Unlocking Brain Benefits: Why Adults Should Start a New Hobby, According to a Neurologist

A doctor and author who took up piano in middle age explains how starting a new hobby later in life helps your brain.

When you’re busy building a business or raising a family (or both), hobbies can seem like the least important thing on your to-do list. If something has to go , then many of us will drop our weekend bike ride , book club , or dance class .

But talk to entrepreneurs and other high achievers about their hobbies and you’ll often hear something very different. Many say that, rather than being a hard to squeeze in extra, their hobby is actually key to their success.

One founder who took up horseback riding in the midst of a bruising startup journey, claimed it made her feel “like an unstoppable force.” Another credited her love of sailing with inspiring her to found a billion-dollar business . A third says surfing keeps you “pushing your limits.” Olympic diver Tom Daley credits his gold medal to his love of knitting .

What’s going on here? Why do casual hobbies unrelated to people’s careers seem to have such a profound impact on their success? In her book, Self, Lara Marcuse , a neurologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, used both her personal and professional experience to explain the profoundly positive effects new hobbies can have on our brains and therefore our lives.

Hobbies make us more resilient

Like many overworked professionals, Marcuse sought relief from the demands of her job by taking up a hobby in midlife . In her case it was learning to play the piano in her 40s. After seven years of lessons she’s not a very good player . But she is a happier person.

“I have a very stressful job,” she says. “[Playing the piano] makes me feel that the world is sort of full of beauty and hope.”

It will come as no surprise to many of you that hobbies can bring us joy and relaxation (which a boatload of research shows make us more likely to be successful ). But psychologists claim it’s not just because they’re a pleasant distraction. Hobbies also enrich our identities , relieving some of the pressure we put on ourselves in other areas of life.

Being a garage band rockstar or 5K champ is fun. It also gives us another well of accomplishment to draw on when work or family life is challenging.

Hobbies slow down brain aging

That’s already one big benefit. But Marcuse explains that hobbies affect us on a neurological level too. Learning something new in middle age is a fun but impactful brain workout that forces us to fire up rarely used neural pathways. This keeps you cognitively nimble, slows down mental aging , and protects against dementia.

These effects aren’t small. One recent study asked older adults to sign up for a casual evening class and measured their cognitive performance before and after they spent a few months perfecting their foxtrot or mastering French verb conjugations .

Their new hobbies “enhanced participants’ memory and attention so drastically that their abilities came to resemble those of adults 30 years younger,” reported the researchers in Scientific American .

Challenge yourself in small doses

That means when Tom Daley is knitting poolside or our horse-loving founder is saddling up, they’re not just finding flow or distracting themselves from other, more stressful aspects of their lives. They’re building psychological resilience and keeping their brains flexible and sharp.

Who wouldn’t want those benefits?

All you need to reap them, according to Marcuse, is to take up a hobby that challenges you in middle life. “It has to be something a little new that’s a little hard,” she says. Then do it regularly but not obsessively: “Just try to do it frequently, and don’t do it for very long,”

As a busy entrepreneur, you may think you don’t have time for hobbies. But science suggests skipping the stress-busting, brain-building power of casual pastimes actually is making you less likely to be successful, not more.

This post originally appeared at The News Pulsecom .

“Click here to subscribe to the The News Pulsenewsletter: The News Pulsecom/newsletters "