Effortful pastimes are perceived as more meaningful than those requiring minimal effort, study finds

Past studies suggest that how people spend their time outside of work or academic endeavors can contribute to their overall well-being and life satisfaction. Yet how humans perceive different leisure activities that they engage in and the extent to which they feel that these activities contribute to their life’s purpose has not yet been extensively investigated.

Researchers at the University of Toronto recently carried out a study aimed at exploring how effort, specifically in the context of leisure activities or pastimes, relates to meaning and purpose. Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that activities that require more effort, such as Sudoku puzzles or other mentally challenging games, are perceived as more meaningful than less demanding activities, such as watching videos on social media—yet they can be equally enjoyable.

“The paper was inspired largely by some recent work from us and others looking at the seemingly paradoxical nature of effort,” Aidan Campbell, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “It’s something people tend to minimize and almost universally experience as frustrating or unpleasant, but at the same time, many actively seek it out or view effort as this virtuous thing which enhances the value of one’s actions.

“We put out an initial paper suggesting effort might feel meaningful for a number of reasons, but this was only us theorizing. We released a follow-up paper this year that tested this assumption with some basic cognitive tasks (e.g., mental math) and found that when we give people these weird, artificial activities, they feel more meaningful when they are more effortful.”

The recent paper by Campbell and his colleagues builds on earlier evidence that linked effort to a sense of meaning. In their new study, the researchers focused on more realistic activities that many people engage in in their free time, to “recharge” their energy or unwind.

“At the same time, our lab has had its eye on the explosion of AI and its impact on people. It motivated a study in our other effort-meaning paper, where we compared the experience of writing with AI assistance vs. on one’s own,” said Campbell.

“There, we found that using AI to assist with one’s work felt less meaningful than doing it manually. This is relevant because many anticipate that the automation of the workforce will continue, leading to many losing work time, and for better or worse, gaining more leisure time. We know that work can be a big source of meaning and purpose for many in their lives, so if we lose this big source of meaning, where might we be able to make it up? Our thought was effortful leisure.”

Campbell and his colleagues set out to explore the relationship between effort and meaning from a few different angles. Firstly, they conducted a survey among over 1,000 undergraduates at the University of Toronto, asking them to share their beliefs about various different activities that people engage in in their free time.

“We also partnered with a puzzle-making company, Amuse Labs, to compare effortful leisure (e.g., Sudoku puzzles) against less effortful leisure (e.g., watching YouTube, less effortful games) in a set of experiments pitting the experience of less effortful vs. more effortful leisure against each other,” explained Campbell.

“In our final study, we digitally followed people through their day-to-day lives for about a week. We’d ask them a set of questions several times randomly throughout the day, such as ‘What are you doing right now?’; ‘How effortful is it?’; ‘How meaningful is it?’ and ‘How enjoyable is it?’ This lets us see, at an individual level, how people experience activities that are more or less effortful to themselves, but also how activities generally rated as more or less effortful feel to people, on average.”

When they analyzed the data they collected, the researchers found that effortful leisure activities were typically perceived as more meaningful than less effortful ones. Interestingly, however, they also observed that people are not always great at predicting the extent to which they will find effortful activities enjoyable.

“We saw that play out in our real-life study. When the activity was less like leisure and more like work (e.g., a job, studying, chores), it felt more meaningful, but less enjoyable versus less effortful work,” said Campbell. “However, people incorrectly anticipated that more effortful leisure would also feel less enjoyable. This didn’t show up in either our experiments or our real-life study.”

The researchers found that effortful leisure often did not only feel more meaningful, but also equally or sometimes even more enjoyable than activities that required no or little effort. Overall, their paper thus highlights the potential advantages of regularly engaging in mentally engaging hobbies or diversions.

“I think the big takeaway is that even though people tend to avoid effort in their leisure, we might be overestimating how bad it will feel, and it will likely end up making our actions feel more meaningful,” said Campbell. “So, maybe when faced with the options between scrolling through TikTok or sitting and watching online videos for a couple of hours versus going out for a walk or doing a puzzle, the path of more resistance will feel more fulfilling.”

The recent work by Campbell and his colleagues could soon inspire other psychology researchers to explore how people feel when engaging in specific types of activities outside of their work or studies. In addition, the team’s findings could potentially inform the creation or improvement of parenting guidelines or interventions aimed at improving people’s well-being and sense of purpose.

“The big looming question for us is likely the ‘Why? Why does effort feel meaningful?'” added Campbell. “We haven’t found a consistent answer to this question, and it may be that there isn’t one good answer, but instead many. Effort can be a way for us to feel competent at what we do. It’s also an instance of us investing ourselves fully into the activity that we’re doing. Both these things can make an activity feel more significant to us.

“We have also only looked at mental effort in our experiments, not physical effort. So, a reasonable way to follow-up would be to replicate these findings with other types of effort, like physical. It might also be the case that some people are particularly prone towards finding effortful, challenging tasks to be meaningful and others view them as simply a means to an end.”

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