repair or die?

Recently I took some time off, I needed a moment of zen to catch-up with myself after a very busy period. At the end of my leave I discovered that I had been spending my time mainly on activities that are a complete waste in current economic terms. But did I feel good? Yes, I felt completely in balance and had a strong sense of reward.
So what had I been doing that made me feel so good? Well first of all I had cleaned up the house, repaired and ironed a huge pile of clothes. I had also cleaned up in the house of my mother in law. I had cleaned up and organized my dormant studio. I had cleaned and repaired my knitting machine with the intent of using it of course but never made it that far. To repair the knitting machine I needed some special screws, it turned out a partner of my husband had a huge box of tiny machine screws that he had once reaped off the floor in a industrial multi-nationals innovation laboratory. They where going to throw them away. He had spent a lazy Sunday sorting them all by sort and size.
All this repairing is not worth it. Officially. Economically. If you would count my time (against my hourly corporate rate) it is absolutely nuts. Economically it would have been a better deal to keep working and buy new stuff. But there are some things that cannot be expressed in money, at least not yet. And that I also think we don’t understand properly yet. We only have a hunch.

Modern society is very demanding it puts a big toll on people, Just last week British scientists published a study in Annals of Internal Medicine, that shows that if you work too much, you have a higher risk of coronary diseases and of dying early. If you work more than 11 hours a day you chances of a heart attack are 67% higher. The Japanese have known for long, they even have a word for it; Karoshi.
A big crafter myself I know that knitting is a soothing activity, but last week I stumbled over this video where Knitspeak author Andrea Berman had been monitored with biofeedback devices whilst knitting, and guess what? Knitting did bring down her stress-factor (measured via electro-dermo measuring) significantly compared to the base-line.

Repairing is maybe another such activity (at least it works for me) it is much talked about for the moment, mainly for it’s semi-sustainable aspects throwing away less (expensive stuff); Platform 21; repair manifesto, or Witte de Wit; making is thinking that shows cases of absurdly time-consuming activities. 

Thonet chair repaired by Harco Rutgers, photography by Leo Veger

So let me put this plea and hypothesis forward;
We need more and better understanding of the damage we make to our body and health when we work too much, too long and too hard. In parallel we need to understand much better what it is that we can do to compensate the stress; we now know that yoga (see Mastermind aug 2010), knitting and repairing probably is good. But what else is good? Immersion in nature? Shopping? And the correlation, what is the correlation? We have now come to a point where 1/2 hour of exercise is recommeded per day, but how much knitting is recommended to balance out a day in the office?