‘I had learned to crochet as a child, but I had never done more than the basics. About ten years ago, in my late twenties, I was going through a period of deep depression, and I was grasping at straws for anything that would make me feel better. I read somewhere that you should do what you loved to do as a child and for some reason crochet came to mind so I decided to give it a try again. It helped immediately, and I’ve been crocheting regularly ever since.’
– Kathryn Vercillo, writer, crocheting
Many of us at some point in our lives may experience mild to moderate symptoms of depression, including sadness, indifference or lack of motivation, low self-esteem, poor concentration and low energy. Grief and sadness brought on by loss and bereavement, or fear of upheaval and anxiety about what the future holds, can feel overwhelming at times and may affect our ability to cope. Intense feelings such as these are part of being human and as such can be termed human condition ailments.
Environmental factors and external pressures of modern life play a part in our mental health, with increasing numbers of people, including teenagers and students, citing symptoms of stress and debilitating anxiety. Excessive worrying, rumination, insomnia and irritability can have a chronic effect on well-being, thwarting our ability to function and thrive.
‘Self-help’ gets a bit of a bad rap, but essentially it is about making certain choices to improve our health and well-being – who among us can claim that they wouldn’t benefit from some self-initiated tweaks? Eating well, exercising and getting enough sleep form the basic toolkit for happiness. But exploring our creativity, our capacity to inspire and be inspired, to use our hands to make objects which express our innate individuality are also to be cherished and encouraged.
We know from personal experience that some form of creative activity has proved essential to our happiness and mental health. Our conversations around Rosemary’s kitchen table or in Arzu’s garden often took place during periods of stress. Full-time jobs and the demands of children can lead to burnout; certainly when your children are very young it can feel as though one is always on high alert, always on the edge of a crisis, whether it’s managing childcare or juggling a work emergency.
Rosemary herself has struggled with depression and bipolar disorder since her late teens and, during her worst breakdowns and periods off work, found that knitting, along with word puzzles and TV quiz shows, was one of the very few things that she could continue to do, and that brought any respite from the debilitating mental pain. The act of knitting, its repetitive rhythm, calms and soothes. While hands and mind are engaged with the knitting in your lap, watching the rows growing in repeating patterns takes some of the pain away. Now, she finds that working with clay and hand-building with coils has the same sedative effect.
That said, having always had the drive to make things, it was only relatively recently that we began to properly think about the role of craft in our lives and to analyse the deeply therapeutic part it played. Making made us feel better, cope better, engage more fully with the world around us, feel inspired and useful.
The actual process of being creative and of making things with our hands, we now recognise, is in itself the incidental and fundamental mental health benefit. Through ‘craftfulness’ we can all tap into this innate creative potential.
CREATIVITY IS THE ‘ORIGINAL ANTI-DEPRESSANT’
‘Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.’
– Heraclitus, 500 BCE, philosopher
Creativity is an intrinsic part of our human-ness – homo sapiens’ ability to imagine and think and to relate thought in symbolic form – language, art forms, writing – distinguishes us from every other species. It is interesting to note within this context that we evolved to use our hands to create objects of artistic, emotional and symbolic expression.
In Arts in Health, research scientist Daisy Fancourt presents a compelling and inspiring history of art and creativity in medicine and psychiatric health, as well as demonstrates the positive impact and well-being potential of the arts. Fancourt points out that the earliest traces of our creativity can be seen in Palaeolithic cave paintings, thought to be prehistoric examples of symbolic expression relating to health. She notes that the earliest pieces of art, dated to around 40,000 years ago, are thought to have been part of ancient healing and fertility rituals.
Today, the growing body of research from clinical trials leaves little room for doubt that creative activity in which people participate because they want to, in an unpressured environment, delivers therapeutic benefits that are positive, significant and can be life-changing. Indeed, in his book Creativity as Repair: Bipolarity and its Closure, Andrew Brink of the department of Psychiatry at McMaster University makes the plain and bold assertion that creativity is the ‘original anti-depressant’.
While it would be irresponsible to claim that ‘craftfulness’ and creativity alone can cure all – severe and chronic mental health illnesses, including bipolar disorders and schizophrenia, call for prescribed clinical and drug treatment plans – it does bear noting that even in these more serious incidents of mental health crises, as in Rosemary’s experience, creative engagement, as part of a complementary, holistic therapeutic approach may play a vital role in the healing programme.
We spoke with the Bound by Veterans charity (formerly the Wiltshire Barn Project), which was founded in 2012 by two bookbinders who shared the strong belief that this craft could be of therapeutic benefit to wounded, injured and sick ex-servicemen and women. The courses run by the charity aim to give veterans, or individuals being discharged from the services, the opportunities to enjoy not just the well-being benefits of bookbinding, but also to attain internationally recognised qualifications in the book arts.
For many servicemen and women who suffer severe physical and mental injuries including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, bookbinding provides a set of skills which aren’t too demanding, and which produce simple, yet unique books and boxes at the end of the course. This gives the maker a great sense of achievement and satisfaction. Binding books is a craft where one is always learning: it is an ideal craft for therapy, in that it is possible to make simple books with very basic skills in a short time; however, over longer periods, structures with increasing complexity are equally satisfying. The feedback from attendees is overwhelmingly positive; those who have endured great physical and mental stress find relief in the simple process of putting together books and making boxes.
A RAF senior non-commissioned officer with over 20 years’ service shared his thoughts with us: ‘Taking the course has helped me tremendously. I was unable to get out of the house for eight months, except for medical appointments, and too nervous to drive anywhere. I now enjoy the journey to the Barn for work. I feel more stable and not so anxious about the future. I’m so busy concentrating on the work, cutting and stitching or making marbled paper, that everything else is pushed to one side.’
Some veterans found their short-term memories dramatically affected by the medication required subsequent to their injuries. Bound by Veterans’ founder Jonathan Powell highlights the power of bookbinding to aid short-term memory recovery: ‘Everything we do requires a little bit of imagination, a lot of concentration and an increasingly well-developed memory. Going through routines is very repetitive but beneficial. It’s good for short-term memory as you have to remember stages and processes. There is a tremendous boost in confidence if you get it right and end up with a functional object. The veterans want it to be perfect and when it is, there’s nothing like the feeling.’
You can get a taste of this yourself in Part III, where you can try your hand at putting a book together.
One of the most inspiring and uplifting places we visited in the course of our research is Core Arts in Hackney, London. Founder and artist Paul Monks showed us around the building, a restored church hall just off Chatsworth Road near Hackney’s Homerton Hospital, housing a vast gallery showing some of the clients’ extraordinary work, recording and rehearsal studios, a fully equipped pottery, painting and life-drawing rooms and digital media suites. Paul told us how Core Arts started. In the early 1990s, he was using vacant space in the old Hackney Hospital to paint. Curious patients, seeking respite from the monotony of their day on the psychiatric ward, soon chanced upon his studio door. Paul invited them in. Before long, he had a growing number of regular visitors and his studio became a haven for artistic expression, as patients sought refuge from the clinical setting in a world of paint and colour.
‘These guys would just come in and sit and chat while I was painting. I had a massive industrial box of paint, so I invited them to have a go, and it just grew from that. I thought hard about the myth of creativity and mental health. I found out that many of my visitors were doing creative things on their own, in their own way. I wasn’t privy to those experiences, so I started visiting them in their flats and saw amazing sights. I saw people who had nothing but a candle and a can of Guinness, who painted the walls, or plastered them making 3D images. I saw this chap who had literally 40,000 rap poems, stacked up in piles of paper, they were just bits of paper he’d found and written on, these fantastic raps, and that’s all he was doing.’
It became clear to Monks that time and again psychiatric patients were being discharged into the community and left to their own devices. There was no capacity to engage these patients and often the patients themselves didn’t know what to ask for. Paul learned that by asking the question, ‘What do you do?’ Listening to the answer, he could begin to provide a positive response to it in the form of the opportunity and a setting for creative expression that so many so desperately needed. ‘We started to get spaces and materials and people attended because they wanted to.’
Twenty-six years on, Core Arts is a vibrant community space offering over eighty creative classes a week, in which clients and their tutors are equally engaged in a learning and creative process and enabling people who experience mental health issues to overcome barriers, fulfil their potential and participate fully in their community. Paul says, ‘The interesting thing about craft activity when I talk to some of the tutors is that so many of them are just happy with the process or the journey – this is key.’
‘I haven’t been able to work full-time for more than a decade. I went to drama school and have worked as an actor, theatre practitioner and playwright but I suffered a breakdown in my twenties as a result of my undiagnosed autism – it was eventually diagnosed when I was thirty-two. I started doing pottery as an after-school activity when I was a child. I was good at it and enjoyed it. At one time I was so keen I went twice a week. When I had a nervous breakdown I went to my mother’s and hid from the world for a while. My family had read about art therapy and thought doing some pottery might help me so they contacted my old pottery teacher and obtained some supplies and helped me get a kiln. I began making twisted trees out of clay. The feeling of the soft, wet malleability, the sense of partnership with the desired shape, drawing it out; it gave me some focus and purpose. I couldn’t write at that time, my brain hurt. Clay sculpture does not require much conscious thought. Hands talk to the clay, a dialogue without words, and the eye guides, but hard thinking is not required. It kept me occupied and focused while my mind healed. It is an artistic and creative outlet very different from writing. I am much better now, busy and more fulfilled, but when I was ill it helped to fill the dead time. It gave me a purpose when I badly needed one, something to focus on that had tangible and useful results. It is a productive way to enjoy myself. And it’s fun.’
– Katherine Kingsford, writer, potter
‘I think my motivation to craft mainly came from both my mother and sister. We actively encouraged an interest in each other for what we were doing and were able to exchange thoughts and ideas, which gave each of us a real sense of pleasure and achievement. When my sister died I think I initially made a conscious decision to quilt less – perhaps I felt it was something we shared together and felt it was wrong to do it without her. However, that feeling did pass to be replaced by a desire to sew and quilt as I used to, so that in some way I was carrying on doing what she loved and what we shared together and our shared memories. I still visit shows but prefer to go on my own even though friends offer to accompany me – that time on my own gives me space to reflect on what my sister and I would have shared together and to feel close to her.’
– Pauline Smith, retired teacher, quilter
When we visited Art House Sheffield, an inspiring creative learning space and mental health social enterprise, the ceramics teacher, Sarah Vanic, showed us around the inspiring pottery studio as she explained: ‘Creativity is a crucial function. People can often survive terrible events and excruciating circumstances because they take themselves somewhere else in their minds. Our minds are boundary-less. There is a parallel with making – there doesn’t have to be boundaries unless you impose them on your project.’
Although limited research has been carried out specifically on crafting and well-being, neuroscientists are beginning to recognise that studies that focus on cognitive ability activities, such as completing word puzzles, might also apply to complex crafts such as quilting, knitting or embroidery.
Quoted in a recent CNN article, Catherine Carey Levisay, a clinical neuropsychologist and wife of Craftsy.com CEO John Levisay, says, ‘There’s promising evidence coming out to support what a lot of crafters have known anecdotally for quite some time. Creating – whether it be through art, music, cooking, quilting, sewing, drawing, photography (or) cake decorating – is beneficial to us in a number of important ways.’
CREATIVITY, CRAFT AND A HEALTHY SENSE OF SELF
‘I make crafting a priority because I believe it is critical to my mental health. I typically set aside time each day to craft. I work from home so it’s something that I can easily do on breaks between writing.’
– Kathryn Vercillo, writer, crocheting
D. W. Winnicott, influential paediatrician and psychologist, worked extensively on the role of play for children. Winnicott focused on the child’s development of a sense of self as separate from the parent. He proposed that we evolve a sense of identity and form strategies for understanding and adapting to our place within the family and the wider world through creative play in childhood.
By separating from the parent, Winnicott asserted, we form an awareness of our own inner urges and impulses and become individuals with our own authentic identity, and we become our true selves. But in order to fit in and not be rejected, this true self must occasionally be masked or suppressed, and the child must form an ‘alternative self’ to present to the world which Winnicott termed the false self.
This other face is a necessary evil in that it allows us to interact and become social beings, but our true self must find expression and guide our behaviour for the majority of the time to maintain a healthy psyche. It’s really all about balance; if we spend too much time hiding our true self and bury our most basic feelings and impulses, then we lose part of who we are, our authentic personality.
Although depression and anxiety, the most common forms of mental illness, can have a biological component, arising from chemical imbalance, these conditions can also be triggered or exacerbated by unconscious conflict caused by negative experiences such as childhood neglect and deprivation, trauma, early loss of a parent or sibling, poverty and social isolation and other painful life events.
When we are being creative and making, and if we allow the mind to roam undirected and unmoored, we tap into our unconscious thoughts and reconnect with Winnicott’s authentic self. This, in turn, can lead to moments of real insight and a happy awakening or lifting of emotions. Freud wrote about ‘ordinary unhappiness’, such as the human condition ailments referred to here, but he was also convinced that artistic, intellectual and psychological work can increase pleasure and create joy.
Crafting connects the mind and the body in what amounts to a deeply therapeutic process. By establishing mindfulness and ‘craftfulness’ techniques, we allow ourselves to experience intense or challenging emotions without the accompanying self-judgement or the need to censor painful memories.
Sarah Vanic stresses that mindful craft has qualities that are unique. ‘Using your creativity can maintain health and well-being, foster imagination and make a space for the reverie you can feel when you are making.’
If we acknowledge, tend to and accept our inner life, we can accept and better deal with issues such as low self-esteem, which are holding us back and making us ill, and build appropriate coping responses. When we begin to make and build pride in our practical ability, we may also start to uncover untapped reserves of inner joy, strength, resilience and talent. A sense of competence and self-reliance encourages greater control of our lives and with that control the world may feel less daunting. Whatever challenges life throws at you, you are better able to meet them face-on and stay standing: you have got the tools to shield and save yourself. You are a warrior armed only with Japanese woodblock tools, knitting needles and a crochet hook!
If you can do that and see it through to the end, what else can you do? Cope with? Make a start on?
‘My mum not only taught me to knit, but also to sew and bake. I spent hours tending to these crafts largely for their meditative effects. Fast forward to adulthood, I found myself completely disillusioned with my career as a lawyer and left to work in my husband’s fashion retail business. Three children then came along in fairly quick succession and I stopped work for full-time parenting. I was totally unprepared for how difficult mothering can be. Postnatal depression took a hold of me and I felt like a failure.
‘I certainly sought medical and professional help for my mental health issues and that was important to my recovery, but it wasn’t until I started knitting again in 2010 that my life started turning around. I have completely transformed my life and my outlook and it all comes down to living a creative life. I had lived most of my life in denial of my creative self and as a result I completely lost my way. I was a sitting duck for depression. I have always loved working with my hands but now it’s more important than ever as it is essentially a critical part of maintaining a healthy and happy emotional life. That’s a huge motivating force.
‘Mental illness affects an extraordinary amount of people from all walks of life and it is often the most sensitive and creative amongst us that find themselves in its grips. Since delving into the world of wool and knitting I have found solace, peace, joy, affirmation and mindfulness. I no longer suffer from depression and manage my anxiety as well as anyone else.’
– Jacqui Fink, extreme knitter, fibre artist
DREAMING, DOODLING AND NOODLING – LET YOUR MIND WANDER . . .
For a good portion of any day, we are bombarded with external forms of stimulation that require directed, as opposed to undirected thinking. Directed thinking requires that we concentrate our focus on a particular task or conundrum, whereas undirected thinking is neither coherent nor goal-oriented, but allows the mind to wander, as in dreaming and daydreaming.
Unfortunately, our hectic and time-pressured lives rarely provide the space for a roving mind. Modern technology and digital forms of communication call for seemingly continual directed thinking – we are inundated with emails, texts, Snapchats; each ping on our device demanding instant attention and response. We worry about wasting time, yet pore over articles on productivity, time management and super-achievers’ effectiveness tips. Perhaps, being busy all the time, not thinking too deeply or letting the mind wander, are defence mechanisms – don’t think, just keep going, block out troubling feelings that might be bubbling under the surface of a seemingly organised and ordered life.
In 2010, a LexisNexis survey of 1,700 white-collar workers in the United States, the UK, Australia, China and South Africa revealed that, on average, employees spent more than half their workdays receiving, responding to and organising their emails, rather than using the information conveyed within to do their jobs.
But studies indicate that undirected thinking is vital for creativity, productivity and, most importantly, our mental health. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Professor of Psychology at the University of California and author of The How of Happiness, suggests that periods of mental time out are necessary for us to flourish, or as the Alexander Technique teaches to ‘not do’, but instead to occasionally ‘just be’. Downtime, it seems, is as essential to the brain as healthy food and regular exercise are to our bodies.
When we are absorbed in the process of making, our minds rest and roam. Feelings and ideas that might otherwise be blocked or drowned out by the demands of directed thinking take root and hopefully inspire new ideas, projects and creations.
Research shows that even when we are relaxing or daydreaming, the brain is anything but idle. Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, and encourages productivity and creativity. Research also indicates that any number of activities where the brain and the hand connect in absorbing and deliberate, repetitive, focused movements (such as in knitting, weaving, sewing, even chopping vegetables) can be useful for diffusing stress and distracting the mind from unhelpful rumination and negative thinking loops.
When we give our minds a break, areas of the brain are in fact hard at work relieving the negative effects of stress, restoring our creative energies and forming new memories and connections essential for our sense of self and mental health. The complex circuit at work when we enter an unfocused resting state is known as the default mode network (DMN). In a review of research in 2012 on the default mode network, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California and her co-authors write: ‘Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives . . . [to] mull over the aspects of our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions [. . .] These moments of introspection are also one way we form a sense of self, which is essentially a story we continually tell ourselves.’
Making things, therefore, gives our overactive brain a much-needed break, and some unpressured time to tap into intuition and creativity. We are acting on this intuition, these new ideas, by using our hands to communicate in a new way, to express ourselves in solid form, in the handmade object. We are, simultaneously, transforming the craft material and, crucially, our mood and ourselves.
‘I work in a creative industry, but lots of the work I do, day-in and day-out, you could deem not to be creative. If I’m having a stressful week, my pottery is a complete balm. I studied art until I was eighteen and when I had been working for a few years in my twenties, I yearned for some pure creativity, away from work and as an accompaniment to office life.’
– Chloe Healy, marketing director, potter
THE DRIVE TO MAKE: CRAFT AS THERAPY
‘I’ve always wanted to do something creative, but have usually worked in normal jobs part-time – it is hard to earn a living as a full-time bookbinder. There was a period when I had to work full-time in the office and had little spare time for bookbinding. I feel low if I’m not being creative. After a day in the studio, it’s as though a weight lifts, it has a therapeutic effect. If I don’t have to worry about earning money, when I’m using my own creativity to make, it is a real pleasure.’
– Kate Rochester, advertising manager, bookbinding
In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that happiness has two components: a feeling of contentment or joy combined with a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. Making things makes us happy because pleasure and purpose meet in meaningful, rewarding creative work with our hands.
Being creative and making things, through the craft and process that you enjoy, has to bring you joy – there is no point in continuing to knit, sew, draw or weave if you find it tiresome, it will only add to your stress stores. So you need to know what you’d like to make and how you want to make it. In other words, which craft is right for you? What do you love doing? We will be looking at this in more detail in Chapter Six.
Once you’ve found your craft, it is a small step to start making more things – ergo creativity breeds creativity. And if making makes you happy, you can then create for yourself a greater number of happy moments – happiness breeds happiness. Arzu recalls discovering bookbinding and becoming obsessed with every aspect of putting together a simple hardback book, from waxing the linen thread to making her own sewing frame. This led to learning how to marble paper, how to make paste papers and to build more tools to support her new pastime – she drew the line at paper-making but says, ‘never say never’.
You also may discover your chosen craft is merely the chapter heading for a host of other crafts.
We looked at Jo Hunter’s 65 Million Artists initiative in Chapter One. But another piece of research, led by Dr Tamlin S. Conner (University of Ortaga, New Zealand) and others, is just as fascinating. This team of scientists decided to explore the question, ‘Does engaging in everyday creative acts make people feel better emotionally?’
The 658 participants who took part in this study kept a diary reporting whether or not they had engaged in creative activities, such as writing, drawing, making music or having an original idea. They were asked to rate their mood and feelings for the duration of the experiment.
With her colleagues, Conner showed that people felt more enthusiasm and generally more positive on the days after their creative days, but she also found these results surprising because they were so definitive. Often research data proves inconclusive, but in this study the findings showed definitively that creative activities yielded marked improvements in well-being.
‘Doing creative things today predicts improvements in well-being tomorrow. Full stop.’
Results showed that people who were engaged in more creative activities than usual on one day reported increased positive emotion and flourishing on the next, while negative emotions didn’t change. However, the reverse effect did not seem to occur: people who experienced higher positive emotions on day one weren’t more involved in creative activities on day two, suggesting that everyday creativity leads to more well-being rather than the other way around.
Intriguingly, the study also suggests that personality did not detrimentally affect the positive effects of creativity on well-being, showing that it is likely that some creative activity every day might work for most people. The excellent take away here is that you don’t need to feel you have a particularly creative personality or be in any way artistic in order to benefit from a craft pursuit.
‘As my confidence in ceramics has grown, it has become an increasingly visible, important part of who I am too. My pottery gives me licence to think and be creative in other parts of my life – I’m not sure how much of that is me giving myself that freedom, or others expecting it of me or bestowing it, but the result is a feeling of confidence, that’s the best way I can describe it.’
– Chloe Healy, marketing director, potter
ANXIETY, DEPRESSION AND STRESS
‘Crochet helped me in my journey to get out of depression and continues to help me maintain mental wellness. It helps me to relax, bringing down levels of anxiety. It gives me a focus for my attention, which helps to reduce the ruminations of the mind that can be so destructive in depression. I have learned how to harness that attention and engage in meditative, mindful crafting specifically to break those patterns of rumination. Crochet gives me something productive to do when it feels hard to do anything, and creating beautiful things for myself and others is a boost to my self-esteem.’
– Kathryn Vercillo, writer, crocheting
Mixed anxiety and depression is the most common mental disorder in Britain – in 2014, 19.7% of people in the UK, aged 16 and over, showed symptoms of anxiety and depression – a 1.5% increase from 2013. According to The Mental Health Foundation, 4–10% of people in England will, in their lifetime, suffer from depression.
The factors underlying the rise in cases are complex and varied, but along with genetic predisposition the most common trigger factors are low socio-economic status, gender and work-related stress. The poorer and more disadvantaged – and certain minority and ethnic groups – are disproportionately affected by common mental health problems. In England, women are more likely than men to have a common mental health problem, and are almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders, while women in full-time employment are nearly twice as likely to have a common mental health problem as full-time employed men.
Workplace stress is increasingly cited as a factor in depressive illness and general anxiety disorders, with 1 in 6.8 people experiencing mental health problems in their jobs (14.7%). Evidence suggests that 12.7% of all sickness absence days in the UK can be attributed to mental health conditions.
Much in the same way that 64 Million Artists believes in an empowered and creatively engaged workforce, we are convinced companies and organisations would do well to provide opportunities for arts for their employees, and believe that this strategy could only benefit staff retention, productivity and loyalty.
Despite the demands on our time and attention from work and family, reuniting the creative self with the self who stresses and frets and occasionally blows things out of proportion is, for us, one way of keeping our lives in balance and can give us the strength of mind to occasionally stand outside a problem and take a more objective view of the situation.
Since 2007, Arts and Minds, a leading arts and mental health charity, has been running weekly art workshops in the community for people experiencing depression, stress or anxiety in Cambridgeshire. Its Arts on Referral project is one of a number of similar NHS primary care initiatives that provide patients with ‘prescriptions’ for a wide range of craft sessions, including printmaking and sculpture. Crucial to the success of the Arts and Minds workshops is that attendees work alongside fellow makers, skilled teachers and artists in a relaxed, non-clinical setting. The sessions provide support and craft experience, but equally important is the social element of relaxed companionship and connection. This is especially valuable in helping recovery in people who are vulnerable and often socially excluded. The impact has been exceptional with patients, showing a 71% decrease in feelings of anxiety and a 73% falling in depression; 76% of participants said their well-being increased and 69% felt more socially included.
‘The particular value of a craft as a “midlife hobby” is of great interest to me. There is a whole process aspect to this: developing a technical skill which involves intense concentration and manual dexterity is very good for the head.’
– Jim Boddington, GP, potter
Even in people of an advanced age, brains are flexible and can adapt to their environment – an old dog can learn new tricks. This is called neuroplasticity. We can flex our brains by learning new skills and seeking out new experiences – so, we ask, why not learn a new craft?
Studies have found that complex activities such as Sudoku, crossword puzzles or learning a language can help protect against ageing effects on our brain. Scientists are now beginning to study the impact of other hobbies. Results suggest that crafting could reduce the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment by 30–50%.
Although loneliness and social exclusion can afflict anyone at any point in their life, loss of loved ones and ensuing isolation is one of the most significant factors affecting people’s health in old age. The Campaign to End Loneliness cites that over 51% of people aged seventy-five and over live alone, according to the Office for National Statistics (2010). Not only that, Age UK found, in 2014, that two-fifths of all older people say that television is their main company. This is another way that craft can play a vital role in improving well-being. Joining a community of fellow makers in a knitting circle, local craft group or through an Arts on Referral initiative like Arts and Minds above provides opportunities to make new friends and connections and becomes an incentive to get out and about.
According to Daisy Fancourt, a growing number of studies demonstrate that taking part in community cultural and arts activities can make a positive impact on early mortality rates, whatever one’s socio-economic status and medical history.
As well as an incentive to learn a new skill, joining a local crafting class also aids social identity. We become part of a cohesive community and in turn we benefit from belonging and enjoying the feedback on our work, the sense of team spirit and morale-boosting support.
‘Sometimes, in my deepest depressions, I could barely leave my bed, or make it to the fridge to force myself to eat, never mind set foot outside the house. I think we all have times when we just want to hide away, burrow down and stay safe. But when you are deeply, chronically depressed, the endless chatter in your head makes even these seemingly safe spaces a scary option. When I was really ill, I became addicted to quite a few things, things that somehow helped block the pain in my brain, some more benign than others. I’d obsessively work out crossword and code word puzzles, having crawled to the newsagent to buy every newspaper I could lay my hands on. Then I asked a friend who worked at the Guardian to send me every volume of the Quick Crossword Puzzles she had on her office shelves. Another addiction, weirdly, was Deal or No Deal! But I always had my knitting. And that is the thing that I still have on the go all the time – I have one project which has become a kind of talisman because I can’t bear to finish it, that’s my depression scarf. Thankfully, I haven’t had a bad episode of depression for several years. I’ve got better, moved on and am pursuing many craft projects now, not just knitting, although that remains a constant backdrop to my crafting life. I love knitting little jumpers for friends’ new babies. I knit bobble hats and scarves and jumpers for my daughter and sisters and nieces for presents. And just recently I’ve been mastering socks. The unfinished “depression scarf” is still in my knitting bag. It’s about four feet long, in a slightly drab brown, but very soft, wool. I haven’t finished it because maybe I worry that I might need to return to it if the black cloud descends – or maybe I should just cast it off, donate it to charity, or give it to someone who will appreciate its warm, soft, comforting cosiness. And start another – this time in orange for joy, or for madness! And celebrate my mental health and surviving to knit another day.’
– Rosemary Davidson, editor, crafter
‘At the height of great stress or anxiety it can be difficult to concentrate on craft. But as issues and problems begin to resolve, there is hopefully a little more mental space to consider setting time aside to let the mind wander down a different path. We have found the benefits to be huge. I remember the months after my daughter was born. Life, while often filled with moments of wonder, felt, at times, like a struggle. Mundane yet essential tasks seemed to take forever to complete and drain me of any energy I may have had in reserve that day. It would be absurd to suggest that one could find the peace of mind (even if one did have the time or inclination) to sit and knit or weave with a crying baby, the house in havoc, and a mind crazed from lack of sleep. But there were moments during those early months when instead of sensibly taking a nap while the baby slept, I would head to my desk, pull out the sheaves of paper, assemble my tools and for an hour, begin to bind a book. Some sessions involved only the gathering and ordering of my tools, but the results of these small interjections into what otherwise often felt the relentless routine of my days were notable. Even if I’d only been at my desk for twenty minutes, I always came away feeling better. The simple pleasure to be gained from measuring sheets of paper, selecting different decorative samples to pair with others, deciding on the structure I would put together, whether a sketchbook, a journal or a photo album, was a great salve to me. Bookbinding was my ”thing”. I could still do my thing, I wasn’t only a person who felt at times like she was failing at this most fundamental of biological imperatives. I was having a hard time, but as long as I could still connect to the me that made books before my baby, I could visualise a point in the future when I wasn’t so battered by lack of sleep, and I could return, more fully, to the crafts I enjoyed.’
– Arzu Tahsin, editor, crafter