You left the office. You escaped the commute, the open-plan noise, the mandatory team lunches. You built a life where you work from anywhere, answer to nobody, and move on when a place stops feeling right.
And yet somehow, you are busier than ever.
Not busier in the bad (old) way, but busy in a new, self-imposed way that is harder to argue with because you chose it. You track your productivity. You optimise your mornings. You have a system for everything. When you arrive in a new city, you find the best coworking space, sign up for a gym, and research local meetups. You are, in our language of nomad culture, crushing it.
So why does something still feel off?
🌱 Health insurance for nomads & expats
🧠 You brought the mindset with you
The digital nomad promise is freedom. But researcher Dave Cook spent four years tracking 16 digital nomads and found something uncomfortable: in practice, nomadic life requires more discipline and self-management than conventional employment, not less. The freedom you imagined, where the tension between work and leisure simply dissolves, doesn't arrive. Instead, you become the CEO, the HR department, and the IT support of your own life simultaneously. Cook (2020) found that nomads rarely anticipate this when starting out and that the work of keeping work and leisure separate takes constant, active effort.
Add to this the pressure to prove yourself across time zones, stabilize your income, and maintain a personal brand, and what you have is a person spending 6 to 8 hours a day in pure performance mode. Not just working. Performing productivity.
A 2025 study by Regmi and Manandhar, examining hustle-culture behaviors among working professionals, found that work involvement, feeling driven to work, and even enjoying your work independently predicted higher anxiety when combined with blurred boundaries and overcommitment. That last finding is essential:
Even loving what you do can make things worse if you never properly step outside of it.
⏸️ The trap of optimized rest
Here is where it gets interesting. Most of us know we need to rest. We have read the articles. We know about burnout. So we try to rest, but we rest the same way we work. Intentionally. Efficiently. With outcomes in mind.
We take up running to improve our health metrics. We start meditating to boost focus. We learn a language to add a skill. We document everything for content. Even the holiday becomes a productivity race.
Iso-Ahola and Baumeister (2023), in a review published in Frontiers in Psychology, found that what makes something function as leisure is not the activity itself but the felt sense of freedom and intrinsic motivation around it. The moment an activity becomes goal-oriented, externally pressured, or tied to an outcome, even a self-imposed one, it stops working psychologically as leisure. You can be sitting on a beach and not be resting.
You can be doing nothing and still be on.
Their research also found that people who perceive leisure as wasteful score lower on happiness and higher on depression, anxiety, and stress. That belief that time has to earn its keep is the invisible tax we as nomads pay on every moment we are not producing something.
🌀 What your brain does when you stop
There is a network in your brain that only activates when you are not focused on a task. Neuroscientists call it the default mode network. For a long time, it was considered the brain's idle state. A background noise while the important stuff happened elsewhere.
It is not. Poerio et al. (2017), publishing in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, found that the default mode network supports some of the most complex and valuable cognitive functions we have: creativity, emotional processing, social cognition, memory consolidation, and the refinement of personal goals. It is the network that helps you make sense of your experiences, process difficult emotions, and generate ideas that task-focused thinking cannot reach.
The catch is that you cannot access it while optimizing. It requires mind-wandering. It requires what the research calls perceptual decoupling: a genuine stepping back from external demands. Not a productivity break. Not a five-minute meditation before the next call. A real, sustained absence of goals.
This is what a hobby can give you. But only if you let it be pointless.
🎨 The case for doing something badly
A scoping review by Cleary et al. (2025), drawing on 11 studies across multiple countries, found consistent evidence that hobby engagement reduces depression, lowers anxiety, and improves life satisfaction. One of the most striking findings came from a 12-year longitudinal study of 8,780 adults by Fancourt et al. (2020):
People who took up a hobby were 32% less likely to develop depression.
And for those already experiencing depression, the odds of recovery improved by 272%. Not because they got good at their hobby. Because they showed up for it.
A separate study of nearly 3,000 workers in Shanghai by Li et al. (2019) found that having hobbies mitigated the mental health damage of long working hours across all groups, regardless of how many hours they worked. The hobby functioned as a buffer, not a reward.
The Cleary review also highlighted research by Koehler et al. (2023) on hobby musicians, which found that autonomous motivation, doing it because you genuinely want to, feeling absorbed in the activity, produced greater well-being than any amount of skill development or external recognition. What was predicted was not improvement. It was absorption.
This matters enormously for nomads. The instinct is to approach a hobby the way you approach everything else: with goals, progress tracking, and a plan to get better. But the research suggests that is precisely the wrong approach.
The moment you start optimizing your hobby, you have converted it into work.
And work is what you already have too much of.
🧳 Why hobbies are harder on the road
If hobbies are so beneficial, why don't more nomads simply have them?
Because the nomadic lifestyle creates specific structural barriers that most hobby advice ignores.
Cook (2020) found that separating work from leisure requires active effort for nomads. It does not happen by default. You are often working from the same café where you relax, on the same laptop you use for everything else. The physical and psychological boundaries that help other people switch off simply do not exist in the same way.
Then there is the continuity problem. Many hobbies rely on consistency, a regular class, a local team, or a piece of equipment you cannot carry. When you move every few weeks or months, those structures collapse. You start over constantly, which makes depth impossible and frustration likely. I know what I am talking about: After 15 years of swing dancing, I am still at the beginner-intermediate intersection, as I find it difficult to enroll in regular local class setups.
The MBO Partners 2025 Digital Nomad Trends Report found that 19% of nomads cite loneliness as a persistent challenge, a figure that has remained stable for years. Hobbies that involve community, a choir, a dance class, a climbing gym, and an improv standup comedy group are among the hardest to sustain when you are always the newcomer.
And underneath all of this is the belief Cook identifies in his research: that digital nomads have absorbed a neoliberal model of personal responsibility in which every hour must justify itself. Taking up watercolor painting when you could be working on your business feels, to our nomad brain, like bad planning.
🌱 What actually helps
The research does not suggest you need to become a dedicated hobbyist with a five-year plan. It suggests you need something, really anything, that you do purely because you want to, that asks nothing of your professional identity, and that you are willing to be bad at.
A few things that tend to work in the context of nomadic life:
Pick something that cannot become content: If you can monetize it, brand it, or turn it into a newsletter, your brain will. Choose something that resists that. Drawing badly in a sketchbook, venturing out for bird watching, and cooking a meal in your simply equipped kitchenette.
Let continuity be optional: You do not need to get better. You do not need to maintain a streak. You need to pick it up when you feel like it and put it down without guilt. That freedom is not laziness. It is the condition that makes it work psychologically.
Resist the urge to research it to death: Our nomad reflex is to optimize before starting. Which running shoes, which meditation app, which language learning method? For a hobby, this is counterproductive. The bar is simply: start, and notice that you wanted to.
Give it time that feels wasteful: If you are doing it efficiently, you are doing it wrong. The value is in the purposelessness.
💬 If things go deeper than a hobby can reach
Sometimes what feels like a need for rest is something more. Burnout, persistent anxiety, and the particular loneliness of long-term nomadic life can reach a point where a sketchbook and an afternoon off are not enough.
Genki World Premium covers mental health care, including talk therapy with a psychologist or psychotherapist, psychiatric visits, and therapy apps, all subject to a 6-month waiting period and prior approval. If you are at that point, knowing your insurance has you covered is one less thing to worry about.
Being a nomad means you have already done the hard work of building a life that looks nothing like the default. This is the next, quieter step: building a part of that life that serves no purpose at all. Your brain has been waiting for permission.
Sarah Kuhlemann
Sarah Kuhlemann
Sarah Kuhlemann
