The Benefits of Acting
Acting can be a great hobby for you to enjoy in your spare time (like acting games!), and there are many places that offer classes that can help you hone your acting skills, even if you already have experience in attending and participating in acting workshops; or that can help you learn the basics of acting, if you are going into acting for the first time. Some workshops are even offered to cater to the needs of office workers and amateurs.
Why should you spend time and money to learn acting? And why should you even consider it as a great hobby aside from spending time learning how to sew, write, knit, or draw? Here are a few advantages to acting and taking it up as a hobby.
- It can help you control your emotions. Contrary to what you might have seen on reality television shows, real acting isn’t all about letting all your emotions out, running across the stage naked, or flailing your hands up and down and screaming all your thoughts to the heavens. Real acting is about knowing which emotions to use for which lines, and how to control your facial expressions so that you are conveying the right emotions.
In other words, acting is more than an art or a craft: it is discipline, and if you can learn the ropes and discipline yourself through acting, then you might also learn how to control and discipline your emotions in real life.
- Acting can help you gain focus. In order to act out a specific scene and convey emotions, actors need to be especially focused: they need to stay in character and know the character through and through. This can be an especially difficult task if there are many distractions.
The acting techniques that get actors focused can also help you get focused on many aspects of your life, including your job, school, or anything that you are working on or getting paid for.
- Acting can help you let go of tension. Many of the acting exercises that you will be learn can be enjoyable, and even make you laugh. Other exercises will help you understand why you react in certain ways to certain stimuli. As you discover more about yourself, you can control yourself better and perhaps be more at peace with yourself as well as enjoy yourself in the process.
- Attending acting workshops will help you make more friends. That means a wider network, more parties to go to, and more fun!