Zen and the Art of Maintaining Gundam: Finding the Perfect Hobby After Work
I don’t really like eating vegetables on the couch. Everything is paradoxically interesting to me, but I quickly get bored when my brain is not involved. I always need something to do. So, instead of staring at another screen when I get home, I finally found the perfect balance of entertainment and relaxation for my evenings.
Sure, I could spend the evening surfing the Internet, reading and blogging, but that sounds too much like work – and besides, I need to get away from screens. So, looking for a new hobby, I recently bought a sophisticated high-quality robot model and slowly put it together. I spent an entire day, more or less closely following the Japanese guidelines, with their wonderfully accurate diagrams, to piece together the little ‘Mech Warrior. To be precise, this is Gundam , the giant space robot from the multi-year Japanese animated series. I hadn’t even seen a single episode of the show, but I needed something that had nothing to do with work, and I wanted to get my hands dirty. Plus the Gundams look cool.
It was an unexpectedly refreshing day. My hands were calloused and cut from cutting hundreds of tiny pieces from their plastic scaffolding with the Exacto knife, which became dumber and more dangerous as I used it. My eyes got tired of looking at intricate diagrams when I tried to remember a little Japanese from school. It was exhausting, but still somehow relaxing as I put my time and energy into something far and away from my daily life. I am beginning to understand why people make complex models of railways in their basements.
I’m not the only one, of course, channeling energy into side projects for recharging. Speaking with Entrepreneur.com, neuroscientist Jeff Stibel said avoiding common problems can help you harness the brain’s innate multitasking:
“Charging is about solving a specific problem and doing something completely different,” he says. While the brain can only handle a certain part of one task before it starts shutting down, Stibel says it can handle many different tasks. “When you hit that tipping point, take a break and take another, your brain can start working again, so you’ll be twice as productive as you would otherwise just do one task,” Stibel says.
This may seem like a sophisticated way of saying “take a break from time to time,” but that’s not all. Just disconnecting from the network or watching TV didn’t really inspire me because all the problems I had to deal with during the day were still in my head due to something so passive. I needed to solve new, completely different problems to get rid of my latent work anxiety. In my case, that meant making a fake robot (you know, unlike the real one ).
I am certainly not saying that everyone should go and buy an expensive Gundam kit today. But consider what you usually do after work for relaxation: Is it active enough to engage your brain, but is it disconnected enough from work to distance yourself? I make model kits, but you can find your world by running marathons, working on car engines, or creating intricate LEGO Death Star sculptures.