To me, being on the water on a smaller sailboat or in a kayak are very relaxing. With a small sailboat, you don’t have the expense or maintenance associated with larger examples. Just avoid racing unless you want to be surrounded with competitive type A personalities!
If I were a young fellow, I’d want to consider the cost vs. longevity of my involvement in the hobby and how much joy does it really bring.
Many hobbies have a fairly decent amount of ever-more-costly gear associated with them, and it sucks to invest a lot in your new hobby only to realize you just aren’t into it as much as you thought after a few years.
I had several really good guitars, and I studied jazz guitar for many years, really wanting to love it. But I never looked forward to practicing, kind of like the poster who mentioned anxiety at going to the pool hall.
Eventually I discovered the *bass *guitar and realized what loving a musical instrument really is like. The guitars are all gone now, replaced with a few carefully chosen basses.
This pattern has repeated itself with other expensive hobbies over the years, where I realized the hobby was actually tedious work.
Then, a few years ago I remembered my machine shop work from a former life and how much I loved that job. So I set up a home machine shop and make tiny steam engines. I spend many peaceful hours at the lathe or milling machine, and I enjoy every minute of it. It’s crushingly boring stuff to everyone else I know, but it’s just the thing for me.
Make sure you truly can’t wait for the next bit of free time to get back to whatever your hobby is. Perhaps that’s the true litmus test.
I paint on huge canvasses. As a hobby. I do sell art but tends to be smaller mix-media things. I love lettering signs and calligraphy.
I was offered a chance to paint a huge mural 2 or 3 years ago in a little town. I showed a portfolio and got the commission. Let’s say I know how Michelangelo felt painting that ceiling. I was climbing allover scaffolding in the Summer heat of Arkansas. It toooookkkk fooooreeeverrr. One of the worst experiences of my life. They said the prestige and notoriety would help my Art career. NOT!
Oh, I get a requests to do murals about once a month. Nope. Beckdawrek ain’t got another one in her. I’ve done a few small indoor wall murals. And got paid. That was nice.
Hobbies don’t relax you if they are also jobs.
Separate your hobby from your work as much as possible.
Ten points to Gryffindor!
He does have a point, there.
I find some older MMOs (Diablo series and newly-revived City of Heroes) repetitive but relaxing, especially when played with old friends.
Sometimes too relaxing. When I want a bit more excitement, I try a more modern competitive player-vs-player game – in my case, a World War II air combat simulator (War Thunder). While moments of suspense are interspersed with visceral terror – for example, when that droning engine turns out to be an enemy fighter suddenly emerging from the gray murk of clouds behind you – there’s also a significant amount of frustration. For personal reasons I stick to the Allies, although for a number of reasons the game meta tends to favor the Axis (particularly the Germans).
While being the underdog does make it particularly satisfying when I do well, my loved ones occasionally must endure a bellowed “GODDAMNED F*ING NAZI!”
I saw Elton John on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show last night. Elton mentioned that one of his ways to relieve stress (I don’t think that I’d go so far as to call it a “hobby”) is feeding paper into an electric paper shredder. He finds it particularly satisfying and a bit addictive, and he described how he got into trouble with his then-fiance (now husband) when he shredded the seating plans for their wedding reception. 
I’m the same, though my preferred puzzles are New York Times crosswords, and the occasional acrostic puzzle. They’re relaxing (to me anyway), not expensive at all, and fit nicely into my briefcase in case I have a longer-than-expected wait somewhere.
This bears repeating. In my experience, once a hobby becomes a job, it tends to lose the fun it once was.
I also did calligraphy, and loved it. Then friends started asking for things. It wasn’t bad at first, inking people’s names onto certificates and diplomas and so on in elegant calligraphy, and I did get paid. But then the commissions started getting bigger and more time-consuming, and deadlines appeared and it stopped being fun. I haven’t done it in years now.
Isn’t it funny how many good friends you get when you have a skill?
I use to juggle porcupines but it cut into my autobranding time.
Me too Beckdawreck. I’ve been told so many times that I should do pro photography.
Oh, F*** no.
Oh you mean like when I come home from the tennis court and scream “I hate tennis!” and go out back and try to destroy my racquet? No; I just needed a new racquet.
Seriously, I don’t look for soothing in hobbies. There are things I find soothing. I often clean the floors, or fold clothes, or iron things, when I’m angry or upset, because these things calm me down. Plus, clean floors and ironed clothes!
I would sure not call this a hobby, but if I’m looking for “soothing” these things work. And since I don’t particularly like to do it, there are almost always things that need ironing and floors that need scrubbing. (Because I usually am not angry or upset. But I recently lost my dog so at this point things are fairly clean and wrinkle-free.)
^^^I often say cleaning is my hobby. I don’t particularly like it. It’s more of an obsessive behaviour. A completely dust free house does make me happy, though.
I’m not sure I’d look at gardening/raising vegetables as “relaxing”*, unless you ease into it, have limited objectives (at least at first) and use labor-saving devices like raised beds and drip irrigation.
I was looking at raising a few chickens for eggs and amusement, but the darn things seem to require a fair amount of attention as well as protection from predators and irate neighbors. One article suggested I would need to trim their nails periodically, and experience has taught me that getting animals to tolerate nail trimming is diametrically opposed to the concept of relaxation.**
*Cacti and succulents are relaxing in the sense that if you forget to water them for a week (or more), no real harm done.
**We recently decided against making an offer on a house based on the current owner’s intention to leave her large pot-bellied and long-nailed pig for the new occupants.
***Mrs. J. has suggested I look into making jewelry and restoring handbags as hobbies, but I am beginning to suspect ulterior motives on her part.
Cooking, being an auto mechanic. Used to LOVE cooking, then it became an actual job, then I became the default grill master/hamburger chef/head cook at ALL the family gatherings without being asked. My sister and neice take care of Thanksgiving now, and I’d prefer to pay someone else to get greasy these days, after deciding to take my small engine tinkering hobby into the army as my job.
These days I watch educational (mostly) video on youtube as a hobby, Because Science is the channel I watch more than any other.
I was in advertising most of my professional life, and actually took up blacksmithing so I could see something I’d actually made.
Now I carry a sketchbook with me for some of the same satisfaction.
My friends kid that I retired so I could read comic books and post on the Dope. Not too far off…
I’ll second this. One of my hobbies is challenge square dancing. It’s group theory* set to music, performed is real time as a team sport. It requires a lot of thinking, without much time to space out. And when my mother was in the intensive care unit, or when I was given notice at work, if was one of the few things I could do that was so engaging that I had a respite from my worries, and even felt moments of joy.
- Not exactly, but pretty close.
I was in a treatment room at the foot clinic Monday. I was taking selfies because the lighting was great. (I have a friend who I trade pix with). A nurse walked in and asked to see. She remarked how good they were. In awhile she brought her phone in and asked me to take pix of her. She wasn’t very cute and she had on scrubs, but I got some decent pix of her and showed her how to edit them. And I’m relatively tech ignorant. Just do one nice thing and peeps come running. I’m glad I got outta there right then.
You might be amused by the Quicksort algorithm, rendered in Hungarian folk dance.
I took up model building in my early 20s in the hopes of teaching myself some patience. After 10 years or so of buying scores of kits and building maybe 3-4 models, I realized that my hobby, in fact, was collecting model kits. I was more patient by then, so I sold off my collection and haven’t looked back.