Work and Leisure

Leisure and health 193accomplishment and self-efficacy is derived from mentally and physicallychallenging leisure activities and can therefore provide permanent protectionagainst burnout. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) argues that optimal or ‘flow’experiences (i.e. mentally and physically challenging experiences) are criticalto meaningful human existence and can be found equally well in work andleisure activities.Leisure, stress and healthAs we have seen, burnout is a health problem resulting from specific types ofstressors, that is, those that are job-related. There are, of course, many othersources and types of stress in contemporary life that can threaten health.Today, people report being inundated by time pressure and stressful events inall areas of their lives. They struggle with the stress of managing daily hassles(e.g. financial concerns), role strain (e.g. competing demands parenthood andunemployment), chronic life problems (e.g. long-term disability), life transitions(e.g. retirement), and life crises (e.g. divorce) (Zuzanek 1998). However,though stress has been linked to a variety of physical (e.g. fatigue, heartdisease) and mental health (e.g. depression, eating disorders) problems, noteveryone even under prolonged stress becomes ill. Some people are able toresist stress or ‘cope’ better than others. Researchers have been looking forthe source of these differences in coping ability, hoping that if they werebetter understood, people could be taught to handle stress more effectively,and social arrangements could be improved to facilitate coping (Zeidner &Endler 1996; Salmon 2001).Though stress and coping have been studied by social scientists for sometime, interest in leisure as a potential coping resource is more recent. Colemanand Iso-Ahola (1993) stimulated thinking and research about leisure as acoping resource by formally proposing the leisure buffer model. Leisure servesas a coping resource by strengthening people’s beliefs about being selfdeterminedand having the social support of others. Both of these beliefshave been shown to be important resources for coping with stress. Sinceleisure is typically highly social in nature, leisure participation can facilitatethe development of companionship and friendship, and consequently,strengthen beliefs about the availability of social support. Also, given thatleisure is often the domain of life over which people have the greatest control,leisure by allowing the exercise of choice and control strengthens selfdeterminationbeliefs. These leisure-enhanced beliefs serve to buffer the negativeeffects of stress on health when stress levels are high. When stress levelsare lower, leisure may have less impact on health and well-being.In addition to buffering, there are other ways that coping resources mayprotect health from stress (see Ensel & Lin 1991; Wheaton 1985), and this istrue of leisure as a coping resource as well (Iwasaki & Mannell 2000a;Kleiber et al. 2002). One such alternative occurs when stressful circumstances