In the graveyard of my hobbies, you’ll find a five-piece needle set with one needle missing, a ball of yarn, one portable watercolour set and two folded-up screen prints from a university module. I say I’ll return to them when I’m ready, but all they get is a reshuffling in my drawer every six months. They’re in the bottom drawer so the shame doesn’t look me in the eye, but possessing them means I haven’t given up just yet.
You see, I’d spent the year doomscrolling after experiencing burnout at a previous workplace. The signs of functional freeze were there—I’d sleep the full eight hours a night and wake up feeling somehow even more exhausted. Significant things would pass me by without registering fully in my memory. After more soul-searching, it occurred to me: somewhere along the five-day work week, I’d forgotten to tend to my inner life. Its vacancy had allowed space for stress storage instead, a reality that many Singaporeans can resonate with.
“The hustle and high-performance mindset remain quite deeply ingrained in our culture,” says Dawn Chia, a clinical psychologist from Annabelle Psychology. “Even when people make time for hobbies, many do not have the cognitive bandwidth to truly engage in them. This heavy mental load is attributed to our constant connectivity, along with the interruptions of work and other commitments.”
In search of whimsy
When life becomes a little too repetitive, my mother’s advice always comes to mind. “Change something. Take a different path home or buy a new drink. See something new, so it changes your energy.” It’s rooted in feng shui, but it’s also backed by science. “In addition to experiencing relaxation and pleasure, hobbies provide a form of relief or detachment from everyday demands and give us a sense of autonomy,” advises Chia. “Having different dimensions to our sense of self beyond our identity at work buffers against feeling like a failure when we encounter stress.”
After seeing enough cosy studio vlogs, I decided to go all in with an impulsive booking for a six-week pottery class. The no-frills venue ran on a simple premise: you either showed up for your scheduled class or you forfeited your fees for missing it. No excuses. Within the first 10 minutes of class, I was pinching and kneading clay with the singular goal of smoothing it out and rounding the edges correctly. With the pad of my thumb on the clay, I rubbed it over and over—the rhythm of it soothed me after a long day at work.
View this post on Instagram
The importance of persistence
As all practising perfectionists know, it’s hard to stay with something you’re not immediately good at. It’s why I’ve found it difficult to sustain a hobby. If I haven’t mastered it, I have to punish myself until I do. There is no joy or pride to be had.
Pottery, however, demands patience. There are no shortcuts to obtain the perfect piece. To build a basic vessel, I needed to portion and roll out each coil of clay in exactly the right way, then carefully apply the slip and smooth it onto each other. Every detail had to be carefully taken care of or the entire piece would break apart in the kiln. In my second class, my instructor corrected my folds. I felt his frustration deep in my chest, enough to crack my resolve wide open. Almost enough to shatter it entirely.
Then the next week came and someone showed me how to smooth over the folds. I watched her collapse a perfectly shaped vase because she only wanted to test its form. She showed me where all our mistakes live—in a big vat of slip in the corner. With a little bit of water, my imperfect coils became the slip that held my new ones together. I got to know the texture of failure and I learnt how to give it a new form. Seeing my art piece on the drying rack filled me with joy. Its wobbly shape bore the imprints of my hesitant hands, but survived the firing anyway.
A new light
The miraculous thing about starting something new is that it holds up a mirror to the other parts of your person. The coffee I make may never turn out quite right, but the mug that houses it was made with the same hands. As I watch my instructor bend over his thousandth art piece, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, I know that it is proof of this: that no matter how elaborate his masterpieces are, the real beauty lies in the fact that he has forgiven himself over and over again. May we all learn the art of giving ourselves a try.
View this post on Instagram
How to create a rich inner world
To start, ask yourself: what am I looking for in a hobby? Depending on your answer to that question, different hobbies will meet different needs, as explained by Chia.
Physical exercises, such as running or hiking, will trigger the release of endorphins, which provide a form of stress relief.
Creative practices, such as painting, writing or ceramics, stimulate our imagination and provide healthy outlets for expressing our emotions and aspects of self. Using tactile mediums, like clay or paint, can have a grounding effect and help us get out of our heads or off our devices.
Cognitive/intellectual pursuits, like chess or learning a new language, exercise our ability to focus, problem-solve, and take in and remember new information. Regularly engaging in these activities can help build our cognitive reserve and delay the onset of neurodegenerative decline, such as dementia.
Social activities, like board game clubs or volunteering, provide opportunities for low-pressure connection with others who share similar interests. This helps us build new networks and experience a sense of belonging, while reducing our risk of social isolation.
If you’ve been struggling to stick to a hobby, here are some psychologist-recommended tips to combat it.
- Start with building micro-habits. Rather than seeking a major lifestyle change over a short period of time, try setting aside 15 minutes a day to start something new. Managing the ‘all-or-nothing’ mindset can help make your hobby sustainable.
- Allow yourself to enter a ‘flow’ state. Made popular by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the term refers to the way one immerses themselves in a task, so much so that they lose their sense of time or self-consciousness. To achieve this, give yourself permission to experience joy in the process of doing.
-
Consider how you can align your hobby with a group to increase social accountability. For instance, this could involve joining scheduled classes with a peer, or engaging a coach or mentor to provide additional guidance.
This story appears in Vogue Singapore’s March ‘Ignite’ issue, available online.
