Thursday, March 13, 2025
3/13/2025
PROJECT SUMMARY Project Title: Leisure as a Protective Factor against Everyday Risk for Cardiovascular Disease PI: Matthew J. Zawadzki Stress, depressed mood, sedentary behavior, and poor sleep quality are risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Changing these risk factors requires non-pharmacological, behavioral interventions, yet existing options have low rates of uptake, adoption, and/or adherence. Leisure activities offers an innovative solution as engaging in leisure may be related to all these risk factors, and also involve activities that people are already doing, report enjoying, and have motivation to continue to do. Yet it is not clear how best to do leisure. For example, some leisure activities may simultaneously increase and decrease risk factors, moreover not all leisure is done the say way every time. This proposal takes the innovative approach that while some leisure activities may be more prone to providing benefit than others, all leisure activities have the potential to reduce cardiovascular disease risk depending on how that activity is performed. Based on pilot work, the following dimensions of how leisure is performed will be tested: how absorbing is the leisure, how positive is it, how much does it promote coping and self- efficacy, how much does it enhance social connections, and how much does one experience guilt when engaging in leisure. The first aim of the study is to identify which leisure – and how people do these activities – most strongly relate to the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. In testing this question it is critical to ask whether these patterns are true for all individuals. The second aim of this proposal explores whether ethnicity (i.e., Hispanic versus non-Hispanic) moderates associations. A community sample (N = 316) of 25-50 year old woman and men - half of whom will be Hispanic - will complete an intake session to measure basic demographic, anthropometric controls, and depression. For the ensuing two weeks, participants will complete ecological momentary assessment measures of stress and depressed mood five times a day, along with daily self-reports of sleep quality upon waking and sedentary behavior before bed. A Fitbit Charge device worn for the two weeks will measure actigraphy and heart rate to index objective levels of sedentary behavior and sleep quality (duration and wake after sleep onset). The results from this proposed study will inform future work aimed at improving how people do leisure. By finding key dimensions of leisure that are related to better cardiovascular health, people can be trained on how to do their leisure in a way that is likely to improve their health. This approach uses the activities that people are already doing but work with people to do the activity in a way that reduces stress, depressed mood, and sedentary behavior, and improves sleep quality. This will avoid forcing people to do activities they do not enjoy and will likely give up after a short while and instead places efforts that have the potential for more general appeal.
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