This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of IHeart Radio.

Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is to find a hobby, or if you already have one, to

schedule some more time for it. This is especially true if you feel like you have no time at all,

because time is all about perception, and consciously choosing to spend time on leisurely activities

can make you feel like you do have time for leisure.

I recently read Celeste Headley's new book, Do Nothing. Now, to be clear, Headley doesn't want people

to actually do nothing, nor has this public radio host and speaker ever spent a day doing

nothing in her life.

However, she does argue that many of us could use some higher quality leisure.

In general, people work less than they think they do.

We have free time, even busy people like Headley.

But when we tell ourselves a story that we have no free time,

when we get a spare moment, we don't have anything particularly purposeful ready to do with it.

And so we spend this leisure time in the most effortless ways possible, such as scrolling through social media.

Or we do fake productive activities, like deleting email.

So one thing Headley suggests is pursuing an actual

hobby. There are all kinds of interesting things you can do that use entirely different parts

of your brain, or that require less intense thinking than your job. Headley has a moss garden.

You can do crossword puzzles or jigsaw puzzles. You can cross stitch or knit or do other sorts of needlework. Legos are great or building model trains or dollhouses. My 10-year-old son and I are building a ship in a bottle. You can plan an elaborate garden. Anything artistic is great. I just read an article about someone

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