#95: The perfectionism-busting power of hobbies
I know you think you shouldn't be making time in your life for hobbies, what with being so shamefully behind on your writing and everything. And I know that you know that, despite this, you probably should be making time for hobbies, because in theory you do actually need to relax sometimes, you suppose, so maybe you'll consider taking up chess or macrame or ice skating just as soon as you've caught up with everything you're behind on (or as soon as someone adds a 25th hour to the day, which is probably more likely). But did you also know that having hobbies helps you resist and correct your perfectionist tendencies? No? Hit the download button, snuggle up, and prepare to accept that maybe you should be taking that crash course in pole dancing after all.
There's a free, online version of William James's Principles of Psychology here.
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again everyone! What have you been up to for the past couple of weeks? I’m getting ready to launch back into teaching. All my pencils are freshly sharpened, I have a new pencil case, and I’m excited to see my new classroom and write in those spanking new exercise books. Not really. The start of the academic year doesn’t have the same sense of occasion when you’re a grown-up, does it? And at some point the prospect of starting to write in a brand new exercise book - or rather, a brand new Word document - stops being exciting and starts being terrifying. Although there’s always a glorious couple of weeks at the start of the new teaching term when all the whiteboard markers that people leave in teaching rooms work properly, aren’t there? Anyway. Before we get on with the latest episode, I want to let you know that I have some treats lined up for you. There are some more guest interviews in the works. I’ve literally just finished recording one, which - all being well - I’ll release as the next episode. I know you’re going to enjoy them and find them valuable. You’ll need some patience, I’m afraid - what with this podcast being entirely produced by little me as a little hobby in between all the other stuff I have going on, the interviews are going to trickle through as and when I can fit them in and get them all shiny and presentable for you. But stay tuned, because there are exciting things afoot. Today, though, it’s just me on my tod, as usual, and I want to talk to you about hobbies. It feels like this is a topic that’s come up a few times lately on this podcast, in different guises. We touched on them in episode #90: The surprising productivity of rest, where I talked about Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s conception of rest, which involves not merely not doing work, but rather doing things that are rewarding for their own sake - and resting in that way involves practice. You have to have things that you find rewarding for their own sake, for a start - hobbies, in other words. And hobbies came up in an indirect way in the previous episode - #94: Postcard from the Costa del Burnout - when I talked about the dangers of pushing aside our own needs, which involves turning away from things that we find rewarding. Hobbies, again. It’s such a frivolous little word, isn’t it, ‘hobbies’? Even saying the word makes me think that I ought to be getting on with something more grown-up. Hobbies are for people whose heads are full of cotton wool and who have no serious demands on their time. I suppose we could call them ‘interests’ instead, which immediately sounds more solemn and respectable and useful. When someone mentions their interests, my mind goes to things like keeping track of the stock market. When they mention their hobbies, I think of - I don’t know - collecting scented candles. Interests are things that enable you to appear as a contestant on Mastermind at a moment’s notice. Hobbies are just harmless but unimportant ways of filling up all those silly First World hours you have on your manicured hands - unless you’re monetising it in some way, and then you can call it a side-hustle or a start-up. These are just the things that my mind goes to, by the way - don’t take what I’m saying here as serious conceptual analysis. But, anyway, in this episode, I want to put in a word for hobbies. I don’t mean that I’m going to try to convince you that they are, or should be, a serious business. I know that’s exactly what I said in the intro, but I was just trying to lure you in, sorry. I want instead to convince you that you should be making space in your life for gloriously unnecessary, financially unrewarding, but enjoyable pastimes. Hobbies. But actually, probably not for the reasons you think. This episode isn’t just a longer winded way of me saying stuff that I’ve already said in previous episodes about how you deserve rest and relaxation and how you shouldn’t be turning away from your own needs all the time, although all that is definitely true. What I want to do in this episode is talk about how hobbies are actually an incredibly powerful tool in your ongoing struggle with perfectionism and all the horrible things that go along with it, like shame and anxiety and self-criticism. The important thing is this: hobbies are things that you enjoy doing for their own sake - I mean, engaging in the hobby is its own reward - and in many cases (depending on the hobby) they’re activities that you care about doing well and want to get better at, but you don’t care about these aspects so much that they undermine your enjoyment of the hobby - because if that happens and you stop enjoying the hobby, then it’s not really a hobby any more, and you probably just stop doing it. This combination of factors - enjoying doing the thing while also caring about how well you do the thing - is something that many of us are missing in our professional lives, our writing or whatever else. We’ve reached a point where we care about how well we do what we do - how good our writing or teaching or whatever is - but that ‘caring about’ has taken a nasty turn into anxiety and perfectionism. Caring about doing our job well takes the form of telling ourselves at every possible opportunity that we are not doing it well enough and we need to do better, even though secretly (or not so secretly) we’re worried that we can’t do better because we’re just not up to it. And in many cases our response to that is a combination of things: we procrastinate over doing our job, while also telling ourselves that because we’re spending so much time not doing our job (which many of us mistakenly attribute to our being lazy or weak-willed rather than anxious) we can’t possibly make room in our lives for something as frivolous as hobbies. If we ever have a spare moment, we need to use it to catch up on all that work that we’ve shamefully allowed ourselves to fall behind on. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that when I ask coaching clients about what sorts of things they do to relax and unwind, lots of them reply that they no longer have anything they do to relax and unwind. I mean, they don’t deserve to relax and unwind, right? And those who do still have hobbies often mention them apologetically, with an air of ‘I know I shouldn’t be doing anything fun until I’m on top of my work, but I think I’d actually go crazy if I didn’t do this thing’. This is a huge problem. Actually, it’s two huge problems. One of these problems is familiar: we actually need things we can do to relax and unwind - this is a fundamental, non-negotiable need, and as I’ve said before, telling ourselves that we need to earn our relaxation in some way is as misconceived as telling ourselves we need to earn the oxygen we breathe or the water we drink. The other problem is this: if you don’t have hobbies, then you don’t have things in your life that you simultaneously enjoy doing and care about doing well and perhaps also care about doing better. Having things like this in your life gives you an invaluable bit of perspective that you can use to troubleshoot your relationship with your writing (or whatever else you’ve become painfully perfectionistic about) and to demonstrate to yourself that it is possible to care about doing something well while continuing to enjoy it - and that your anxiety and avoidance around your writing is not something you can simply write off (see what i did there?) as an inescapable part of caring about doing it well. It took me a while to realise all this, but if you’re a regular listener, these reflections probably won’t come as a huge surprise. You’ll have noticed how fond I am of drawing analogies between writing and running. Running is a hobby of mine. I’m not a super speedy runner, but I enjoy it. I do it partly because I care about remaining fit and healthy, but partly - and this is the important part - because it’s its own reward. I also care about doing it well, or as well as I can: I’ve been working with Carrie, my lovely running coach, on trying to improve my 5k time, and Carrie has also seen me through the training for several marathons. There are plenty of frustrations that go along with this - improving my 5k time hasn’t been going as well as I’d hoped, and there was one marathon that I didn’t manage to complete - I told you that story in episode #65: Reflections on a recent failure. So, running is something I continue to enjoy despite being pretty mediocre at it and despite plenty of disappointments and failures along the way. And, for me, that demonstrates that it’s possible to continue to enjoy doing something despite all those things. Writing, on the other hand … well, for me, as for many of you, disappointments and failures in writing are liable to undermine any enjoyment we take (or once took) in it. Why does that happen with writing, but not with running, or other hobbies? The answer, I think, is that I, like many of you, have staked my sense of worth on my writing. If my writing is rubbish, then it’s very difficult for me to resist the conclusion that I’m rubbish. But running, on the other hand - well, much as I’d love to be the best runner, or even just a better runner than I currently am, my identity isn’t tied to it in the way it’s tied to writing. I can be a rubbish runner without being a rubbish person. This is something that the psychologist William James wrote about in The Principles of Psychology: quote, ‘I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse.’ Ok, so staking your identity on your writing makes it difficult to cope when your writing isn’t going well. So, what’s the solution? Remind ourselves that it’s possible to be disappointed in our writing without being disappointed in ourselves? In part, yes. Self esteem, William James told us, equals success divided by pretensions. So, if you want your opinion of yourself to be robust enough to withstand the slings and arrows of your writing endeavours, try either being a bit more successful or caring a bit less about being successful. Simple, right? But simple doesn’t equal easy. There are plenty of us doing our best with the ‘try being more successful’ part, and I think we’ve all had moments of sour-grapes style trying not to care so much about being successful, but on the whole, this is a battle we’re still trying to win. And perhaps there are also a few wise few out there who care deeply about doing well, and are able to experience disappointment when things don’t go well without feeling less worthy as a person - but, especially when emotions are running high, which they tend to be when we experience the sting of disappointment or shame or anxiety or frustration, that’s a bit of mental fine-tuning that lots of us find really difficult. This is where having hobbies can come in really useful. When you’re engaging with things that you enjoy, that you care about doing well, yet which don’t undermine your sense of worth when you encounter setbacks, you can be a role model to yourself. Specifically, your low-anxiety, low-stakes engagement in your hobbies can show your writerly self how it’s done. The way that you feel about and respond to setbacks in your hobbies, for example, can give you a welcome sense of perspective to draw upon when you encounter setbacks in high-anxiety, high-stakes things like writing. Here’s a fun example for you. Right now, I’m wearing a blue and grey stripy cardi that I knitted myself. Along the way, I unravelled large chunks of it at least 4 times because I didn’t like the way it looked. And before I even started knitting it, I’d used the yarn to knit almost all of a completely different jumper - everything minus half a sleeve - which I ended up unravelling because I wasn’t satisfied with it. If I had to choose, I’d rather be satisfied with something I knitted on the first attempt and not have to unravel it and start again. But I don’t mind ripping it all back that much, and I don’t regard the time I spent knitting what I later undo as wasted time, because I just enjoy the process of knitting it and I learn things along the way. How does that compare with writing? Well, there are certainly things I’ve written that have had to be revised and rewritten in a roughly similar way, but I’m generally much less relaxed about it and often find the process dispiriting and frustrating. Part of that is for the reasons that William James wrote about: my identity is staked on being a successful writer, but not on a successful knitter. I don’t really care about eminence in knitting. I just like making stuff. But there are other things going on too. One is that, while it’s great to be able to enjoy producing something - a piece of writing or knitting - for its own sake, there are often factors that stand in the way of that. If you’re a student or an academic then you don’t usually have the luxury of enjoying writing for its own sake. You’re painfully aware that what you’re writing needs to be of a certain standard in order to earn a particular qualification or get published in a particular place and usually by a particular date. Often, there are other people expecting the end result, which can add pressure too. We can usually avoid all that when we’re engaging in our hobbies - but, I’ve noticed, when something like those pressures are in place, the hobby becomes less enjoyable. If I’m knitting something that I’m trying to finish in order to give it to someone as a present on a certain date, that can really take the shine off. And I often find it useful to reflect on that. When I’m staying up all night to get a bloody sock finished off and wishing I could have gone to bed hours ago, I’m aware that it’s not the knitting itself that I don’t like, it’s the deadline. And so when I find myself actually beginning to hate a writing project, it can be helpful to remind myself that it’s not the writing itself that is the problem - it’s the stuff connected to it, the deadline, the anticipation of other people reading and criticising it, the knowledge that people are waiting. That doesn’t remove the stress, but it helps me understand it, and it means I don’t end up questioning my life choices in the way I might if I thought that I actually hate what I’m writing. And understanding the stress often opens doors to doing something to alleviate it a bit. Negotiating a new deadline. Talking with supportive people to bolster my confidence. That sort of thing. There’s something else, too. Identifying as someone who engages in a particular hobby can give you some insight into the way in which you think about yourself as a writer - and it can shine a light on some of the problematic ways you relate to your writing. Sometimes, people who know me well describe me as someone who is always knitting. Which is fair enough. I like to have a knitting project with me wherever I go so that I can work on it any time I have an opportunity. Going somewhere and not having any knitting with me makes me feel … well, it makes me want to go home and knit. I also look forward to opportunities when I can sit and knit. And even when I’m not actually knitting, I’m often doing knitting related stuff like looking at knitting patterns online or watching YouTube videos about knitting. I’m pretty much always in a low-key knitting mode even when I’m doing other stuff. However. If I was to be meticulous about this and add up all the time I actually spend knitting, it would end up being much less than I tend to imagine. Very often, when I take my knitting project with me to a restaurant or a meeting or whatever, I end up not knitting at all, or if I do, I might just do a tiny amount. Often I’ll sit down at home with the intention of taking a break and doing some knitting but I’ll end up doing something else instead, or one of the cats will be asleep on my unfinished project. Sometimes I can actually go a few weeks without knitting at all, although that’s generally because I’m crocheting instead, which I also like, although less than knitting. I’ve never actually added up all the time I spend actively knitting during a typical day, but I suspect that if I did, the figure would be surprisingly low. And yet, I generate a ton of knitted stuff. I have knitwear piled up in drawers that won’t close, everyone gets knitted stuff for birthdays and christmas, and my kids have knitted stuff they’ve only worn once. All this stuff gets created in stretches of five minutes here and there, in between other stuff. Which is not dissimilar to my writing. Sometimes I feel - and I know lots of you share this experience - that I’ve been working on a writing project for weeks or months, and then it occurs to me that if I were to add up all the minutes that I spend actually getting the words down, it’s going to be a horribly, shamefully tiny amount. In fact, I once did exactly that, as I’ve mentioned before. I once used a stopwatch to measure all and only the moments I spent writing during a day set aside solely for writing. I started the clock when I began to type and I stopped it when I turned away to do something else. I was absolutely horrified by the figure I ended up with. It was tiny. And that was on a day that felt relatively industrious, writing-wise. It made me feel like a fraud, and I continued to feel that way for years. Now, I’ve spoken before about how confused I was to think that measuring the time I spent adding words to a page was a reliable way to measure how much of a writer I was. Writing involves more than typing. Or, as I put it in episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing. I’d taken a rather cerebral approach to working out that the process of writing includes all sorts of things that aren’t writing: I’d looked at the evidence, which involved talking to other people about their writing process, and I also just (in the end) deduced that in order to do the actual writing bit of writing, you need to have something to write about, which means you need to have ways of coming up with ideas and connections, and that can involve a lot of what can feel like doing nothing. My insight into the writing process was an outcome of empirical evidence and logical deduction, and if I were a 17th century philosopher I could probably write a treatise on it, if nobody else had already got there first. But, actually, comparing my ideas about writing to my ideas about knitting revealed to me my weird ideas about writing in a much more immediate and intuitive way. It would be downright weird to gauge how much of a knitter I am by using a stopwatch to measure how much time I spend actively knitting. I mean, who does that? I know, without having to measure it, that I’m someone who knits a lot - but I don’t think that knowledge is really linked to how much time I spend actually knitting, partly because there are usually other demands on my attention and also because sitting there and relentlessly knitting for hours on end without a pause is a weird and unnatural way to approach it - although there are certainly times when I’ve done that. My conception of myself as someone who knits a lot is based more on the sense that I have an orientation towards doing it - by which I mean I want to be able to do it in little pockets of time here and there, if it’s not going to get in the way of something else, and so I arrange things in a way that makes it easy to pick up, which is just a fancy way of saying that wherever I am, I ensure that I have a knitting project with me, along with the tools and materials I need to make progress on it, if I have an opportunity. All this led me to ask myself: what if I approached writing in a similar way? You know, what if I set things up so that I could have an orientation towards writing, which would involve ensuring that writing is something that it’s very easy for me to pick up and put down - and that might be as simple as having a notebook and pen with me when I’m out and about so I can write down ideas, or a print-out of my latest draft so I can take a look at it when I have a moment? The first thought that sprang to mind when I pondered this is that there’s a big difference: I actually want to knit whenever I have a chance to do so, whereas writing is often something I avoid. So, there’s a sense in which I trust myself to knit - as in, I don’t doubt that I’m actually going to do it - whereas I don’t trust myself to write. But, actually, this is not quite true. Yes, I think of myself as someone who will do anything to avoid sitting down to write - but in large part, that’s my inner critic’s unflattering conception of what I’m like, and it’s based on a contrast between how much time I spend actually typing and how much time I think I should spend typing - and that contrast is based on some weird ideas about writing. If I ask myself, instead: if my career didn’t depend on it, and if I didn’t have to worry about letting anyone down, would I happily never write anything ever again? And there, I can confidently answer: absolutely not. I would be horrified if I had to stop writing. I know I’m not alone here, either - I’ve spoken to … well, probably at this point, hundreds of people who have anxieties around writing and who think of themselves as lazy and unwilling to do it, but who would no more want to give up writing forever than they’d want to give up a major body part. So, here we all are, happily maintaining both that we can’t trust ourselves to get on with our writing and confidently asserting that writing is a major part of our lives and something we’d never want to give up. Something’s gone wrong there, hasn’t it? Now, I know not all of you are going to be knitters - but if you are, feel free to connect on Ravelry, if you use it - my username is Minitufts. But plenty of you have hobbies you enjoy, even if you feel guilty about spending time on them instead of doing whatever it is you think you should be doing instead, although I hope I’m managing to convince you that this guilt is misplaced. Take a moment to reflect on your attitude towards your hobby compared to your attitude towards your writing, or whatever else it is that you think you should be doing. What would your writing life be like if you approached it more in the way you approach your hobby? Might it become less fraught and more - dare we even imagine it? - enjoyable? And, conversely, what would your hobby be like if you were to approach it in the way you approach your writing? I don’t have to try this experiment to know that if I were to approach knitting in the way that I have, in the past, approached writing, I would come to hate it. Because that would involve things like telling myself that I’m not a proper knitter unless I can sit there and do it for 8 hours straight without getting distracted. And if I were to knit for 30 seconds and then, I don’t know, pause to speak to someone or look around the room or make a cup of tea - all of which is completely normal for me - I’d attack myself by saying to myself things like ‘I’ve only just started doing this and here I am stopping already, I’m an absolute joke, everyone else out there is relentlessly and robotically knitting and that’s what I need to be doing too if I ever want to make it in life’. Really fucked up, right? That’s a sure fire way to kill my enjoyment of knitting. And so, it should be no surprise at all that approaching writing like this will likewise kill off any enjoyment we might have of writing. Now, having hobbies is rewarding for its own sake. That’s the point. That’s why they’re hobbies. But having hobbies is a good thing for other reasons, too. One is that engaging in hobbies can be a good way of unwinding and recharging your batteries. Another is, as I hope I’ve managed to show you here, having hobbies is a good way to remain in touch with what it looks like to have a positive, fulfilling relationship with an ongoing activity that you’re not weirdly perfectionistic about. For those of us with a tendency to develop a painful, anxiety-filled relationship with our writing, and to take on warped, unrealistic, and unhelpful ideas about what seriously engaging with an activity ought to look like, this is incredibly helpful. And besides, it’s also empowering. It’s one thing to have someone else to set us on the right tracks when we veer off course - and we all need that sometimes. But it’s quite another thing to have the capacity to be our own role models, to calibrate our own approach to the projects that are valuable to us by drawing lessons and insights from other areas of our own lives. There’s no disputing that those lessons and insights are applicable and relevant to you. If you’re one of those people who thinks they can’t afford to devote time to hobbies, think again. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some knitting to be getting on with. Before I go, though, I want to send big big love to my running coach, Carrie, who - as I record this - is undergoing surgery. Thinking of you, Carrie! And, the rest of you, go check out Carrie’s podcast, Plucky Not Perfect, where she’s opened up about her experiences with cancer diagnosis and treatment, and talked about some of the mind-boggling things she’s been doing while it’s going on - like a 100-kilometre fundraising bike ride. Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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