Senior man with trumpet
Reading. Crafts. Gardening. Volunteer work. Walking. Pickle ball.
New research suggests hobbies have key mental health benefits for the elderly, highlighting the need for strategies to support hobby participation in aging populations.
In general, hobbies “involve imagination, novelty, creativity, sensory activation, self-expression, relaxation, and cognitive stimulation, all of which are positively related to mental health and wellbeing via psychological, biological, social, and behavioral pathways,” Daisy Fancourt, a behavioral science and health researcher at the University College London (UCL)’s Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care, and her co-authors wrote in a study published in Nature Medicine this week.
There, researchers at UCL, Japan’s National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, and other centers in Europe and Japan brought together survey, questionnaire, and interview responses — along with mental health measurements — for nearly 93,300 individuals over 65-years-old from 16 countries in Europe, the UK, North America, and Asia.
“To help meet older adults’ needs and to support the sustainability of health and social care systems globally, it is important to explore cost-effective strategies to enhance older adults’ mental health and wellbeing,” the authors reasoned, adding that they have seen “global interest in how engagement in psychosocial activities could address these challenges.”
The average age of the participants in each country ranged from 71.7-years-old to almost 76-years-old, the team explained. For their analyses, the investigators analyzed consistently available hobby and mental wellbeing data for the individuals, who were enrolled through five longitudinal studies.
Their results revealed a wide range in the proportion of participants who reported having a hobby. Just 37.6 percent of respondents in China reported what the researchers classified as “hobby engagement,” for example, compared to 90 percent of participants from Japan.
Even so, the team explained, the data from China was not included in a subsequent meta-analysis, since individuals there were only questioned about their participation in hobbies with a social component, and did report on more solitary endeavours.
In Europe, around half of participants in Spain or Italy reported hobby engagement. On the other hand, hobby rates were far higher in Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark, where more than 94 percent, 95.8 percent, and 96 percent of individuals questioned said they participated in hobbies, respectively.
Just over 56 percent of American participants said they had a hobby, but nearly 44 percent did not.
Despite these variable hobby engagement rates, the team consistently saw diminished depressive symptoms in participants with hobbies. Elderly individuals with hobbies also reported enhanced levels of health, happiness, and life satisfaction.
“Given the relative universality of [these] findings, ensuring equality in hobby engagement within and between countries should be a priority for promoting healthy aging,” the study’s author suggested.
In a news and views article appearing in the same issue of Nature Medicine, University of Liverpool public health, policy, and systems researcher Sophie Wickham, who was not involved in the study, said the latest results suggest there are beneficial ties between hobbies and mental health across a range of cultures and locations.
“Alongside the experiences of acute joy that such activities bring us, research consistently highlights the importance of hobbies to support prolonged positive mental health; but the generalizability of such findings in different geographical and cultural settings has not been clear,” Wickham wrote.
To that end, she suggested, the latest results pointed to “longitudinal associations between hobby engagement and fewer depressive symptoms, improved self-reported health and increased happiness and life satisfaction—irrespective of country, gender, retirement status, and country-level retirement age.”
Even so, Wickham noted that the dramatic differences in hobby havers from one country to the next highlights the importance of policies that support the availability of, and access to, hobbies to boost the mental health of aging population members.
“The large between-country differences in hobby engagement may reflect how societies are structured and organized within each country, which is heavily impacted by national policy,” Wickham wrote, calling it “imperative that policy makers around the world consider the findings from this research, which solidifies the evidence base for mental health benefits of hobby engagement.”