Teach Yourself to Rest Read Free

Is “Leisure Guilt” Ruining Your Time Off?

Switching Off · 7 min read

Time off is supposed to restore us, but a study published this summer suggests that sometimes it doesn't, and the reason has less to do with what people do with their free time than with how they feel about taking it.

The researchers call that feeling leisure guilt, and they found that people prone to it enjoy their free time less and get fewer psychological benefits from it.¹

In July 2026, Hyunjin Koo and colleagues published a paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin introducing and studying a psychological construct they call “leisure guilt,” the feeling of guilt or unease about spending time leisurely rather than productively. Across four studies, they developed and validated a scale measuring people’s proneness to leisure guilt. In their experience-sampling study, they then repeatedly asked people about their leisure experiences as they unfolded in everyday life.¹

People experienced leisure guilt during about 14 percent of their leisure occasions. That is roughly one out of every seven times they were doing something they considered leisure. This was more common among younger adults, women, and people with lower socioeconomic status.¹

In her 2023 dissertation, Koo found that people who were more anxious about their socioeconomic standing reported greater leisure guilt. Those who experienced more leisure guilt also reported more stress and anxiety, alongside lower subjective well-being and self-rated health. The findings are correlational, so they don't establish that status anxiety causes leisure guilt, or that leisure guilt causes those poorer outcomes.² The people most prone to leisure guilt got less from their free time, reporting poorer leisure experiences and fewer of the psychological benefits associated with leisure.¹

One detail in the new study that is particularly interesting is that leisure guilt was more common during solitary leisure than social leisure. That suggests leisure guilt may be less common when people are with others, although the study doesn’t tell us why.¹

The important finding, then, isn't simply that people sometimes feel guilty while they're relaxing. It's that people who experience more leisure guilt seem to get less from their free time. The time can still be there, the activity can still be enjoyable, but the psychological return is smaller.¹

Pattern

We tend to think of leisure as the thing that happens after the important things are done.

The problem is that productive work doesn't have a natural finish line.

There is always another email, another task, another way to get ahead, which means leisure is always competing with an imaginary future version of ourselves who has finally caught up.

That creates a strange imbalance where work rarely has to explain why it deserves our time, while leisure often does, particularly when its value is difficult to measure or justify.

Belief

The belief underneath leisure guilt isn't really “I should always be productive.” The deeper issue is that we don't all grow up with the same idea of what makes time worthwhile.

We start picking up those ideas early. Parents' expectations, the activities they encourage, what schools reward, and the way achievement is talked about can all shape what children come to value and how they spend their time.³

A child doesn't need to hear that leisure is a waste of time.

They can get the message from what gets praised, what gets rewarded, and what adults seem to take seriously.

Finishing what you're supposed to finish gets attention.

Doing well gets recognition.

Being busy can look like you're trying.

Over time, those experiences can influence what feels like a worthwhile use of your time and what feels harder to justify. That helps explain why knowing you need a break doesn't necessarily make it feel easy to take one. You can consciously believe and flat out know that rest matters while still carrying a deeply familiar sense that time should be put to good use.

Productive time feels like an investment. It can build skills, income, status, or progress. Leisure can feel more like spending. The time gets used, and then it's gone. When you're already worried about your standing, that pressure can become even harder to ignore.² ⁸

There is some experimental evidence that this way of thinking actually changes the experience of leisure. In one series of studies, people who viewed leisure as wasteful enjoyed it less. When researchers temporarily activated the idea that leisure was wasteful or unproductive, people enjoyed leisure activities less, too⁴.

We can also absorb a way of judging our time in which its value depends on what it produces. Once that way of thinking becomes familiar, leisure doesn't just have to feel good, it has to feel justified.

The Reflex

Once leisure has to compete with everything else that could be done, free time can become another moment for weighing whether you're using it well.

“Could I be doing something more useful with this time?”

“Should I really be spending my evening like this?”

“Why does relaxing feel like I should be doing something else?”

“I'll relax once I've finished everything.”

The questions aren't about whether you enjoy the leisure. They're about whether you can justify spending your time on it.

You can be enjoying yourself and still have part of your attention caught up in whether you should be doing something else, or whether you've done enough to justify taking the time in the first place.

Behavior

Even our leisure can become something we manage and optimize. Activity maximalists, if you will.

While that may feel productive, research suggests that optimization can change the experience itself. Across 13 studies, scheduling leisure at a specific time made it feel more like work and reduced enjoyment. Looser plans didn't have the same effect.⁵

So the behavioral shift isn't about giving yourself more leisure. It's about giving some of it less management. Don't automatically schedule it, pack it with activities, or try to squeeze the maximum out of it.

If the thing we're trying to recover from is a life where every hour has to be useful, turning leisure into another optimization exercise defeats the point.

Environment

All of this makes leisure guilt harder to treat as a simple problem of personal discipline. The research suggests that people can come to see leisure as less worthwhile, that viewing it as wasteful can make it less enjoyable, and that trying to manage it too tightly can make it feel more like work. At the same time, the wider conditions around us can keep reinforcing the value of productivity, as work can extend into non-work time and busyness itself can carry social value.⁶ ⁷

So when someone finds it difficult to relax without feeling that they should be doing something more useful, it isn't necessarily because they haven't learned how to switch off or don't want to. They may be responding to ideas about what makes time valuable that have been reinforced by their work, their circumstances, and the culture around them.⁸

Taken together, the research suggests that leisure guilt isn't just about what happens when we sit down to relax. It reflects a broader way of valuing time, where productive time feels easier to justify and leisure has to compete with it.

Sources

¹ Koo, H. J., Piff, P. K., Götz, F. M., Stieger, S., & Shariff, A. F. (2026). Leisure guilt. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

² Koo, H. J. (2023). American idle [Doctoral dissertation, University of California].

³ Greenfield, P. M., & Quiroz, B. (2013). Context and culture in the socialization and development of personal achievement values: Comparing Latino immigrant families, European American families, and elementary school teachers. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 34(2), 108–118.

⁴ Tonietto, G. N., Malkoc, S. A., Reczek, R. W., & Norton, M. I. (2021). Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 97, 104198.

⁵ Tonietto, G. N., & Malkoc, S. A. (2016). The calendar mindset: Scheduling takes the fun out and puts the work in. Journal of Marketing Research, 53(6), 922–936.

⁶ Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72–S103.

⁷ Bellezza, S., Paharia, N., & Keinan, A. (2017). Conspicuous consumption of time: When busyness and lack of leisure time become a status symbol. Journal of Consumer Research, 44(1), 118–138.

⁸ Zhao, Q., Ma, R., Liu, Z., Wang, T., Sun, X., van Prooijen, J.-W., Dong, M., & Yuan, Y. (2024). Why do we never have enough time? Economic inequality fuels the perception of time poverty by aggravating status anxiety. British Journal of Social Psychology, 63(2), 614–636.