Why is passive leisure the least restorative part of the day?
What it argues
The experience-sampling work found people report their highest engagement and best mood during demanding work and their lowest during passive leisure, the so-called paradox of work. Flow is the state where difficulty and skill are matched. It is a measurement finding, not a doctrine.
The probe
Compare what you say you want to do with what you were doing when you last lost track of time. Note the gap in hours, not in adjectives.
The source
Flow, from experience-sampling studies — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1990. The link goes to the text or to a catalogue record for it, not to a summary. This one is a catalogue record: the entry gives you the question and the probe, not the argument in the author's words.
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