When did having a hobby become another task to optimise? Hopefully not yet or anymore!!
Somewhere between the notion of productivity maximisation and side-hustle culture, leisure acquired an optimised plan/agenda ahead. A popular formula says that we should have three hobbies: one to keep us physically healthy, One popular online formula tells us to keep three hobbies: one for physical health, one for personal growth and one for income.
It is memorable, but to be factually checked fairly, it is not a scientific prescription. Research does not tell us that everyone needs exactly three hobbies or that one of them should be monetised. It supports a broader idea: self-chosen leisure can contribute to wellbeing through intertwined psychological, biological, behavioural and social pathways, depending on the activity and how we experience it.
The first two sound generous. The third makes me pause.
Whether we live to work, work to live, work for money or work for a better cause has no universal answer; ours may change across different seasons of life.
Perhaps the formula needs a gentler update for our fast-moving world: one hobby to move the body, one to grow the mind and one to explore the future.
Move. Make. Explore.
1. One hobby that moves you
The modern working day is an odd physical arrangement. We sit in front of a screen for hours, use mostly our eyes and fingers, and then wonder why the rest of the body feels left out of the meeting.
We may call the afternoon dullness brain fog, brain fatigue or—even more dramatically—brain rot. These are not interchangeable medical diagnoses, and sitting is not their single cause. The better-established point is simpler: regular movement supports cardiovascular, metabolic and musculoskeletal health, as well as sleep, mental health and cognitive health. According to the World Health Organization, nearly one in three adults worldwide does not reach the recommended level of physical activity.
This is why the best physical hobby may not be the most efficient workout on paper. It may simply be the one we genuinely want to return to: dancing, swimming, climbing, cycling, tennis, yoga or a long walk that somehow solves a problem the desk could not.
A hobby can succeed where obligation often fails. It gives us a reason to move that is not punishment compensated for the tempting Ben & Jerry’s.
2. One hobby that lets you be a beginner
Adults become very good at staying inside our competence as the advertised perfect career ladder supposed to be linear. A growth hobby gives us permission to become a beginner again with all the awkwardness, humility, curiosity to expand our known territories and dopamin reward with tiny victories that come with it.
That might mean learning photography, pottery, chess, gardening, piano or a language that makes a familiar city open differently.
The evidence is encouraging, not magical. In a randomised study of older adults, participants who spent three months learning demanding skills such as digital photography and quilting improved their episodic memory compared with groups assigned lower-demand activities. This does not make photography a vaccine against cognitive decline. It suggests that novelty, sustained attention and effort can matter.
A longitudinal analysis of 93,263 adults aged 65 and over across 16 countries also associated hobby engagement with fewer depressive symptoms and greater happiness, life satisfaction and self-reported health. Because this study was observational and focused on older adults, it cannot prove that hobbies caused those outcomes or that the findings apply equally at every age.
What it does support is simpler: enjoyable activity is not empty time. It can restore a part of us that deadlines do not reach.
3. One hobby that opens a door to your future
Now for the controversial third hobby: must it make money?
I would reframe it as one hobby that increases your sense of possibility and expansion. It may sit beside your professional field or lead into completely new territory: data visualisation, public speaking, industry writing, sustainable design, coding, investing basics or the psychology behind how people make decisions.
It may eventually create income. It does not have to.
Research on motivation offers a useful but limited parallel. A 40-year meta-analysis of performance research, rather than hobbies specifically, found that intrinsic motivation and external incentives could both matter, while intrinsic motivation was particularly important for performance quality. It does not prove that monetising a hobby will ruin it. It does suggest that interest and income are different kinds of motivation.
There is another boundary worth protecting. Research on recovery from work identifies psychological detachment mentally switching off from job-related demands as an important part of unwinding. If every evening hobby is secretly preparing us for the next promotion, work has not really ended. It has simply changed clothes.
A professionally adjacent hobby should create energy, curiosity and optionality. If it becomes another source of targets, tension and self-judgement, it may no longer be doing the job of a hobby.
A healthy portfolio, not another performance plan
Do we truly need three separate hobbies? No.
One activity may quietly do several jobs at once.
Dance can support fitness, learning and social connection.
Gardening can involve movement, creativity and restoration.
Writing can sharpen thinking, preserve memories and unexpectedly open professional doors.
Sometimes or often than expected, hobby can tell a lot or showcase the blind spot puzzles of the dream life you might have been searching for as long as you can remember.
ps: inspired by Seth Godin, somehow blogging makes sense to me along with other hobbies I’m fortunate to retain to keep me sane in the world full of scattered distraction.
The point is not to build a perfect hobby portfolio and manage it with a colour-coded spreadsheet (as a proud control freak ;)). It is to notice whether life contains something that returns us to the body, something that expands the mind, compassion, oxytoxin (who knows petting can be resourceful hobby) and something that keeps the future open with anxiety in check.
Hobbies will not remove modern anxiety, cure burnout or guarantee peaceful sleep. They are not substitutes for healthcare, fair working conditions or genuine rest. Yet they can give the week a few places where usefulness is not the only measure of value.
Choose something that helps you wake up a little happier and go to sleep carrying a little less tension. That is already an intangibly meaningful return on investment.
Move. Make. Explore. And let at least one remain delightfully “non-agenda” nor algorithmically calculated.
References
Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 980–1008.
Fancourt, D., Aughterson, H., Finn, S., Walker, E., & Steptoe, A. (2021). How leisure activities affect health: A narrative review and multi-level theoretical framework of mechanisms of action. The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(4), 329–339.
Kuykendall, L., Tay, L., & Ng, V. (2015). Leisure engagement and subjective well-being: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 141(2), 364–403.
Mak, H. W., Noguchi, T., Bone, J. K., Wels, J., Gao, Q., Kondo, K., Saito, T., & Fancourt, D. (2023). Hobby engagement and mental wellbeing among people aged 65 years and older in 16 countries. Nature Medicine, 29, 2233–2240.
Park, D. C., Lodi-Smith, J., Drew, L., Haber, S., Hebrank, A., Bischof, G. N., & Aamodt, W. (2014). The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: The Synapse Project. Psychological Science, 25(1), 103–112.
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36, S72–S103.
World Health Organization. (2024, June 26). Physical activity.
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