How much time do you spend on activities you find meaningful? Are there any skills you’re developing or projects you’re working on just for fun? What are your hobbies?

A growing number of people today don’t have hobbies. This can be because of high demands on their time, such as working a tiring job, having a long commute, caring for others, and raising children. But plenty of people spend much of the free time they do have in largely empty ways, primarily on social media and watching shows of questionable quality.

While scrolling on your phone or watching easy TV can be a very appealing way to relax, especially after a busy day, spending the majority of your free time like this has consequences for your mental health and sense of wellbeing while taking up much of your time and preventing you from using it in more meaningful ways, such as on hobbies.

Even if you don’t think you spend too much time online, you can still benefit from learning about hobbies so you can be motivated to invest your energy in them while appreciating the value they provide.

Hobbies give back to you in many ways and have a huge potential to improve your mental health through fostering a sense of accomplishment, helping to build focus, developing skills, and encouraging persistence while giving you opportunities to feel proud of yourself for your efforts and the results.

Becoming invested in hobbies can take motivation, especially with undemanding distractions always available, but by understanding their benefits you can be motivated to discover how rewarding hobbies can be.

What are hobbies?

What are the requirements for an activity to be a hobby? Can any ways of spending your free time be considered hobbies? Are there any that shouldn’t be considered hobbies?

Hobbies are activities you do – mostly – for fun that are rewarding and leave you feeling fulfilled. Usually, but not always, you’re developing a skill or creating something of value, even if you’re the only person that would value it. Ideally you’re able to get lost in the process. They often teach you new skills or allow you to practice ones you already have, but in a way that’s enjoyable so it doesn’t feel like work.

They help you recover from tasks that require energy, like your job and chores, but they’re more fulfilling than activities that are passive, which gives them meaning.  

They can require motivation to begin since they take more effort and attention than other ways you could spend your time – especially screen-based entertainment – but once you start they should become restorative by enabling you to get lost in the task.

When you’re finished you could be exhausted – physically and/or mentally – but you feel replenished, accomplished and proud of yourself. There will be times when you’re frustrated or disappointed because you didn’t do as well as you wanted to and/or you struggled more than you thought you would, but more often than not hobbies are rewarding.

Some activities are only hobbies if you approach them thinking of them as a hobby. For example, if you love to cook and are curiously trying a new recipe for dinner, you’re practicing your hobby of cooking. But cooking so you have something to eat isn’t practicing a hobby because it lacks the skill-development and engagement.

Consuming content can be a hobby if it’s done actively rather than passively, such as seeking out information you’re interested in online, watching thought-provoking shows, analysing the plots and characters of movies, or becoming emotionally invested in the books you read.

However, with very few exceptions, social media can’t be considered a hobby. When you scroll through social media, you mainly come across short-form emotion-provoking content. This presents your brain with more information and stimulation than it can process, so it becomes over-worked, overwhelmed, and you can be left feeling drained from doing an activity that was meant to be relaxing.

Furthermore, taking in this type of content makes it difficult to appreciate slower forms of entertainment and limits your ability to focus since your brain becomes used to high levels of stimulation. So instead of helping you develop skills, social media can harm your ability to become engaged and learn.  

Some people who want to adopt hobbies can be heavily invested in planning what they’ll try and shopping for the supplies, but never get any further. They can even trick themselves into thinking they’re doing it when all they’ve actually done is research and/or bought things for their hobby.

Shopping for a hobby is often fun and comes with instant gratification. You can immediately begin to feel that you’ve made progress without having done anything that takes effort. Buying markers and a colouring book or comparing different types of guitars is usually easier than spending time colouring or learning to play.

Spending an excessive amount of money investing for hobbies can also add pressure for you to enjoy them and practice them often; instead of being an experiment you can feel obligated because of how much you spent to get started.

Many different types of activities can be considered hobbies. It’s often better to pursue pastimes you’re interested in instead of asking yourself if they meet the criteria of potentially overly-exclusive definitions of what makes an activity a hobby. If an activity is engaging, entertaining, and requires at least some effort because you can learn and develop skills, then it’s likely you could consider this a hobby.  

What are the benefits of hobbies?

Hobbies improve your mental health in a variety of ways. Their benefits vary depending on the person, their hobby, and how much they use it to challenge themselves or to relax.

Working on hobbies involves building skills. These can be practicals skill like carpentry or surfing as well as personal development skills such as critical thinking and communication. Although these skills can be applicable to your job or other important areas of your life, they don’t have to serve a purpose and can even be more rewarding if they’re just for pleasure. (And because hobbies are often very low-stakes environments where others aren’t depending on your success, they can be ideal opportunities to challenge yourself without having to worry about consequences.)

When you practice a skill and try to improve what you’re capable of, you build confidence and resilience.

Confidence comes from being aware of your talents, which hobbies allow you to develop and exhibit, potentially to others but especially to yourself.

Resilience is the belief in your ability to face challenges with uncertain outcomes and cope with the outcome even if you aren’t successful, so challenges are less intimidating. Hobbies enable you to develop resilience through challenging yourself, sometimes being unsuccessful, and recovering while learning and expanding what you’re capable of.

Hobbies also help to improve your focus and lengthen your attention span.

The ability to focus requires shutting out internal and external distractions. The amount of time you can focus determines the length of your attention span.

When you’re working on a task and you start to lose interest, you can choose to do something different or fight these feelings and continue. By resisting the urge to distract or better entertain yourself, you’re building your ability to focus. Typically, the more often you’re resist the urges, the less frequent they become and you develop a longer attention span. Hobbies can provide many opportunities to practice these skills.

In addition to being enjoyable, hobbies are also excellent opportunities to learn skills and build valuable internal tools.

What prevents hobbies from being valuable?

Although hobbies can be incredibly beneficial, they can also become a source of frustration, anxiety (*) and/or inauthenticity if you approach them with an unhealthy mindset. But if you understand these mindsets and how to avoid them, then you don’t have to be affected.

Some people, especially perfectionists, can approach hobbies the same way they approach many other things: with the belief that they must meet incredibly high standards without making any mistakes in order to feel fulfilled and be successful. Instead of wanting to casually practice their hobby, they don’t want to make mistakes, produce less-than-perfect results, or experience the many setbacks that are unavoidable when attempting something new. When they struggle, they can become frustrated and give up because they don’t want to spend their time on something they can’t do as well as they need to in order to feel satisfied.

This mindset turns hobbies into a challenge and another item on your to-do list where they can easily become a source of stress and tension. Instead of being restorative, they feel like work and don’t help you recover from necessary but demanding tasks.

Some people believe that if they take up a hobby it needs to become a part of who they are – instead of being someone who likes to run, they’re a runner; they don’t have the hobby of making pottery – they’re a ceramics artist. This belief can cause them to feel that they must practice their hobby very regularly, with a high level of engagement, financial investment, and thoroughly enjoy themselves each time they practice it. If they don’t consistently feel motivated and enthusiastic towards their hobby, they can doubt themselves and believe they’re undisciplined or inauthentic, so their hobby can become a source of pressure.

An often-effective way to reduce these feelings towards hobbies is by thinking of them as experiments rather than commitments.

You might experiment with painting and discover that don’t like it or that meditation isn’t as satisfying as you thought it would be. So you determine that the results of your experiments are deciding that you don’t want to continue. You didn’t fail by giving up; you learned how you feel about these activities and that you wouldn’t benefit from continuing.

Another common but unhealthy approach to hobbies is being performative rather than authentic. People from certain groups and cultures could feel compelled to have specific types of hobbies, such as joining a sport team or practicing domestic hobbies so their primary motivation is to meet the expectations of others rather than enjoying themselves and developing in areas they’re interested in. Social media can also influence people into thinking they should have certain hobbies to be interesting and valuable.

Performatively practicing hobbies prevents them from being beneficial and can even cause them to be detrimental because of the energy that being performative requires. Instead of simply enjoying your hobby, you’re more likely to be working to convince others – and yourself – that you like mountain climbing or want to spend every evening reading.

Hobbies can be aspirational: you aren’t currently someone who enjoys learning languages or you’d rather go on your phone on your lunch break instead of reading but you want to become someone who does so you motivate yourself to keep practicing them. This isn’t the same as being performative because you are genuinely interested in the activity, even though it presently takes you effort to engage in it, and your aim is for the hobby to become more natural and rewarding.

The need to be productive can also impact hobbies.

Although the glamourisation and allure of hustle culture has been fading in recent years, the mentality that you must constantly maximise your time and be as productive as possible is taking its place. This belief can cause people to view time spent on hobbies as wasted unless they can profit from them.

Common advice to people with hobbies they’re passionate about is to make it into a source of income. But monetising a hobby can remove a great deal of the benefits and joy by turning your pastime into a job, especially if you need to take on projects or meet deadlines that aren’t your own.

This drive to be productive can also make people believe that their hobbies must enable personal growth and development. Because they believe that all of their time must be spent meaningfully, including what is meant to be relaxation, hobbies become a way to better themselves.

Hobbies can and often do improve you, but this should be at least somewhat incidental and not overshadow the pleasure they bring. If you practice a hobby largely because it fosters growth or approach a pastime you enjoy with the mentality that you have to utilise it for self-improvement, then you’re unlikely to feel free to relax and enjoy yourself.

By thinking of hobbies as existing for fun and to help you unwind from necessary demanding tasks, you can chose hobbies that help you relax and approach them with a mentality that enables them to be rewarding and restorative.

Hobbies become unhealthy when you don’t think of them as something you do for fun. This doesn’t mean that you don’t care about the outcome, since a lack of investment would also remove a great deal of the motivation and benefits. But if you’re not enjoying yourself the majority of the time you’re practicing your hobbies, then they aren’t a way to recover from other demanding areas of your life.

How you spend your free time has a great deal of impact on how you think of yourself, what you feel capable of, what you learn to enjoy, and more.

People can spend too much time on screens so they don’t feel the need to take up hobbies and can think that they don’t have the time.

But having hobbies is very valuable – they enable to you relax and recharge in ways that are meaningful yet enjoyable by giving you something to do as well as ways to be proud of yourself.

If you feel unfulfilled, worry you aren’t reaching your full potential, and want to be more proud of how you spend your free time, hobbies can be effective ways to unwind and feel refreshed while also being you closer to becoming your ideal version of yourself.