Why You Should Take Up Knitting and Crocheting
Why You Should Take Up Knitting and Crocheting
Taking up activities like knitting and crocheting can have many wonderful benefits — the activities can ease stress, better your mental health and can even build relationships. Embracing the power of crafting will do more than give you the ability to make beautiful accessories, it will offer perks that can change your life.
Crafts Ease Stress
Crafts like knitting and crocheting are so repetitive and relaxing, the experience can be considered meditative — the process creates a trance-like state, so that you feel completely lost to everything around you. The exercise can reduce your heart rate, tension, and blood pressure, and create a powerful sense of calm.
If you want to de-stress with knitting, try a long but easy project, like a blanket or afghan — go to the website Yarnspirations to find a beginner pattern like the Bernat Angled Eyelets Blanket or the Caron Crystal Lace Blanket. The website can also provide all of the supplies you will need to start your knitting project, like yarn, needles, and other crafting tools. When you are done knitting your blanket and want to see what other projects can reduce your stress, browse through their blog for more creative ideas and crafts.
Crafts Improve Your Mental Health
Crafting’s ability to reduce stress helps with larger mental health concerns like anxiety and depression. Knitting will create a distraction for anxious people, so that they can focus on one simple task. Whenever an anxious person feels overwhelmed by the world around them, they can turn to knitting as a coping mechanism to reduce their chances of having an anxiety attack or breakdown. Knitting is especially useful, because it’s portable — if a person feels their anxiety rising, they can pull their yarn and needles out of their bag and knit almost anywhere.
Knitting and crocheting can also aid with depression, particularly because crafting can stimulate the creation of the pleasure chemical “dopamine” in your brain. The British Journal of Occupational Therapy published a piece on a study of 3,500 knitters, which stated that 81 percent of the members that suffered with depression claimed they felt happy after knitting.
Crafts Build Community
Crafts can help you forge new connections with like-minded people — many communities have knitting circles and groups, where crafters exchange ideas and create together. There are also many online crafting communities where you can share your projects, ask questions and send encouragement to other crafters across the globe.
Crafting can also better your current relationships, because it is a way for you to show your appreciation and affection for others. Friends and family members will be touched by the gifts that you make with your own hands — the effort and thought that went into making the gifts will make them precious.
Learning crafts like knitting and crocheting can help you make wonderful clothes, accessories and gifts for your friends and family. They can also help improve your health by creating an effective coping mechanism and reducing stress, anxiety and depression. Finally, crafting can help you make new connections and improve the relationships that you already have.
