In Defense of Wasted Time #2: Three Reasons You Need a Hobby

Welcome back! This is Part II of my three-parter on hobbies. (In case you missed Part I. And, you can read Part III.) What follows are three ways that grownups benefit from hobbies. I’ve drawn on interviews with over a dozen friends and family members, so you can hear from a wider range of voices than just mine.

1.  Hobbies as self-care

Self-care is a broad category, encompassing fitness and physical health, social connection, and emotional wellbeing. Over half the people I interviewed had physically strenuous activities as hobbies, from cyr wheel (look it up on YouTube) to jiu-jitsu. Personally, I use my hobby (ballroom dancing) to manage my chronic illness. Living with a chronic illness means exercise, while necessary to manage symptoms, will always makes me feel worse afterwards; dancing is a type of exercise, though, that I enjoy enough to make the post-exertion crash worth it.

“Last year, I started having medical issues that directly related to my not being able to relax my muscles. I realized I needed to come up with more ways to relax. So when I find myself with pockets of time during the day, I grab my book and I sit and I read. Being immersed in a book lets me escape into a story for thirty minutes, helps me reset, and gives me joy. Gradually, my muscles have started to relax more, and I feel better.” – Katie, 30s, hobby: reading

Essentially, self-care is rest. (I’ve written more about rest here.) When I talk about rest with my clients, I always say that there are many kinds of rest, and we need them all: physical rest, emotional rest, mental rest. Sleep and couch-rotting may help us physically rest, but hobbies can meet our needs for other types of rest.

“A hobby is something that you do in that creative flow state. Things move at a different rhythm. It’s so good for your brain. You’re forming new neural pathways. And because its ‘frivolous,’ it’s the heart of rest.” – Jeanne, 20s, hobbies: painting, Irish dance

“Martial arts have given me the gift of feeling like I can belong in my body. I struggled for a long time with body image and shame around my body, including gender dysphoria. When I started training, I began to focus less on what my body looked like and more on what it could DO. I started lifting weights, not to look better, but to be STRONGER. It has helped me move past shame as a motivator for physical activity and allowed me to feel embodied in a way I never experienced before. While I still experience gender dysphoria, I’m now so physically present in my body when I train that I no longer feel like I need to dissociate from my body in order to feel okay.” – Mizu, 20s, hobby: jiu-jitsu

“it's good for my mental health to have an outlet—it's good for the soul. It’s an outlet for thoughts and feelings, things I can't put into words, or at least not in everyday language.” – Therese, 30s, hobby: writing poetry

“It's a playground in some ways. A haven.” – Andy, 30s, hobbies: photography, video games

“It’s a blessedly calming and reliable experience. The tiny, repetitive motions are soothing to my brain. It’s one of my favorite ways to enjoy an audiobook; something about keeping my hands moving seems to deepen my attention.” – Tabitha, 30s, hobby: crochet

2.  Hobbies as personal development

“There's this thing that happens when kids start reaching, I don’t know, high school, where they think they can't do things they’re not good at anymore. I am not a fan. Let people do the activities because they want to, because they're fun! You CAN make it about personally getting better at it, but shtaaapp with the ‘only if I'm good at it compared to others’ nonsense!” – Jeanne, 20s, hobbies: painting, Irish dance

One of the most frequent things people told me they appreciated about their hobbies was the opportunity to learn: the chance to be bad at something, the challenge of working to get better. Without hobbies, most of us would otherwise stop doing this at a young age—and our brains would get stiffer and slower as a result.

“A hobby means I have to humble myself and learn how to ‘play.’ I have a hard time allowing myself to try things if I don’t already excel at them first. Allowing myself to be bad at something feels very scary. But learning how to fail and be bad at something helps rewire my brain to know that I’m safe even when I suck.” – Lindsey-with-an-E, 40s, hobbies: cyr wheel, dance

Hobbies are good for us because they force us to stretch, to express ourselves in new ways, to be vulnerable in front of others, to develop parts of ourselves that we underuse in the rest of life.

“I’ve struggled with overcoming fear in many areas of my life. My first day grappling, I got pinned under a dude a foot taller than me. I had an anxiety attack and cried on the mat. When I chose to return to the class later that week, I proved to myself that I could overcome my own fear.” – Mizu, 20s, hobby: jiu-jitsu

“My hobby has let me experience the swelling of fulfillment when others have been delighted by what I’ve made.” – Tabitha, 30s, hobby: crochet

Hobbies allow us to experiment with self-expression and reconnect with lost parts of ourselves.

“I love getting to make noise that has emotional significance. I’m not a huge personal feelings guy when it comes to myself, but playing something that people around me can experience is almost like letting them have a little bit of my vulnerability.” – Joel, 20s, hobby: piano

“When I talk about starting to play softball after my health crisis, I tell people I needed some ‘re-creation.’ I didn’t have hobbies for a long time. Part of that was raising five kids. But it was softball and paddle-boarding that brought life back to me, almost as much as physical healing.” – Paul, 60s, hobbies: softball, paddle-boarding

Some of my proudest moments have come through my hobbies, such as writing a 900-page trilogy of novels in eleven months and surviving a 9-hour test to earn my black belt in taekwondo. I’ve also used hobbies to expand my experience of myself; over the years, ballroom dancing has let me play with both masculine and feminine gender expression, and taught me to move gracefully within a body that, for much of my life, felt too large for comfort.

Ultimately, hobbies make us bigger, vaster; they give us chances to feel out the far edges of our multifaceted potential.

“Hobbies have helped me realize I am capable of way more than I thought.” – Melanie, 30s, hobbies: painting, embroidery, video games, reading

3.  Hobbies as a spiritual discipline

A beautiful surprise in my interviews was just how many people share my experience of hobbies as a spiritual discipline. When I use the term “spiritual discipline,” I mean any disciplined activity that allows us to connect deeply with something greater than ourselves, such as a higher power, the universe, Mother Earth, or the collective soul of humanity. Often, we think of things like prayer or meditation as spiritual disciplines, but any joyful activity that puts us into flow state shares the same spiritual space.

“There’s an expression of God-image when you find something to MAKE. I think it’s so, so good for you, to produce something, especially if it’s tangible, something you crafted with your hands or your body. We were made to make: food, stories, blankets, gifts, dances, pictures, etc. It’s rich, and good, living out the image of a creator, you know? Makings things feels like getting in touch with my meaning and purpose, honestly.” – Jeanne, 20s, hobbies: painting, Irish dance

“My hobbies allow me to tap in to a very innate wiring that is very specifically just me. It allows me to feel like I’m connecting with something that I was specifically created for. There’s something deeper in it that allows me to feel really seen and known by God. It reminds me that there’s an intention and purpose for which I was made.” – Lindsey-with-an-E, 40s, hobbies: cyr wheel, dancing

In my experience, worship and creativity feel so similar that it feels ridiculous to try to distinguish them. They are both states of transcendence, ecstasy, connection, and almost unbearable emotional intensity, characterized by an out-of-body sensation of being lifted out of and beyond myself through an intimate encounter with an external power.

While I have most often experienced my writing as spiritual connection with a higher power, I have tasted this through body-based hobbies, as well. The heart of a spiritual discipline is the practice of full presence. We are so rarely completely centered in the now. Our minds are often on the past or the future, leaving us barely aware of what’s going on around us. One characteristic of flow state is how the past and the future vanish, and we exist fully and only in the present moment. Challenging physical activities—swimming, running, dancing, surfing—force us to be in the present moment, deeply connected with our bodies. There is no space for anything else. And sinking into my body, losing myself in movement, can feel profoundly spiritual.

“It’s spiritual because it’s about who you are instead of what you’re doing or how you’re being practically useful.” – Jeanne, 20s, hobbies: painting, Irish dance

When I can finally stop thinking, and just be, the moment becomes sacred.

Read the final (and best!) part of this series on hobbies.