KEEPING FIT : Leisure Shouldn’t Be Taken Lightly

Do you work just as hard at having fun as you do at your job?

Then you may be going about it all wrong, says Steve Sumpter. And your efforts to reduce the level of stress in your life through leisure activities may be having the opposite effect.

“Many people have a work-oriented approach to their leisure,” says Sumpter, who is director of rehabilitation services at Capistrano by the Sea Hospital in Dana Point and a specialist in leisure counseling. “They think it must be productive, competitive, and they want to excel at it rather than just enjoy the activity for its own sake.”

The pressure is more intense in a place like Orange County, where we have virtually limitless leisure options from the beach to the mountains to the malls to amusement parks, but only a limited amount of time, energy and money to spend on those activities.

Part of the problem, he says, is the old Puritan work ethic, which views leisure as an unnecessary and frivolous indulgence.

But even if we are willing to put fun on the priority list, Sumpter says, we may not know how to go about it because “none of us was ever taught how to use leisure time.”

Like anything else, he says, leisure skills must be learned and practiced. “It’s not automatic. We didn’t learn it in school, and for most of us it’s kind of a trial-and-error thing. Or we pattern ourselves after our parents, which may not be good because they didn’t learn leisure skills, either.”

In addition to teaching leisure skills at the hospital, Sumpter has also put together a self-published booklet, “Are You Having Fun Yet? A Guide to Developing Leisure Time Skills.”

In the book, he identifies 11 common barriers to leisure, attitudes and beliefs that keep us from enjoying our leisure time:

1. Lack of motivation.

2. Self-esteem problems.

3. The work ethic.

4. Low leisure priority.

5. Finances.

6. Perfectionist thinking.

7. Inability to substitute one activity for another when necessary.

8. Lack of a partner with similar interests.

9. Transportation problems.

10. Time management.

11. Ourselves.

The last item on the list, Sumpter says, is most important. “Sometimes we need to learn how to get out of our own way.”

Leisure activity, or in some cases inactivity, can be used not only as a counterweight against the pressures of work, but a good balance of leisure choices can help keep the various aspects of the self in balance as well, Sumpter says.

But to meet our needs, he says, we first must become aware of what those needs are. To identify specific areas that should be addressed, Sumpter sits down with patients and has them take inventory, in effect.

“We do a needs assessment. We put together a list of the roles they play, work roles, relationship roles, and try to identify what they need that they don’t currently have. After they’ve listed those needs, we prioritize them in rank order and come up with a plan of action to address the needs. Maybe, for example, they see that they need to devote more time to family activities,” he says.

Sumpter works from a list of 305 possible leisure activities to help patients get a clearer idea of what sorts of activities they lean toward and what sorts they avoid.

Leisure should bring out all aspects of a person, he says. He identifies those aspects as physical, passive, adventurous, artistic or creative, unusual or different, and intellectual or scientific.

“If I look over the list and find I have no adventurous activity listed, I would then go back and try to find one,” he says. “If you really don’t want to be adventurous, you don’t have to, but maybe you can find something that would allow you to explore that area.

“Generally speaking, the older we get, the less risk-taking we get. Sometimes it helps to challenge ourselves with little challenges that create new energy and let us assess life from a different side of the fence.”

But success is more likely, he says, if we begin by setting small, realistic goals. “If your goal is to be more adventurous, don’t start with hang-gliding,” he says.

For family activities, try to find areas of common interest and work from there, Sumpter says.

Planning and assessing can be helpful, but Sumpter cautions that too much planning is not good. “You want to have some spontaneity,” he says.

And don’t be afraid to experiment, “even if it’s something you’re not particularly good at.”

Some of us tend to prefer work to leisure because the rewards there are more concrete, he says. “Work provides us all with a real, tangible outcome. From our jobs we can assess one another, compare ourselves to others by the cars we drive, the houses we live in, and so forth,” he says. “But other values may not necessarily be as tangible, but they have tremendous value to the self.

“Many people will choose to stay in the work environment just because they lack other ways to gain satisfaction. They think, ‘If I’m not finding success in my leisure time, then what’s the point of making time for it?’ ”

The worst extreme, Sumpter says, is those who decide to wait until retirement to start enjoying themselves. When that long-awaited day comes, they don’t know where to begin, and retirement becomes stressful instead of relaxing.

People who come to the hospital for specific problems such as eating disorders and chemical dependencies often have specific leisure problems, Sumpter says. Eating disorder patients tend to want their leisure activities to be organized and controlled, as they do other aspects of their lives. And chemical-dependency patients have a propensity for adventurous, high-risk activities, seeking the “high” of excitement.

“We try to help them find activities to help them deal with the fact that realistically, life is not a constant high,” Sumpter says. He might suggest gardening, for example, to help a recovering addict learn to enjoy life in a calmer way.

Sometimes the most effective use of time is to simply waste it, Sumpter says. “It’s healthy and productive to have some time you don’t have to account for.”

Copies of “Are You Having Fun Yet?” are available for $12.95 from Capistrano by the Sea Hospital, 34000 Capistrano by the Sea Drive, Dana Point, Calif. 92629.