The Role of Subjective Expectations for Exhaustion and Recovery: The Sample Case of Work and Leisure, 2022, Schüttengruber & Freund

The Role of Subjective Expectations for Exhaustion and Recovery: The Sample Case of Work and Leisure

Victoria Schüttengruber and Alexandra M. Freund

Abstract

We propose a new model of exhaustion and recovery that posits that people evaluate an activity as exhausting or recovering on the basis of the subjective expectation about how exhausting or recovering activities related to a certain life domain are.

To exemplify the model, we focus as a first step on the widely shared expectations that work is exhausting and leisure is recovering. We assume that the association of an activity related to a life domain associated with exhaustion (e.g., work) leads people to monitor their experiences and selectively attend to signs of exhaustion; in contrast, while pursuing an activity related to a life domain associated with recovery (e.g., leisure), people preferentially process signs of recovery.

We further posit that the preferential processing of signs of exhaustion (vs. recovery) leads to experiencing more exhaustion when pursuing activities expected to be exhausting (e.g., work activities) and more recovery when pursuing activities expected to be recovering (e.g., leisure activities). This motivational process model of exhaustion and recovery provides new testable hypotheses that differ from predictions derived from limited-resource models.

 

No Freund of mine, not starting from those premises.

 

Probably only significant for this caveat which acknowledges separation of healthy exhaustion and recovery process from impacts of illness:

"The proposed process model of exhaustion and recovery addresses temporal signs of exhaustion, as opposed to chronic or clinically relevant experiences of exhaustion (e.g., such as in burnout or depressive episodes) that result from accumulated processes of exhaustion (e.g., Demerouti et al., 2001, 2021; Freudenberger, 1974; Maslach et al., 2001). For instance, the job demands-resources model (e.g., Demerouti et al., 2001) suggests that chronic states of work-related exhaustion stem from stable conditions such as high job demands over long periods of time. Whether our model could also be applied to long-term exhaustion (and recovery) is an interesting question; however, it is beyond the scope of this article."

 

Literally no one does that. Obviously. Medicine is moving backwards, giving more space to pre-science ways of just talking speculative BS.

This is somewhat similar to old microeconomic models that used to make assumptions of people "optimizing" their choices based on perfect information, maximizing the utility of their choices and a whole lot of speculative stuff that has been mostly abandoned as it's way too simplistic. Nowadays it's just used as thought experiments, kind of like how physics textbooks about mechanics will do stuff like "assume a cow is a spherical object of uniform density", because it works for that purpose.

Seriously, though, economics is so much more serious than this junk. Even political science isn't as detached from reality.

 

This is absolutely not how I modeled my own energy levels when I was a healthy autistic person. The main factors I considered were demands on social interaction, executive function, and sensory processing.