Benefits of Skipping Daily Activities.
The urge to succeed by always being busy can be a significant obstacle in your path.
It’s not what you do that benefits you but who you become. Your time is limited, and if you don’t spend it well, your days will end before you know it.
If we think that living requires us to accomplish more and more every day, then life will feel far from enjoyable when circumstances prevent us from achieving our goals or losing interest in these goals.
In such cases, daily activities feel like burdens that prevent us from accomplishing them to perfection. That is why it’s good for everyone who wants to enjoy their day to stop doing things deemed obligatory and start doing things that make us feel free.
If You Don’t Want to Be Controlled by Daily Activities, These are The Best Ways to Stop Being a Slave of Your Responsibilities:
Table of Contents
1. Learn To Say No:
Saying no doesn’t always mean you’re a terrible person. It also says a lot about you as a human being, and that’s that you respect yourself too much to do whatever someone expects from you or tries to impose on you.
If people find out that saying no makes them feel enslaved, they can say, “Not right now.” This way, time is given for people to reflect on whether the activity adds something positive to their lives and whether they will regret not doing it in the future.
You can also suggest another date when you would be available to do that activity.
2. Adapt Daily Activities To Your Rhythm:
If you like to do things spontaneously, daily activities can diminish your spontaneity because they take away your freedom and give it to others.
Understand how important it is for you to stay spontaneous and keep your lifestyle as accessible as possible. Don’t let obligations creep up on you until they become unbearable.
3. Do Things That Make You Happy:
Happiness doesn’t need to be part of doing something, but it doesn’t feel like work; everything becomes exciting and vibrant. Find what makes you happy about life and try to have as much of it as possible by creating healthy boundaries between work and play.
Skipping a day’s work or avoiding household chores may sound like heaven for many people. However, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis, the effects of “slacking off” — at least in moderation — might be positive and go beyond enjoyment and relaxation: Skipping daily activities could also help people learn and remember information better.
“When you are on a schedule, your brain can get stuck in a rut,” said Janina Steinmetz, lead author of the study and postdoctoral psychology researcher at Washington University. “It probably evolved not to get good at one particular task every day but to adapt to different tasks throughout the year.”
The researchers argue that our brains’ ability to adapt quickly would have been particularly beneficial during evolution because it would have allowed people to learn new skills more quickly throughout their lives.
This might also explain why weekends are often synonymous with sleeping in, starting late, or taking it easy after work hours.
“When you take a break, your brain changes, making it easier to learn something new,”
To reach this conclusion, researchers tested 88 participants’ ability to remember word pairings in three experiments. The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.
In one experiment involving 48 undergraduate students, half of the group learned word pairs on days when they were asked to do an undemanding activity between one and four times during two-hour periods throughout the day.
The other half were required to do undemanding activities every 30 minutes during each testing session for ten consecutive hours without breaks. Afterward, all participants remembered about 20 percent more of the word pairings when their brains were allowed time to relax over extended periods.
In a second experiment involving 48 undergraduate participants, the group asked to “relax” between word pairings showed an even more significant memory improvement 24 hours later, recalling 20 percent more word pairs.
Those subjected to regular intervals of undemanding activities throughout the day remembered a similar amount after 24 hours as those who took breaks only during the 10 hours.
But it is not just about sleeping on your desk at work – time spent relaxing before learning new information may be equally important to improving long-term learning and memory.
“If you are preparing for an exam or trying to remember something, taking time off right before learning the material might help,”
“Our brains need to take a break after learning something new,” Steinmetz said. “It’s like exercising before playing a game of tennis. You warm up your body.”
The study is part of an ongoing effort by researchers to understand how the brain processes information when multitasking and why that might lead to forgetting.
Their next steps will focus on memory formation in realistic situations, such as studying for an exam, listening to a lecture while checking email, or doing work simultaneously.