HOBBIES: CREATING HEALTH

WRITER: RICHARD T. BOSSHARDT, M.D., FACS

As a physician, I am interested in anything that improves health and well-being. By the former, I mean our physical state while the latter is the sum total of our emotional, psychological, and spiritual condition. Last month I wrote about stress, which I believe is one of the major contributors to health problems in this country. There are a variety of ways to beat stress. One of them is having a hobby.

A plastic surgery colleague of mine assembles models of World War II era vehicles, ships, and airplanes. To equate his models with those we usually see done by kids and teenagers is to compare a masterpiece work of art to something done by amateurs. His attention to detail is stunning, and each completed piece is a perfect miniature of the real thing down to the tiniest detail, including simulated wear and tear, battle scars, etc. He even puts them in a realistic diorama setting to reproduce the environment in which they were found be it air, land, or water. He spends countless hours over each one. He does not make a cent on these models. He builds them for the satisfaction and because he finds it stimulating and fun.

Hobbies are activities that we engage in for the sheer pleasure they give us. While making money from a hobby can certainly be done, if that becomes the focus it is no longer a hobby but a job. Some people might say that making money is their hobby. My brother-in-law is one of those entrepreneurs whose passion is “the deal.” He loves brokering business deals and starting up businesses. Once a particular project is completed, however, he moves on to the next. He has brokered hundreds of deals and started dozens of businesses. While he makes a lot of money doing these things, I think he would do them even if it didn’t pay.

I checked out a list of the 50 most popular hobbies. Numbers 1–4 were, respectively, reading, watching television, family time, and going to the movies. Number 10 was exercising — my favorite. Number 17 was sleeping, and 22 was relaxing. I never imagined the last two could be pursued as a hobby!

While hobbies are enjoyable by their very nature, from a medical perspective, do they provide any health benefits to those who practice them? The answer, I am pleased to say, is yes indeed!

For one thing, hobbies can give our life meaning. Dr. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He was also Jewish and spent three years in the concentration camps in World War II. His experiences there led him to develop the school of psychiatry known as logotherapy. Dr. Frankl posited that all people have — as one of their basic underlying motivations in life — a need for life to be meaningful. People who find meaning in life can weather its vicissitudes while those who do not may succumb to them. By giving us an outlet for our creativity, providing a goal, and/or offering a challenge, hobbies can provide our lives with meaning.

Hobbies can benefit our mental health in tangible ways. In one mental institution in England, therapists helped patients with schizophrenia and major depressive disorders to develop long-lost hobbies. They found that those who successfully did this showed measurable improvements in their mental health and general well-being.

A stress blog from the Mayo Clinic weighs in on hobbies, albeit indirectly. It discusses mindfulness, which is described as a state of “focused, deliberate attention to a task or thought to quiet the mind and eliminate distractions.” This is a pretty good definition of the state of mind when pursuing a hobby. Medical evidence is mounting that this can benefit the immune system. Research has shown that one of the underlying constants of many disease processes, from heart disease to cancer, is inflammation. Studies have further shown that the state of mind described by “mindfulness” can decrease inflammatory marker proteins in the blood of subjects. Combined with other interventions such as a healthy diet, rest, and exercise, a hobby can potentially not just add quality to our lives, but prolong them, as well.

People are not meant to sit around doing nothing, or simply working throughout their lives for a paycheck. I could not have said it better than Brian Jay Stanley who, in a short essay, wrote: “To know someone truly, look at what he does when no one is paying him. My wife makes jewelry, my father gardens, I write, my grandfather cleared brush from the woods by his house. Seeking the common core of varied hobbies, I notice in all a devotion of effort toward a self-imposed goal. To accomplish something is every hobby’s purpose, but what is the purpose of the accomplishment? We are less interested in the accomplishment than the accomplishing. Hobbies express an entrenched urge to create, to add patches of order to the universe. In our hobbies as in our careers, we stack the world’s raw scraps into meaningful shapes — arranging dirt into flower beds, stones into necklaces, words into paragraphs. We curse a Saturday that sees no progress on our projects, not because anyone needs what we produce, but because we need to produce. At work we long for leisure; in leisure we keep working.”