Interestingly though, socialising for longer than two hours in a day was not associated with further increases in the probability of reporting a better than typical day.

Time spent on exercise and sports was also positively associated with having a good day … at least up until five hours.

Surprisingly though, spending any amount of time on relaxation and leisure was associated with a lower probability of having a good day. The report’s authors noted though that ‘watching television and movies’ accounted for most of the minutes people spent on relaxation and leisure.

They caution also that bidirectional effects, that is people being more likely to engage in some activities because they were already feeling good or bad, could be a factor.

“Indeed, bidirectional effects likely help explain the negative association between relaxing and having a good day, because people probably spend more time relaxing when they are feeling down,” the report said. “Still, it is striking that even a little bit of relaxing (e.g. less than an hour) was negatively related to having a good day.”

The other caveat the authors added to their findings was that some activities may be more commonly observed on better days, not because the activities are inherently enjoyable, but because they accompany other positive experiences.

“For example, ‘travel related to eating and drinking’ was positively associated with having a good day, perhaps because a 30-minute drive for food could indicate a meal of perfectly seared scallops at a restaurant rather than freezer-burned fish sticks at home,” the report said.

Grey nomads who excitedly counted down the days until retirement may also be surprised that the report found that working for up to six hours was actually unrelated to whether people rated their day as better than usual.

When individuals worked for more than six hours though, their predicted probability of having a good day rapidly declined.

Veteran traveller Madeleine Claire told the Grey Nomads that even ‘emptying the toilet’ days couldn’t put a dampener on her ‘every day on the road is a good day’ mantra.

“I guess everything is relative and everyone has days that are better than others,” she said. “But grey nomads have such a high baseline that even one of our bad days would probably be a fantastic day for pretty much everybody else.”

• Is there a particular task or activity that makes you have a Big Lap bad day? And what about a good day? Comment below.

Are you a Grey Nomad member yet? Click here to find out about the discounts, competitions and other benefits on offer.