When I began my journey into the medical profession eight years ago, one of my worries, alongside passing tests, impressing attendings, and caring for patients, was that I wouldn’t have the time and energy to engage in hobbies. I thought hobbies would become things I used to do, back when I had more time. But when I look back on the last eight years, I’ve spent more time running, reading, and writing than I thought possible. What I didn’t know was that in medicine, hobbies aren’t luxuries — they are necessities.
I keep coming back to the adage, "You can't put all your eggs in one basket." It's overused, sure, but it encapsulates the necessary equanimity of not allowing your life, and by extension your sense of self, to rely singularly on work. It's like a well-balanced financial portfolio that isn't entirely composed of stocks when the stock market crashes. I'm not a pessimist — I like my job — but I also realize that, particularly as an EM doctor, there are many aspects outside my control that can have an outsized impact on my day. There are sad cases and stressful cases, and instances where I struggle against the inevitable pull between providing good care and the inherent constraints and shortcomings of our healthcare system. But then I come home and go for a run or write for 30 minutes and feel that if nothing else has gone right that day, I have at least found this small corner of accomplishment.
As physicians, I believe we are particularly prone to the sense that if an activity or pastime carries no tangible purpose, or we have no inherent talent or skill, it may not be worth pursuing. It’s like a vestigial appendage from many years spending many hours pursuing distinct goals with real-world implications. I can think of a few hobbies that I have discarded for these very reasons: pottery, collaging, kintsugi (which, frankly, I enjoy most as a philosophical concept: the Japanese art of mending broken porcelain with gold dusting, illuminating and beautifying flaws), gardening, ornithology (who was I kidding?), and ichthyology (we live near a lake and I wanted to know what was being pulled out of the water but ultimately settled for calling everything a panfish and was rarely wrong). The key to a hobby is just that: it is not a career and not meant to satisfy anyone but yourself. If you want to become an expert in your hobby, great! If you would rather dabble, amazing! When it comes to being a naturalist, I've settled for a nature app that lets me identify animals as I see them. In Wisconsin, I've discovered animals like muskrats, woodchucks, and river otters (none of which I could have identified on my own) and found those discoveries particularly useful when a patient presents after getting bitten by one of them. Maybe I'll recall them the next time, and maybe I won't, but it feeds my curiosity about the natural world, and that's good enough for me.
If much of medicine is analytical and inflexible thinking, hobbies promote more creative, cognitive flexibility. Creative hobbies can pose a subtle cognitive challenge and change the way you think. Studies have also demonstrated their ability to reduce anxiety, depression, and physician burnout. One of the driving factors of these positive mental health effects is the strengthening of social ties. I can think of many hobbies that I would feel entirely ill-equipped to approach alone, most of which involve snow, for which I have no natural proclivities or instincts, having grown up in a sunny area of California. Take snowshoeing or cross-country skiing, which I only recently tried at the behest of a friend of a friend, who is a cross-country skiing guru, and now my friend. Just as hobbies can forge new neural networks, they can also become the bedrock for new friendships. One of my favorite television shows right now is “Shrinking.” In the show, a shamelessly over-involved neighbor, Liz, has a hobby of tumbling rocks and giving them to her closest friends as a token of friendship, an honor she bestows on a select few. I don't know anything about tumbling rocks, but I love that she has turned a private hobby into a grounding force for her most intimate relationships.
Maybe one way to approach hobbies is to think of them as friends: if you're lucky, you have friends from middle school or high school, the ones you've known for decades and who care for you and know you like a sibling, and then the newer friends, ones you've made in your most recent move or because of circumstance. For me, my childhood best friend is and continues to be running. It's hard to believe I've been running for more than two decades, but it's true. It's always been less about the racing and more about shifting my mindset and doing just what a hobby should: allowing me to become someone else in the process. It was only after beginning my medical career that I appreciated just how much making the time to be creative or train for a race, to be someone other than a physician, was making me a stronger, more resilient doctor in the process.
Now, while I don't see myself tumbling rocks anytime soon, I did buy a kintsugi repair kit this winter. I like the idea of asking my family to give me their favorite broken china and creating something perfectly flawed.
What are your hobbies? Share in the comments.
