Which kind of rest are you actually missing?

What this is

This is our own quiz, not a validated test. It borrows one idea from research on how people recover from work: rest is less about how many hours you get off and more about what happens inside them. The four results are the four “recovery experiences” that research describes, with friendlier names. The questions are ours; we did not use the items of the questionnaire mentioned below.

The research behind it

The four experiences come from a 2007 paper that developed a questionnaire on how people unwind after work. Analyses with 930 people showed that four experiences could be told apart: psychological detachment (mentally leaving work behind), relaxation (a calm, low-activation state), mastery (challenges and learning outside work, like a language class or a new hobby) and control (deciding for yourself what to do with your free time, and when and how). In a subsample of 271 people, these were moderately related to job stressors and to measures of psychological wellbeing.

A meta-analysis that pooled 54 samples and 26,592 people found the four experiences do not all do the same job. Detaching from work after hours had a stronger link with lower fatigue than relaxation or control did, while control had a stronger link with vigor, feeling energetic, than detachment or relaxation did. Both papers rest mostly on people describing themselves, so they show what tends to go together, not proof that one kind of rest causes one kind of benefit.

What it cannot tell you

Your result is the kind of rest your answers pointed at most often; a tie goes to the one listed first. Most people are a little short on more than one, and the mix changes from season to season. The quiz cannot measure how tired you are or why, and it is not a check for burnout, sleep problems or anything medical. If tiredness does not lift with rest, that is worth raising with a doctor. Your individual answers stay in your browser; with your consent, the site only counts which result comes up.