People tend to develop different hobbies. Some hobbies are only short-term and people tend to lose interest in them soon. On the other hand, some hobbies are long-term and people continue to pursue them for many years. However, I believe that each hobby has a more significant meaning in a person's life. More specifically, the formation and disappearance of each hobby indicates a change in a person's mental state during that particular time. Now I want to give out two examples of my habits to illustate my idea.

The first habit I want to discuss is a habit that I have already lost interest in it. When I was a child, I saw a fantastic piano performance that sparked my interest in playing the instrument. I played the piano for nine years, but eventually, I gave it up. In the following text, I will explain why I made the decision to stop playing the piano. Initially, I was interested in playing the piano when I first started practicing it. However, things changed when I took the grade 7 piano exam. I failed the exam on my first attempt, and unfortunately, I failed again when I tried it for the second time. My mother encouraged me to try once again, and promised to give me more pocket money if I passed the exam. Therefore, despite feeling learning helpless about passing the piano test, I still chose to participate in it because of the extrinsic motivation of earning some more pocket money.

However, my attitudes towards playing the piano changed after the third attempt. The failures of the past exams triggered my defense mechanism, and I tried to rationalize my failure by telling myself that I didn't have any talent for music. This kind of thinking led to the reciprocal determinism model, which in turn affected my behavior. I believed that a person without any talent can never play a nice piano song, even if they practiced for a hundred times. As a result, I began avoiding practicing, and the piano songs I played sounded worse than before. To make matters worse, the people around me who were also learning piano gradually surpassed me, even though they had learned for a shorter period of time than me. This made me feel more frustrated, and I finally lost all motivation to practice the piano. Not surprisingly, I failed again this time. But the negative things brought by the failure of the exam was not only the bad emotions, but also the negative influence on my self-efficacy for a long time. When I saw the new piano song, my first reaction was that I can not play it well. I even thought that I can not do anything successfully in the after few years.

I was deeply affected by three failures I experienced while playing the piano. Two of them had a significant negative impact on me. Firstly, it leads to a low self-efficacy on me, and I started to believe that I would fail at everything I do. Secondly, I developed a strong dislike towards playing the piano as well as all musical instruments. I think this was a classical conditioning. I associate negative experiences with the piano, so I feel bored and tired when I see the piano. At the same time, I hate all musical Instruments because generalization. The disappearance of the piano as a hobby was indicative of my declining self-efficency and the learning helplessness brought by the failures during that time.

The second habit I would like to share is playing puzzles. During summer vacation, I accidentally purchased a jigsaw puzzle. As I pieced together the picture bit by bit, I felt a sense of relief from my stress, so I started to enjoy puzzles and spend more times on it. I find out that my motivation of completing the puzzles become as an intrinsic motivation, which is a much more stonger motivation than the extrinsic motivation on playing the piano.

As the school started, my stress level increased, I used to eat a lot to relieve stress before I got into puzzles, but now I found myself spending more and more time on puzzles. Interestingly, puzzles take a lot of time, and I started feeling anxious about spending so much time on them. But I convinced myself that puzzles help me decompress well, and hence I continued playing them. The cognitive dissonance theory is working on this to help me change my mind.

It also greatly increased the time I spent alone with myself, and I found that I enjoyed spending more and more time alone with myself, so I wondered if I would change from an extrovert to an introvert in the Big Five Trait, but the test still showed that although my level of introverted increased, I was still more extroverted. I think this can be explained by the Biopsychosocial model. My extrovert genes come from my parents, who are both outgoing and cheerful people. In terms of psychology, although I spend most of my time alone because of puzzles, I still enjoy hanging out with my friends. Finally, in social factors, I was surrounded by warm and outgoing people, which also influenced my physical appearance. The formation of this hobby indicates that my inner stress has increased and I am more introverted.

Learning psychology is a good way to help us self-observe, and I also found the relationship between the formation and dissipation of hobbies and the change of our mental state after learning psychology. I think I will continue to apply various psychological theories in the future.