Pleasurable and enjoyable activities have multiple emotional benefits: they can bring about more positive emotions and boost overall mood.
You might say “well duh!”. Engaging in enjoyable activities sounds pretty obvious for benefitting mental health, but it is surprising how little we as people actually engage in personally enjoyable activities. But recent research has found that getting more of these activities can help prevent things like anxiety and depression.
Enjoyable activities can be physical or nonphysical. Even things like reading or other at-home activities can bring about positive emotions. The most helpful for emotions it is that is something you enjoy (these can be different for different people) and that there is a mix of activities.
To increase positive emotions, it helps to do these activities intentionally both as part of a weekly schedule and spontaneously. Breaking out pleasurable activities you may not have planned to do when you notice you may be having a more difficult or stressful day can be very effective for mood.
Hi! I’m Dr. Matt B., and these are your Emotional Minutes. Welcome back. I’m doing one of my most enjoyable activities today: skiing. Today I wanted to talk about enjoyable activities. Doing enjoyable activities has a lot of benefits for positive emotions. We can really feel a sense of joy in the moment, appreciation, and excitement. After the fact, we might feel a lot of gratitude for the experience. We have a sense of accomplishment from doing the things that we did.
Enjoyable Activities
Enjoyable activities can encompass a lot of things. It can be physical like skiing, going for a bike ride, doing a craft or activity with a friend or a family member, or just reading up or commenting online on a topic of interest. A lot of times, people might think an enjoyable activity is obviously going to give you joy or be enjoyable. Still, it’s shocking that most of us don’t schedule these things into our week.
Enjoyable activities have a lot of benefits for positive emotions. The benefits include focusing attention away from negative emotions or stressful situations in our lives. It also boosts our mood and gives us more positive moods throughout the day or week.
Identify Your Enjoyable Activities
It takes a lot of intentional or purposeful action to make sure to get those enjoyable activities into your schedule. Of course, what is considered enjoyable activities can be different for everyone, so one of the first things that can be helpful is generating your list for yourself on what those things are. These will be different for different people, but what are the things that give you a sense of enjoyment, pleasure, appreciation, and excitement. You may also experience small doses of excitement at the moment while you’re doing them.
These can be physical or nonphysical activities. Examples of physical activities include athletic sports, skiing, hiking, or activities like that one of those. It also could be something you might do at home, such as a puzzle, a craft, or gardening. It’s less about the activity and more about the enjoyment you get from it. It can be good to have a mix of things. Consider having activities you can do at home by yourself and something you can go out and do with a friend or outdoors.
Adding Variety
Another thing is to generate ones that are both social and non-social. We can’t control other people’s behaviors. I’m sure you’ve had times when you wanted to do something and maybe even had it planned, but somebody canceled, and perhaps you didn’t end up doing it. Having things you can do with other people is a good thing, but making sure you also have activities that you can do by yourself at home or that you might enjoy breaking out if there’s no one around to do things with in a social sense. Activities you can do by yourself allow you to still get those benefits of doing enjoyable activities.
There can be good to have a mix of things you might schedule. For me, on Sundays during the winter I go skiing. Having these scheduled activities is excellent. But also having something that you can break out. Maybe it’s some crafts you do in your home or a website you like to go on to chat with people.
This relates to a topic we’ve discussed on Emotional Minutes called behavioral activation. Having those things scheduled multiple times throughout your week and making time for them will help give you an overall baseline mood. Also, then having those things that you can break out on a whim if you need them or if you’ve had a more difficult day. These can be used at the moment to bring up your mood when you need to do so.
When Doing the Activity isn’t an Option
Sometimes it can be tough to get to enjoyable activities. Some people have physical limitations where some activities are challenging for them, or maybe it is nighttime, so something you want to do isn’t available. In these situations, reading up or watching videos on topics you like is a good option. So, maybe you’re not doing the activity itself, but you’re going online and checking out videos about it and learning more about it. This can really help.
Sometimes it takes getting creative in terms of doing enjoyable and positive activities. If you can’t do the activity itself, find ways to do things that are related to the activity. Skiing is a pretty good example because there’s a whole time of year when people can’t ski. People who like skiing will do as much as possible to stay engaged with the sport. They might watch ski videos or read up on ski form to improve their ski form. They may also research ski destinations that they might visit. This is the case with other things. For instance, you can’t garden in the middle of winter or at night. Maybe you’re reading up online about different ways to garden or methods or plants you can plant.
Today we talked about enjoyable activities, and hopefully, that was helpful. This is just one of a couple of pathways to positive emotions that we’ve been talking about here. We’ll talk about more in the next couple of episodes. I’m Dr. Matt B., and these are your Emotional Minutes. We’ll see you next time.
