existing relationship is strong, if you are empathetic, and if you are committed to the other party, you are more likely to forgive them, mend the relationship, and feel the benefits.

Getting Started

Forgiveness is difficult. It is much easier to hold a grudge. But the benefits of feeling forgiveness are so powerfully positive, that it is worth the work.

Reading this research and understanding the value of forgiveness is a great first step. Recognize how forgiveness will positively impact you, in addition to the relationship and other parties.

Identify what needs forgiving. You may be holding onto a grudge or resentment of which you aren’t consciously aware. You may have said something was okay when in fact it still bothers you. You may have moved past a disagreement without truly forgiving.

Acknowledge your emotions, and work to release them. Feeling hurt, offending, or resentful isn’t wrong, but holding onto it will harm you more than anyone else.

Choose to forgive. It is a choice. Release the control the grudge has had on your life, practice empathy, journal, and take other steps toward moving beyond the grievance.

Turn to the experts. We have the research and results on forgiveness, but each case is different. Join a support group, talk to a counselor, or see a mediator if the burden is too heavy to overcome on your own.