Self-Help
Why Dabbling Is Important for Your Mental Health
Activities you do occasionally benefit you, even if you never improve at them.
Updated October 7, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Imagine this: Olivia is packing up her apartment to move to a new city. She takes her dusty yoga mat out of a closet and almost decides not to bring it.
She feels bad that she has only used it a couple of times since moving into her current apartment a year ago. But she hasn't given up on her aspirational self, so she tucks it into the moving van anyway.
A few weeks later, Olivia is settling into her new job and town. She has no friends and feels lost and overwhelmed by all the new things to learn. She passes a yoga studio and decides she'll get a 30-day pass to see if yoga will ease her anxiety.
A few weeks into her classes, she sees someone she recognizes from work. They start talking, and the woman invites Olivia to join her friends at a monthly outdoor yoga event held at a nearby park, followed by brunch. Olivia has her first friend.
Activities We Do Inconsistently Have Benefits
Most self-improvement advice focuses on building consistent habits. But Olivia's story reveals something different: Activities we do inconsistently can still have huge value for our resilience and mental health. It's good for your mental health to dabble—to engage in activities without expecting consistency or improvement.
We can only have so many consistent habits. Dabbling:
- diversifies your sources of positive emotions
- keeps your identity flexible and varied
- creates social connections
- varies the problems you solve
Yoga gave Olivia relaxation and friendship. But dabbling does more than this: It reminds you who you are. Karaoke reminds you that you're playful, knitting that you're creative, theater that you're sophisticated, volunteering that you're generous, and trivia that you're competitive.
These positive emotions become especially valuable during transitions, waiting periods (like waiting for exam results, college admissions, or trying to conceive), or low-energy times like winter.
Dabbling doesn't just create opportunities for new friendships; it also helps maintain old ones. And, dabbling challenges you. It tests: resourcefulness, adaptability, logistics, prioritization, improvisation, and foresight. Diverse activities vary the problems you encounter and the strategies you must use to overcome them.
What can get in the way of dabbling is when you forget what you enjoy, or activities lose familiarity and start to feel uncomfortable.
How to Keep Activities in Your Repertoire
It's fine to dabble in an activity once and never again, but mostly dabbling means returning to the activity from time to time, as the urge or opportunities present themselves. To keep an activity from disappearing from your radar, a reasonable guideline is to do it at least once a year. If you don't need to do the activity once a year for it to feel familiar, then even that's not needed.
Here are tips for keeping diverse activities in your wheelhouse.
Link the activity to:
- An annual occurrence, like you volunteer at a charity run that happens every September.
- A season, or the changing of seasons. You make jam once a year when berries are in season, or homemade soup the first weekend it's cold.
- A particular friend. Maybe you have a specific friend for karaoke, trivia nights, and thrifting.
- Travel. You pick hotels with pools and do laps even if you don't swim at other times, read paperbacks only in airports, or visit art museums only when you go to a big city for the first time.
- A backup plan. You do a particular activity when your usual one isn't available. For example, you knit only when your internet is out. (Don't overlook this one!)
- A young family member—for example, perhaps you take your niece ice skating or camping when she comes to visit.
Remove barriers:
- Identify low-commitment, drop-in events instead of memberships that require consistency.
- Keep a list called "Activities I forget I like" and add to it when you do things you enjoy, so activities don't disappear from your mind.
- Keep basic resources on hand, like knitting supplies or saving a favorite yoga video to a playlist.
Activities You Don't Do Consistently Still Matter for Mental Health
Psychological benefits don't only come from consistent activities or improvement. While strong habits are an outstanding way to improve, they limit you to doing the same activities repeatedly. Dabbling lets you engage in a wider variety of experiences and provides unique benefits.
While you might criticize yourself for not engaging in certain activities more frequently, simply keeping them in your repertoire might be what's most important. If you don't improve at a specific activity because you do it only very intermittently, that may not matter. Activities you only dabble in may come in clutch when you need to boost your positive emotions, be reminded of forgotten aspects of yourself, alleviate loneliness, or elevate your problem-solving.
Facebook image: Lena May/Shutterstock
