Improve Your Health With This Simple Step

When we were kids, almost all of our time outside of school was spent on hobbies. Now, with work and family commitments, there is little time and energy leftover and often we turn our backs on our hobbies, leaving our days to slowly start feeling mundane, overly stressed and void of the activities that were once the mainstay of our carefree lives.

With excuses ranging from lack of time to not having someone to do them with, adults typically accept that having fewer active hobbies is simply part of growing up.

Unfortunately, it is also contributing to our diminishing physical and mental health.

A hobby is defined as a pursuit outside one’s regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation. There is some subtle detail in this definition. It is that activity you do in your off-time, because you want to do it and it helps you relax, not something you do because you have to do it.

Hobbies are also very individual. What might qualify as a hobby for you might not for someone else. In general though, a few great examples of hobbies are cooking, dancing, gardening, knitting, music, painting/art, photography, puzzles, reading or a book club, a sport (tennis, golf, soccer, skiing, yoga, etc.), traveling and writing.

Studies have shown that engaging in your hobbies provides numerous benefits and many of these are health related. Further, having an active and engaging hobby becomes even more important for the very people that don’t embrace them – the people with very busy, active, over-scheduled lives.

Here are some benefits from making a hobby an integral part of life. Of course, they don’t all apply to every hobby, but many apply to numerous hobbies: