Find Joy in Hobbies Again

(light music) Headspace Studio. Hi, my name is Samantha Edu, and welcome to Radio Headspace, and I'm so happy to be here. As you know, I'm a therapist here at Headspace. I'll be here occasionally to talk about some things I think you might find helpful or interesting in the world of mindfulness and mental health. I've been thinking about hobbies lately. I love hobbies and I really need them. I garden, I do sewing embroidery, and reading. When I don't pay attention to my hobbies, work becomes a hobby and that is not always the best for my self-care goals. So today, let's talk about hobbies as an adult, why you need them, what they can do for you, and how to find things you enjoy if you don't have one. So over the last few years, I have definitely found myself having less hobbies. What really did it for me was cleaning out the closet behind my office, which contains a lot of my hobby machines. (laughs) And so I went in to clean it and then took a look and realized that I had a Cricut machine, two sewing machines, I had a sewing embroidery machine patterns, like all of the things that would just really make a good hobby life, and realized I hadn't touched any of those things at least in two years, and I missed them. So I decided to just reignite my hobby life and I pulled them out. I pulled out the sewing embroidery machine first. I decided to make a graduation stole for my friend. Because I have not taken the machine off the shelf in so long, I had to come with a beginner's mind and like be very patient with myself, show myself some self compassion, when I wanted to throw the machine out of the window and my needle kept breaking, and it was like, oh my, I literally had to learn this all over again, something that I used to do so easily. It took some patience, like the things that I was not maybe not giving myself every day, like self-compassion and grace. If I wanted to be able to gift this to my friend, I needed to go through it. And so I just made myself a promise that, regardless of how many times I messed up, I would just keep doing it. And that the end product did not have to be perfect. And it wasn't perfect, but it was like perfect for me, perfect for her, and perfect for the situation. I found when I reignited that fire by doing something outside of work, I showed up a little bit differently inside of work. I could see it in my productivity. I could see it in the way I took care of myself. I could see it in the way that I actually held my boundaries with work. It was a better me. And I would encourage anyone to create something for yourself...