cozy winter hobbies
Hi everyone! Here in Germany it's already so cold, and I'm spending more time at home. As a homebody I love this, but I know it can be challenging. So I decided to share lots of hobby ideas with you for staying cozy at home, enjoying the holiday season, and discovering how important hobbies can be.
The hobbies I've tried over these past few weeks have taught me so much. They've helped me heal my relationship with doing things, manage my anxiety, and improve my relationship with money. I believe this is powerful, and I hope you'll find inspiration from my list of hobbies.
LIST
Painting and drawing
Crochet and knitting - a great example of how society focuses on productivity and money, but these hobbies teach us that the activity itself is the reward, plus you create something useful fro yourself.
DIY projects
Making your own candles
Woodworking
Furniture painting
Clay
making bracelets
make your own postcard
christmas gifts
When we make things ourselves, we reconnect with our basic human nature. This is how humans first started, creating and building is in our DNA. While it can be challenging, here's a spoiler: doing difficult things is great for balancing dopamine—and shopping isn't one of them.
Games: like board games, cards, puzzles, Lego, Play-Doh, video games
Hobbies are like playing for adults, though there are differences. Hobbies usually require more learning and regular practice than playing, but combining both helps us accept doing things just for fun and reconnects us with our inner child.
Painting ceramics with friends or doing pottery
Movie and TV series reviews: physical or digital, I made them as a hobby for myself in 2023 and I am so glad I did so, there are many you can listen and watch in my podcast EU AXO.
Making albums
Scrapbooking
Home decorating - especially for Christmas now, and creatively arranging things in your space is something you'll see often on this channel because I love it, I think it is so creative.
Decluttering and cleaning - while challenging for many, some find it meditative and enjoyable. It seems anything can become a hobby if you do it with pleasure and find reward in the process itself. This leads me to...
Cooking and baking - I used to see this as gendered work, as something I HAD to do because I'm a woman. Viewing cooking as a hobby has helped me reframe my relationship with it. The reward becomes the food itself, the warmth it creates, the tactile experience, and how it calms my mind. Approaching it as a hobby has transformed my perspective.
Making music - a new music is coming soon! And making music myself started as a hobby, then became professional, so it's more than just a hobby now. But music can be enlightening—learning an instrument, writing lyrics, making covers, singing in the shower, taking lessons, or simply sitting down to truly listen to music can be one of the most rewarding activities.
Reading - while not for everyone, reading truly heals. It helps you learn new things and escape reality. There are many genres—just find yours. Libby is an app you can connect with libraries close to you. Audiobooks are my new obsession —you should totally try it too!
Collages - with old books and magazines, or digital ones, making instagram posts. Making social media a hobby is my next goal, haha!
Writing stories and books - I've been writing a book since 2016. The story has changed, of course. I wrote in 2016, gave up, and now I'm rewriting it from the beginning in 2024. Just go for it—what story is in your mind that needs to come out? Imagine, invent, you don't even need to share.
Journaling is perfect right now—bullet journaling, with stickers, drawings and photos. Now it is a time for so much reflection, and journaling always helps.
Indoor Gardening - now is time for an extra plant care, adding grow lights, pruning, repotting, finding better spots for them. While not really my thing, it's wonderful if you're into it.
Indoor photography: using phones or cameras, finding new perspectives at home, playing with shadows, lights, colors, backgrounds. As a content creator, I create at home, and it keeps my mind active, helping me see my space creatively.
30-day challenges - while not technically a hobby, these challenges are great for staying busy during cold months. I want to do 30 days of decluttering and 30 days of self-portraits. Viewing challenges as performance art can shift your perspective—what experiences can you create? This can heal our productivity mindset by making the process an event itself. Nothing needs to happen afterward; the process matters most—that's what 30-day challenges teach us.
Restyling clothes, plan outfits - there are many planning apps, such as Whering.
Cinema, museums, theaters - those are indoor activities that can become hobbies through habit. Visit these places more during cold months. Make it a hobby, something you do for yourself, just for the experience. Appreciating art is valuable—your hobby doesn't have to be creating art, you can simply enjoy it.
Mandalas - in my last video, I discussed cycles and circular planners (planning is also my hobby—I really enjoy it). Making mandalas can be a wonderful hobby too.
I recently saw a video where someone created a monthly mandala, recording temperature, daylight hours, and drawing one small thing each day—similar to the 30-day challenges I mentioned. You can paint, record information, track your cycles, moods, or moon phases in your mandalas or simply draw and paint them.
Learning a language - as a German teacher, I know it's not always fun when you have to learn a language. But consider this: maybe you don't have to learn, maybe you want to learn and now you are more at home and have the time. It can be fun and enlightening
At Deutsch HA you can learn with me.
In one lesson we were discussing Hobbies and a student that teached me a word in my own mother language, portuguese, which was: desopilar. A new way of naming hobbies.
It means unclog, is like relief or unblocking. In german would be something like verstopfen. The word "hobby" might not fully explain the concept we search when we want to make these activities. There is something deeper when we do them, and mostly why we do them.
In Portuguese and French, we call it "passatempos"—passing time, because in these activities you're so in flow that time flies by. In German, we also say hobby, but also "Freizeitaktivitäten"—which is, what you do in your free time?
Why did time became a prison? What makes us feel our flow? makes us feel relief and free? What would we all do if not for money?
It seems like a dream—a time to do just what we want to do—but it's actually hard to find what we truly like, what we need. So I hope this inspired you to try new hobbies, see which one matches you the best and hopw you have a nice time finding this deeper meaning for yourself. And have fun!
