Why You Need to Take Up Hobbies

Everything happens fast forward today. We want everything faster. We want our content easy to consume. We want to watch everything in bite sized chunks on YouTube shorts or TikTok. We’re literally training the next generation not to be able to pay attention for long periods of time, and yet we should be working on making sure that we ourselves are able to stick to activities and work that we do. 

We’re also living in a time where the cost of living crisis has become insane. Work and responsibilities seem to have become so big that all we are doing is opening our eyes, eating, going to work, coming home, eating again, sleeping, and repeating the pattern. And that seems to be our new Groundhog Day. The time we do have to ourselves is spent doing chores and worrying about housework, which really doesn’t help anybody. Well, it helps you to do your house, but it doesn’t help you to relax. Mental health is on the rise and we should be looking at why this is happening. 

After all, we were put on this planet to eat fruit by the ocean and to forage in the woods, but yet we have credit scores and pay taxes. It doesn’t really seem very fair. So one of the things that you can do to make life easier is to take up a hobby that you enjoy. But millennials and earlier generations should be looking at doing more to spend time on their hobbies. We’re watching Gen Z work to the clock rather than putting in all the hours and embracing that hustle culture that was shoved down our throats, so we should be doing the same thing. 
Hobbies are there for us to be able to take some enjoyment out of what’s left in life, and the good news is that hobbies don’t have to be expensive. A game of solitaire on your computer is free. A game of chess against somebody else on the other side of the world is free. Taking up art doesn’t have to be expensive either. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at a list of why you need to take up hobbies.

• Hobbies will help you to bust out your stress. You need a place that you can go, whether in your house, outside the house, or even in your mind where you can distress. A lot of people today feel like they are living inside a pressure cooker, and that’s not an exaggeration. We need to be able to release some of that pressure and hobbies can help you to do that. Instead of living in a constant state of stress, you need something that brings you some joy. Instead of just considering work and routine and responsibilities, you need to be able to switch off and have some fun and feel those happy feelings and hormones running through your body. If you’re looking for a way to destress, then you need to pick a hobby.
• You can unplug. The good news about most hobbies is that you don’t have to be plugged into a screen to enjoy them. Board games are just as exciting and thrilling as video games on the TV. Work can be so consuming that you don’t think about carving out time for other activities that don’t avoid screen time. Reading a book comes with such great pleasure, and yet you’ll put that to one side because you would rather have a Doom scroll on TikTok. You can end up feeling very burnt out as a result of this, so you need to think about what hobbies you could do that won’t involve constant screen time. There are plenty out there, from painting to running to playing solitaire with a deck of cards in your living room. You need to be able to unplug from time to time and not be so reliant on a screen, although that is not easy.
• You gained some new experiences. One of the best things about having a hobby is that you’re going to gain an experience that’s completely new. Routines can be monotonous while they are comforting. You need to stop doing the same things over and over again and inject a little bit of fun into your life. The challenges and experiences tend to get diminished after you become comfortable with your work. It does sound like a good thing, but really it’s not. As human beings, we crave new challenges and we crave new experiences, so we should be doing all that we can to give ourselves those things. Having several hobbies of different things can cure that.
• You can avoid bad habits. You might have had the whole thing about the devil making work for idle hands. Well, well, they’re probably not the devil involved. We do have the ability to become very distracted if we are idle. Instead of allowing yourself to get to the point of boredom where you are starting to just pick up random bad habits and going down a destructive path, you need to pick a hobby that works. You can make your time much more productive when you pack in hobbies that you like and that you enjoy. Because no matter what you do, your mind will always be occupied.
• You could earn money from it. If you enjoy your hobby so much, you could always monetize it and sell what you do. Most of the time people think of hobbies as something that they do in their free time, and that’s true. But there’s also the phrase that you will never know a day’s work if you are enjoying what you are doing. For example, if you love to bake cakes and you’re good at it, and you build up a little base of people who want your cakes, then you could always clap a price tag on them and sell them. If you love to paint and notice your friends and family asking for certain prints, you could again slap a price tag on it and sell them.

• You may have the chance to meet new people. There are some hobbies that are very social which allow you to get out there and meet people that you may not have met before. It’s human to want to socialize with people who have the same interests as you do, and it’s not always easy to get out of your same social circles at work or from your childhood. When you pick up a new hobby, however, you can meet new people who have the same interests that you do and give you someone new to be enthusiastic with.
• You may find a hidden talent. When you were at school. You may not have put much into drawing or painting your own pictures, but as an adult you might get a thrill in painting. This could help you to explore a hidden talent you didn’t know you had. It’s important to engage in hobbies so that you can grow your talents and find something that you really do enjoy. This means that your life isn’t going to just be about the kids or just be about work. Because yes, while the kids and your job are important, so are you.
• You have an opportunity to improve your self confidence. When you know you’re doing something well, you feel good about that. A hobby allows you to feel like you are doing something fantastic, and if you can do it without messing up, it’s going to make you feel good. The way that you see yourself is so important, and a hobby can help you to see yourself in a very positive way.
• You can be more mindful. When life gets stressful, it’s hard to step back and find mindfulness and meditation. As we talked about, attention is a fickle thing, but hobbies can help you to promote mindfulness because you won’t be ping ponging around subject matter, you’ll be focusing on the thing that you are enjoying the most, and that can make a very big difference. Your life needs to feel fulfilled, and hobbies can help you to do that.
• You can nurture your existing relationships. When you are not a stressed out person, you have the opportunity to look at the relationships that you’ve got and build upon them. Cooking experiences with your spouse in the evening or spending time with the kids in the hobby that you’re enjoying can really help you to connect. If you bake together, you can enjoy what you made together later. Hobbies can help you to connect with your existing relationships as much as they can help you to meet new people. And that can make a big difference to your physical and mental health.

With the right hobby, you can give yourself a future that you can enjoy and be proud of. Don’t say no to a hobby if you have the chance to take one up.