As you might imagine, at the moment I am spending a lot of my time speaking to patients who are anxious and depressed. Life is unfortunately anxiety inducing and depressing for all of us at the moment. With another lockdown now in force the onslaught of isolation, loneliness, and the sensation of helplessness will be renewed, not to mention the tangible financial stresses that a new lockdown will place many people under.
When I talk to people about their mental health I always like to discuss self-help measures and, as part of this, I usually ask what people do to help themselves relax and de-stress. It is surprising how few people can give an answer to this.
The term hobby feels a bit fuddy-duddy. It conjures up images of old men pasting stamps into albums or putting little wooden ships into bottles. But a hobby is really just a means of spending time in what feels like a meaningful and productive way.
It seems to me that many people simply don’t have any specific interests with which they can fill spare time by doing something that actually makes them feel good. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, in their normal life many people don’t have much spare time. We have created lives that are intensely busy. We work long hours and the work doesn’t stop when we come home because we all have access to work emails on our phones, or can work remotely, or join workplace WhatsApp groups, and all this continually allows our work life to seep into our private lives. Not only this but in the pursuit of ‘convenience’ we have made it possible to do things like banking and attending healthcare appointments in the evenings and weekends. Not only does this mean that the people providing those services are having to work increasingly unsociable hours to the detriment of their own well-being, but those of us seemingly benefitting from this convenience are now actually filling our leisure time up with mundane chores.
The second reason for the lack of hobbies is the ease with which we can fill our time with browsing social media. And herein lies a real danger because the evidence suggests that spending time like this can be actively harmful to our mental health. Take for example a study from the US which followed 5000 people for three years and found a direct correlation between the number of status updates a person posted with a diminished sense of well-being (1). Or the Austrian study that found that Facebook use left people feeling unsatisfied, with a sense of having wasted their time, and yet many continued to use it because they repeatedly made a ‘forecasting error’ – repeatedly assuming that using social media would make them feel better, despite experience telling them otherwise (2).
Another interesting study conducted by the University of Michigan tried to gauge the moment to moment impact that using social media has on our state of mind. The authors of the study tried to do this by texting study participants five times a day over two weeks to assess how they felt at any given moment and how they rated their overall life satisfaction. The study found that the more time someone spent on Facebook, the more unhappy they were at the next text update, and the more they used it over the 2 week period, the less satisfied they were with their life overall (3).
In his book Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport talks about the importance of spending time free from the influences of other people’s minds in order to maintain our own sense of well-being. This is what hobbies provide, a period of focus on something specific and some time to ourselves. It is the opposite of what social media provides, which is a period of time completely deluged by the thoughts and emotions of others.
The absence of established hobbies would explain the frenzied buying of baking products at the start of the last lockdown. But, ultimately, there is only so much cake you can eat. The lack of hobbies was a problem during the last lockdown but at least back then we could sit in the sunshine. The empty, lonely hours this time around are going to be all the more difficult through the depths of winter.
The good news is that developing an interest, whether that is learning a language or an instrument, starting to exercise, or tracing your family tree, is probably more accessible than it has ever been. The key is recognising the need to get going with it.
References
1. Holly B. Shakya, Nicholas A. Christakis, Association of Facebook Use With Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study, American Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 185, Issue 3, 1 February 2017, Pages 203–211, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kww189
2. Sagioglou C, Greitemeyer T. Facebook’s emotional consequences: why Facebook causes a decrease in mood and why people still use it. Comput Human Behav. 2014;35: 359–363.
3. Kross E, Verduyn P, Demiralp E, et al. Facebook use predicts declines in subjective well-being in young adults. PLoS One. 2013;8(8):e69841