Work and Leisure

196 Seppo E. Iso-Ahola and Roger C. MannellBefore leisure is seen as a panacea for dealing with stress in contemporarylife, however, it should be noted that these coping strategies do not alwayswork nor are they necessarily appropriate for dealing with all types of stressors.Iwasaki and Mannell (2000a) assessed the amount of academic stressuniversity students encountered in their daily life for a two week period. Thestudents also reported on how they used leisure to cope with this stress duringthe two weeks. Students who experienced higher levels of academic stresswere more likely to use leisure to escape thinking about this stressor, enhancetheir mood and seek companionship. Interestingly, not all of these strategieshad the desired effect of improving coping and psychological well-being.Though the leisure coping strategies of temporary escape and moodenhancement did counteract the effects of academic stress to some extent andcontributed to well-being, greater use of leisure companionship actuallyresulted in lower levels of well-being. Attempting to cope with academicstress, particularly the stress resulting from pending assignments, by usingleisure companionship, may have diverted the students’ energy from meetingthose deadlines, and consequently, actually increased the stress experienced.While more work needs to be done to understand the operation of leisure as acoping resource, it seems promising to consider the use of leisure copingstrategies as part of a process by which stressful events trigger the use ofcertain types of leisure coping strategies which in turn can influence health.Leisure-stress coping like other types of coping would appear to be adynamic process that is influenced by changing transactions between people’scoping resources (beliefs and coping strategies) and specific contexts andstressors over time. These transactional processes need to be examined if weare to understand not only general coping processes (Lazarus 1995), but alsoleisure as a coping resource (Iwasaki & Mannell 2000b).While evidence is mounting that an active leisure lifestyle may be an effectivecoping resource (e.g. Iwasaki et al. 2001; Mannell et al. 2003), we havemuch to learn. It is also clear that strategies aimed at improving healththrough changes in leisure lifestyle should not focus solely on levels of participation.The coping potential of specific leisure pursuits needs to be considered.Also, leisure is not automatically a ‘force for good health.’ Thechoices people make can be completely benign in their influence on health orin some cases these choices can be quite destructive as with activities involvingsubstance abuse and other forms of destructive behaviour. In fact, recentanalyses of national U.S. and Canadian data suggest that participating in socalledbeneficial leisure activities, including exercise, can even have negativeconsequences (Zuzanek & Mannell 1998). For example, if people who areexperiencing heavy demands from work and family try to pack too muchactivity into their leisure in an effort to cope with stress, stress levels mayactually be exacerbated rather than buffered. Having a physically active leisurelifestyle was found to be more strongly related to physical and mentalhealth among older retired adults who have less demands on their time than