QThread causing entire program to sleep in pyqt5

Question

This is my first attempt at trying to subclass QThreads and use it in a program but I'm getting something kind of weird. I'm not sure if my constructor is wrong or something like that, but basically when I run my QThread the entire program sleeps (not just the thread) when the QThread is sleeping

For example, the provided code will print "Hello there" after 3 seconds which is how long the QThread is supposed to sleep for

How do I fix my code so that I can have my thread running in the background while the program is running

from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets
from PyQt5.QtCore import QThread, pyqtSignal
import time

class MyThread(QThread):
    def __init__(self):
        QThread.__init__(self)

    def __del__(self):
        self.wait()

    def run(self):
        self.sleep(3)
        print("Slept for 3 seconds")


def main():
    qThread = MyThread()
    qThread.run()

    print("Hello there")

main()

Answer 1

Use start not run:

def main():
    qThread = MyThread()
    qThread.start()

    print("Hello there")

Since run is the starting point for the thread (which exists in case you wanted to reuse the code not in a thread),

whilst start is the method to start the thread itself, so it will in turn call run