In my second year, my hobbies really took a step backwards. I was hit with harder classes, less time, and more assignments than I cared to remember. My hobbies, be that playing guitar or reading books, became afterthoughts – distractions, at the time, that prevented me from studying and pursuing my goals. And when second year ended, and I was left with more time in my hands than I knew what to do with, I picked up my guitar again: dusty, out-of-tune, almost a stranger in my hands. I could barely hold the pick with my muscle memory so out of touch. Yet when I turned on the amp, and put on my favourite backing track, it was like I had never stopped playing.
In my third year, I became determined to let my hobbies live as they once did.
Remember why you started
Hobbies are, by definition, activities that you *like* doing for pleasure and relaxation. This implies that you’ve made a habit of doing this hobby for whatever reason. We often forget our reason was for starting our hobbies – how much they mattered to us, instead of the thirty-question heat transfer reader due on Friday. Funnily enough, it took scrolling through my reels and getting a bunch of guitar videos in a row for me to remember that I have a guitar, that I could play this cool-sounding sequence of notes in a certain time signature if I wanted to. I had to remind myself that I’d been playing guitar since I was six years old, that I would never give it up if I could help it. It took being reminded again of my own talents to remember how much music meant to me.
Time management is a must, of course. It’s easy to say that. Yet time management is nowhere to be found when you did everything right from the start of the module and you’re still drowning in assignments.
Take a moment to remember why your hobbies mattered to you. There’ve been times where I would look at my guitar and feel physically ill about playing it because there was just so much going on. Ask yourself – why do you like art? Why do you like to read? Remember how it feels when you pull off a hard solo and you play it pitch-perfectly?
You don’t need to be good again immediately
For hobbies that require effort to get good at them in the first place (like playing an instrument, drawing or a certain sport), it might also take some time for you to relearn how to get back to your previous level. Muscle memory is strong, but you can’t count on it to survive weeks or months away from your hobby. As someone who hates, and I repeat – hates – feeling like a beginner at something, I need to remind myself that I don’t need to be good again immediately. I just need enough commitment to start.
Attach it to something you already do
Willpower is unreliable, especially when you’re neck deep in past papers and struggling to keep yourself afloat. What worked for me, in my guitar-specific case, wasn’t trying to summon motivation out of nowhere, but tying my hobby to something already built into my day. I started keeping my guitar propped up next to my desk instead of in its case in the corner of my room. That way, my guitar was staring at me every study break of assignment turn-in point. Ten minutes of noodling between problem sets became the norm, not the exception, because the guitar had stopped requiring a decision to go find it.
You can apply this to other hobbies, such as reading, drawing, anything. Leave the book on your pillow instead of your shelf. Put the sketchbook next to your laptop. You’re not trying to add a new task to your to-do list, remember? You’re trying, rather, to remove the friction between you and the thing you already love doing.
Expect the dips, and plan your way back
Here's the part nobody tells you: you will lose touch with your hobbies again. Not because you failed at any of the points above, but because that's just how university works. A brutal exam period will come, a group project will eat your evenings, and one day you'll realise it's been three weeks since you last picked up the guitar. That’s kind of just the actual price of being a full-time student with only 24 hours in a single day.
The mistake isn’t losing touch. The mistake is feeling shame: treating the gaps as proof that the hobby doesn’t matter as much to you anymore, and letting shame keep you from going back to it. I used to feel as though I needed to apologise to my guitar for the dust and the out-of-tune strings, and I hated feeling that way. It’s what kept me, in my second year, from restarting at certain points.
So plan for it like you'd plan for anything else you know is coming. Keep a low-effort way back in – a favourite backing track, an easy song you know by heart, one chapter instead of the whole book. Don’t wait until you feel ready or motivated. What does feeling ready for a hobby even mean, anyways? That feeling shows up after you start, not before. I definitely didn’t feel ready to sound terrible after my second year ended – yet I turned the amp on all the same, and ten minutes later, none of my previous feelings mattered anymore. Your relationship with your hobbies should be exactly that: disregard how you feel about them, and do them anyways. Your hobbies don’t need you to be consistent. They just need you to keep coming back.
