Ways to Relax

Relaxing Ways to Spend Your Time

This was a record week for our surveys with 2,714 of our website visitors telling us about their ways to relax. We thought it might be fun for us to do a little Googling and compare the relaxation habits of children with those of adults so here goes…

Meditation

We couldn't find any reliable statistics about meditation in the UK but in America over 14% of adults have tried meditation at least once and across the world between 200 and 500 million people meditate. One thing is for sure – meditation is on a dramatic upward curve with more and more people trying it.

Cooking

Only 3% of children say that cooking is their main way to relax but amongst adults it is a much higher figure. You only have to look at the plethora of cooking programmes on TV to see how popular it has become but don't run away with the idea that all adults enjoy cooking. One in eight people avoid cooking from scratch and one in four British people can only cook three recipes!

Walking

The Ramblers (formally the Ramblers Association) tell us that 22% of adults in England walk for recreation every month and around 63% walk recreationally at least once a year. In Scotland and Wales the figures are even higher with at least 30% of adults walking for fun each month.

Hobbies

It used to be that the most popular hobby amongst adults was golf but the popularity of this has fallen off dramatically over the last few years forcing many golf clubs to close. Now, only about 1 million adults play golf regularly but more than twice this number cycle for a hobby. Football is by far the most popular spectator sport and about 2 million adults say that they PLAY football regularly as well.

Reading

Around 190 million books are sold each year in the UK (about 3 per person) but the number is decreasing because people are turning to digital books, where the sales have gone up 5-fold in the last 10 years. Kantar assert that 34% of adults are "heavy readers" and they each read 10 or more books a year. Women are more likely to read than men. Women are most likely to choose romance novels whilst men are most likely to read sport and science fiction.

Sleeping

It seems that very few adults complain about sleeping too much, quite the reverse, many adults say they don't get enough sleep. Aviva (the insurance people) conducted a major survey in 2017 and reported the following facts:

• About 25% of adults suffer from sleepless nights
• 47% say they don't get the right amount of sleep
• More women than men worry about sleep problems
• More than 10% of adults take sleeping tablets
• Around a quarter of adults get less than 5 hours sleep a night

Watching TV

Every house that has a television in the UK has to have a TV licence and over 25 million licences are issued each year. The majority of houses have more than one TV. On average, people watch TV for about two and a half hours each day and that doesn't include streaming services such as Netflix. The major problem with watching TV is that the inactivity leads to obesity – you don't burn off many calories sitting in front of a screen.

Playing Games

Our survey was not specific about the TYPE of game that children play but it's a fair bet that most of our respondents were thinking about video games and not Monopoly! Don't think that video games are solely the territory of the young because nearly a half of adults aged 50 and over regularly play. Unlike children, the majority of adults prefer "card and tile" games as opposed to casino games. Only 5% of adults expressed a preference for shooting-type games and that is very, very different to teenage boys!

More Children's Surveys