Many have found knitting to be meditative and relaxing, after all, haven’t we all observed how zen and serene our elderly neighbors seemed sitting on their rocking chairs on their front porch knitting garmet after garmet? No? Just me? Well today science may just have the backbone I need to settle the matter at last!
Knitting and crocheting is a craft, which many find meditative!
In order to understand knitting, one must understand crafting. “Crafting” is the act of a person making something with their own two hands, and at the end of the process receiving a craft or product as a reward. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in a 2004 TED talk on crafting, says when crafting,
“You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears. You forget yourself. You feel part of something larger.”, and terms this process as “flow”.
Flow he says refers to our brains preference to focus on one task, rather than multiple ones, and that when our brains do this we are “temporarily suspended” in the time it takes for us to complete the task. Essentially, what he is describing is a meditative state.
Meditation has many health benefits: including uplifting your mood and boosting your health!
Much of the scientific rhetoric on meditation is quite lacking due to the lack of a proper control group to compare to, and the added obstacle of the volunteer basis already having a preconceived idea of meditation’s presumed benefits. However, I was able to locate one such study which identified this concern.
Using data surveying technology to compile data for over 18000 studies, and conducted at Johns Hopkins University by Madhav, Goyal M.D., the study was published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal in March 2014. The findings concluded that “Mindfulness meditation programs” had moderate evidence to show improvement in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression over other forms of meditation such as Mantra which showed little to no evidence of improvement in health.
It’s important to note that these results, though they seem small, are showing that meditation itself, without any influencing factors such as attention or expectation, can have a positive effect on your overall health. Mindfulness meditation which showed the most benefit, according to this study, is the practice of bringing your mind to the present and clearing your brain of anything but what is in the moment.
What does this all mean for knitting a crocheting? The benefits of meditation and a reward!
Crafters, not only do you get to experience the health benefits of meditation, but anecdotally many experience happiness at the reward of having a product or craft at the end of their work period!
Knitters specifically, this means that after drawing your focus to the moment of knitting, at the end of the day you will have a boost to your dopamine levels, the chemical that regulates pleasure and “reward”, at the prospect of giving your craft to a loved one, or using it yourself!
Crafting, such as knitting and crocheting, therefore has meaning which lifts the spirits of those who make it a practice of theirs! Continue brightening the world with your warm creations! Not only will your health thank you, but so will those around you!
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