3 Reasons Why You Should Take up Some Hobbies

*Collaborative post*

Image credit: Pixabay

Do you have any hobbies? Any particular pastimes or interests that you dedicate a lot of your energy and attention to, and that involve your active engagement, rather than just your passive consumption?

These days, there are all sorts of entertainment options available for anyone who wants to kill time or relax on any given evening or weekend. Many of these entertainment options, though, are pretty passive, and don’t exactly fall into the category of being “hobbies” in a conventional sense.

Watching on-demand TV, for example, may be fun, but it doesn’t get you investing yourself in a particular pastime like a dedicated hobby would.

Without further ado, here are a few reasons why you should take up some hobbies.

Because you will learn interesting things

Hobbies, almost by definition, involve you exploring a particular topic that won’t automatically be “general knowledge” to everyone. As a result of that, you’ll be developing particular skills and insights in that particular area.

If, for example, you are interested in keeping reptiles and begin to investigate the best variety of reptile vivarium for sale, you’ll naturally come to learn a lot more about things like the life cycles, habitations, and behaviours of different reptiles, than the average person would tend to know.

The same general principle applies to all sorts of different hobbies, as well. If you’ve got a hobby of stamp collecting, you will learn interesting things about different stamps, across different periods of time. Likewise if you are interested in woodworking, knitting, fish-keeping, or any number of other things.

Many of these skills and insights might be directly or indirectly useful in other areas of your life – but in any case, they will help to keep things interesting.

Because it’s good for your mind

In the book, “The Brain That Changes Itself,” psychologist Norman Doidge looks at many remarkable examples of “neuroplasticity” or, in other words, the brain’s ability to grow and reshape itself throughout life.

One of the fascinating examples he looked at was how having hobbies helps to keep peoples brains young and healthy, as they age. At least, that’s true when each hobby is focused on for a period of a couple of years or so and then swapped out, meaning that there’s always new stuff to learn on the horizon.

Staying mentally active and learning new things appears to be very good for your mind – and hobbies are a great way of making that happen.

Because it will make your life more fun

Life might just get a bit repetitive and stale if you find yourself only engaging in a narrow range of shallow entertainment options whenever you’ve got some free time on your hands.

When you’ve got interesting and uplifting hobbies to delve into, however, there’s a good chance that life will simply feel a lot more fun, and will be a lot more rich, deep, and interesting.

Whichever hobbies you choose to dedicate your time and attention to, the very fact that you are actively engaging with the topic in a focused and deliberate way is likely to mean that you have a pretty good time, all things considered.

Sarah x