Hobbies and interests do more than give you a break from work. They give you exposure to different ways people measure success, solve problems, think creatively, and structure their efforts.

Here are five under-the-radar ways hobbies build your skills for handling stress.

1. They Put Your Work Pressures in Perspective

I occasionally watch professional running races, and it always strikes me how intense it must be to train for decades for races that last seconds or minutes.

That pressure is such a contrast to when I shuffle-jog for health, when it doesn’t matter how fast I am or how one day’s performance differs from the next.

In any professional sphere, what people value and are judged on is often irrelevant to people outside that world.

Your field might care about sales numbers, thinly-sliced career levels, followers, how your company is ranking next to a competitor, or whatever. Outside your field, those concerns often don’t register.

When we engage with one of our interests, it exposes us to a world in which what matters in our professional world doesn’t, and something else does. This highlights how work priorities are often constructed and contextual, not absolute truths. This recognition can provide emotional distance that serves to buffer work stress.

2. They Give You New Problem-Solving Tools

When we engage with an interest, we get exposed to novel mental models that can help us solve problems in our work with fresh eyes and new analogies.

What I’m about to explain might seem very niche, but the take-home message is that it’s in the weeds of whatever your interests are that you’ll find deep learning that will transfer to your work life.

One of my hobbies is collecting miles and points (e.g., airline miles and hotel points). In that community, hundreds of people who don’t know each other gather in micro-communities and the comments sections of blogs to share data points about their own experiences and experiments. Through this, a map of opportunities and risks is built up in a way that would be impossible through individual trial and error.

The miles and points community excels at recognizing patterns from scattered reports to reverse engineer an understanding of how systems work (such as what makes you likely to be approved for opening a points-earning credit card). The community also shines when it comes to recognizing out-sized opportunities that are real but too good to last, and hopping on these without overthinking them, because doing so would likely mean missing out.

While it might not be immediately obvious, the examples I gave – crowdsourcing scattered intelligence, recognizing patterns in spotty data, and acting decisively on fleeting opportunities – can be thought of as problem-solving tools. At first blush, they might seem specific to the miles and points hobby, but they apply equally to navigating workplace challenges where information is scattered, systems are opaque, and windows for action are short.

Feeling like you’ve got a wide range of problem-solving tools makes tackling work stress feel less daunting.

3. They Develop Your Creative Abilities

The miles and points examples I just gave are also a good illustration of how hobbies can strengthen our creative abilities.

• Exposure to crowdsourced intelligence based on others’ experiments helps me learn about the types of experiments I don’t think to try but others do.
• Learning from incomplete, scattered data reminds me it’s not only complete data that can produce creative insights.
• And, the focus on grabbing temporary opportunities before they disappear helps nudge me to look for these in all sorts of domains of my life.

Once you develop these creative reflexes in one area, they become available tools for any challenge you face. When you’re actively developing your creative toolkit, it reminds you that creativity is a great way to respond to stressful challenges.

4. They Provide Fresh Frameworks for Structuring Projects

In different hobbies and interests, people structure their efforts toward goals in different ways.

• People educate themselves in different ways.
• They have different feedback loops for detecting and building on progress.
• They balance energy and fatigue in varied ways.

For example, in fields like running or strength training, people operate in mesocycles and often include “de-loads” (recovery breaks to drop accumulated fatigue).

Training often follows different phases like base building, speed work, sharpening and tapering. Not every aspect of performance is worked on simultaneously.

These models of structuring work can give inspiration for your working life. Learning that high performers deliberately vary the intensity of their efforts counters the workplace assumption that consistent maximum output is the goal.

Lessons from almost any interest can apply, such as how crafters manage a large or unfamiliar project, or ways people collaborate in virtually any endeavor.

5. They Diversify Your Sources of Self-Worth

Quick analogy: An exercise used in eating disorders treatment is to have clients draw a pie chart showing how much of their self-esteem depends on body-related factors, like scale fluctuations.

It’s common for people to draw a pie chart in which 90 percent or more of their self-worth is tied to their weight and ability to restrict their calories.

That’s an extreme example, but work can often end up having a similar controlling influence. When we have hobbies and interests, it helps diversify our sources of self-worth. When one domain of our life is bumpy or we’re having bad luck, other domains help keep our overall self-perceptions more stable.

Guy Winch expertly explores this in Mind Over Grind, showing how diverse interests interrupt the negative flywheel where your sense of self becomes smaller as your work stress expands.

Let Your Hobbies Help You Manage Challenges Differently

Your interests aren’t just distractions from work. They offer opportunities to build skills and perspectives that can make you much more adaptable when faced with even crushing work stress.