Playing

All work and no play may
make your homunculus cranky.
Man, isn't The Happy Homunculus turning into one downer of a blog?  Seriously! I revealed that I'm basically a lazy, do-nothing and earlier we focused on the most onerous of subjects: our eating habits.  Hissss! My homunculus is ready to disown me.  But, please don't go, fearless reader!  Today, we're going to focus on having fun.

I don't have any awesome studies or new articles to reference for today's challenge. Instead, I'm operating on my own little hypothesis: having fun is good for your brain.  Now, there is evidence that vacations are beneficial to general health, probably because of the stress-reduction.  However, I'm not personally up-to-date on the literature regarding daily leisure and mental health, but there has to be a connection!  If you know of some solid studies that examine this, please post some links in the comments.

In any case, as part of this Week of Self-Awareness, we're going to use today's Daily Mind Game to get a sense of how much time we spend having fun each day.  For me, since I waste so much time planning to work instead of working, I have less fun time than I would like.  On the bright side, when I made a conscious effort to track my leisure-time, I realized that I spend a decent amount of time doing fun stuff every day.  That mental shift immediately made my homunculus less irritable. Score!   

Playing

Task: Track your leisure time.

Info: Fun is in the eye of the beholder, so I'll let you decide what you consider fun.  No matter your definition, how much of your day is spent having fun?  Are there ways you might increase the amount of leisure time in your day?  Don't have much time for fun?  No worries, this challenge is just about observing our behavior, not passing judgement.  By enhancing self-awareness you'll be better able to add more fun to your life when you have the chance.

Goal: Have fun getting a general sense of your leisure time and brainstorm three strategies for adding even more fun to your day.

Personally, just engaging in esoteric metacognitive exercises is pretty fun...  Perhaps you could include this Daily Mind Game in your fun tally, too :)  Rock on!

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