7 Ways My Life Became Better When I Revived My Childhood Hobbies

Put yourself in touch with your inner child by rejuvenating your childhood hobbies, and making them a part of your everyday life. It’s fun!

Hobbies are mostly associated with being a child and as we grow up, very few of us stay connected to our hobbies. Most of us forget what our childhood hobbies were. We get busy in work, life and any time left goes into internet surfing, television or phone calls.

Hobbies help us rejuvenate our spirits and it is a special kind of happiness when you rediscover your childhood hobbies and work on them regularly. Here are few immediate benefits that I got from reviving my hobby of writing after many years.

It was after many years, when I was stuck in a difficult situation in my career that I started writing to process my thoughts, and I could again find my passion for this. I started feeling less stressed about the career rut. I started writing for websites, and never stopped it again. For you it can be anything else – dancing, gardening, photography, sports – you decide.

Building new networks

Upon starting to write again, I reached out to several communities who accept contributions and look for writers. Along this process I got to know people who also become good friends. I have never met with some of them but we connect over written words.

Hobbies are here to stay and most hobby doers connect together forming a community for them. In the times of social media virtual hobby groups are easy to find and they inspire you all the time.

Continuous improvement

Hobbies open a path of continuous improvement in our skills and well-being.  Because of writing I read more and keep thinking about ideas to write about. It is another high to see the written articles published in websites or magazines. Crisp editing of my articles by the website editors gives another dimension to my articles and I love reading them again. I have improved my presentation skills at work to a great extent by following the editing patterns of one of my favourite editors.

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Bringing positivity and keeping us healthy

Our hobbies provide a parallel world and help us think away from daily routines and find satisfaction in something else. Often a bad day can be ended well by spending some time working on our hobbies.

I find an immediate lifting of my mood when I am able to write down an article after not being able to do it for some time. My mother, an avid gardener, finds herself physically and emotionally happy after toiling with the soil and cleaning the dry leaves.

Help to bridge the gap

As a woman I feel (now more and more men are also opting for this model) that we keep questioning our career and achievements specially when we take the plunge into marriage or parenthood, or when we need to be mobile and leave our ongoing jobs and change places. Those junctions enable us to take a pause and re-estimate whether we would like to keep developing in our previous profiles or work on something new.

Sometimes it takes time to find a new job in these scenarios. Strong hobbies can give us purpose during these times. For me from being a researcher and then a transition to a scientific writer, my hobby of writing helped me bridge the gap. While applying for scientific writing jobs I could show my portfolio created through freelance writing for various scientific or other websites.

Reaching out and inspiring others

Through my writing (mostly for women at work, women in Science, parenting, book and movie reviews) I have reached out to several other women who might be going through similar phases as the experiences that I share. I get comments from them that they feel good after reading my articles and that is a great feeling.

Being able to touch others lives in any which way brings immense gratification and that in turn helps me find ways around my challenges.

Helps in being a better parent

Not as avidly as my mother, but I like to keep some plants too at my place, so flowers and plants, how to enrich the soil without using chemicals, etc. are often topics of discussion between us. They are extremely rejuvenating and beyond the general conversation of a mother and daughter.

Similarly both my mother and daughter have a knack for writing. So I share my experiences and thoughts with both of them, and that helps us bond in a very special way. Our common hobbies help us forget our differences in age, beliefs, languages in which we think, and relive very different facets of one another. This bonding helps us have fewer arguments on other trivial matters!

In our daily routines, we often put ourselves in an autopilot mode, and hence find no time for doing things that we loved to do as a 10 year old child. Our childhood hobbies keep us connected to that child within ourselves and bring in an enormous amount of positive vibes to our day to day activities. It is also an activity where expectations are not at stake and hence we can feel liberated – a state of mind that is extremely important as we grow older.

Often when work does not go well, or when the mind is preoccupied with lot of worrying thoughts, picking up your childhood hobbies can bring you a lot of peace.

Image source: pixabay

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