When a schedule tightens, personal pursuits go before nearly anything else. The reason lies in how obligations are enforced rather than in how much people value them.
Nothing external enforces them
Work, appointments and family commitments involve other people who notice absence and respond to it, which supplies enforcement from outside.
A private activity has no such mechanism. Skipping it produces no message, no consequence and no conversation.
Under time pressure the items with external enforcement survive, not because they matter more but because dropping them costs something immediately. The cost of dropping a private pursuit arrives much later and never as a bill.
They occupy the residual slot
Fixed commitments are scheduled, while personal pursuits usually occupy whatever remains after everything else is placed.
Residual time is the first thing consumed when any other item expands, so a modest increase in workload eliminates it entirely.
Activities that acquire a fixed slot — a class, a standing session with someone else — behave differently, which is a scheduling fact rather than a motivational one.
Restarting costs more than continuing
Skills decline with disuse, and returning after a long gap means performing worse than you remember, which is unpleasant enough to postpone.
Equipment gets stored, arrangements lapse, and the practical setup that once made the activity easy has to be rebuilt.
The gap therefore widens on its own, and a pause intended to last a busy month can extend for years without any further decision.
Justification is harder than it should be
Activities with no productive output are difficult to defend against competing claims that can be described in terms of necessity.
People frequently respond by reframing a pursuit as exercise, networking or self-improvement, which secures the time and changes the activity.
An activity performed for a purpose stops supplying what an activity performed for its own sake supplied, which is often the part that was doing the work.
What restores them reliably
Attaching the activity to a fixed time and, where possible, to another person converts it into something with external enforcement.
Reducing scale helps more than resolve does, since a short session that actually happens outperforms an ambitious one that waits for a free afternoon.
Persistent loss of interest in things you previously enjoyed, rather than loss of time for them, is a different matter and one worth raising with a clinician.