Creativity, hobbies and stretching of the brain!

Remember how you used to play as a child? Why did we stop? Did we stop? I think we just changed the word play out to doing hobbies. Play is so important in learning. Not only with us humans as children, but also with animals. Play teaches us things on another level, it teaches in ways studying just can't.

Maybe you can sit with a hobby for hours without even realizing how long you have been sitting there and focusing. Imagine that you can train that part of your brain without it feeling like you are training your brain! That is what a good hobby is to me.

A hobby is defined as a leisure activity done regularly, for pleasure and relaxation. It could be knitting, it could be hiking, gaming, reading a book, writing, woodworking, playing dungeons and dragons, hunting, fishing, or going to the movies! Almost all of us have some kind of hobby, whether we use a lot of time on them or just dabble. Whatever your hobby might be, it is very good for you and your mind to have one (or many…) of them. This is just not something I believe, this is backed by studies and research. More companies like 3M have dedicated work time for employees to work on projects they find exciting! Hobbies can teach you things you never otherwise would learn, useful valuable skills for your private life, and work life!

Hobbies can teach you a lot of things, like deep focus, but it can also teach you survival skills, grit, creativity, and many other things which you can use daily. If you feel like you haven’t had a creative day, maybe you can sit down with a creative hobby like knitting or woodworking and have quite a fulfilled day after all. Some use their hobby to make a switch of workplace. I kind of used my hobby of creating apps to get a job as a UX designer. If you have passion for what you do, whatever you do, you will put in loads of effort in getting good and continue getting better at it.

Whatever your hobby is, I am here to say it is very important. I heard a saying once that it is important to stretch your eyes. Look up, look out into the horizon, and give those eye muscles a good stretch. It struck me then that it is good for the brain to give that brain of yours a good stretch! And how do you do that? Well, I think you can do that by not doing what you usually do at work or as a job. I think you do that by zoning completely out into another activity like your hobby. The only thing you think of at that moment of complete immersion is the thing you are doing. Not if you will remember to pick up milk, or if you are cold, or you will make that deadline, just doing… not “thinking”. By focusing on nothing else but the task at hand, you can immerse yourself and hopefully enjoy a nice time of hyperfocus. The more often you can access this, the more often you can trigger it on demand, so that when you need to “get shit done”, you know how to enter the deep focus state, and just do it.

I’ll finish this off with a quote by a very inspiring man, who followed his interests and passions wherever they took him;

So go out there, indulge in your hobby, make time for it, take time off to do it, it will pay off in more ways than you know!

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