When Los Angeles-based Teri Slaven, 78, starts knitting, she immediately enters what she calls “the zone.” “I feel busy, focused, and content,” she tells SELF. For Carolyn Barnes, 33, from Tempe, Arizona, it’s crocheting.
She started her after a death in her family and a phase of parenthood. (Her sons were 1 and 3 at the time.) “I was and really tired from motherhood," she tells SELF.
"I didn’t have anything left to give. But I knew I couldn’t give what little I had left to my phone.” She bought a beginner’s crocheting kit, called , and although there was an initial learning curve, she recognized a sharp change in her brain right away.
She was . “I felt a sense of purpose,” she explains. If you’re on the hunt for a hobby that’ll potentially , calm you down, and help you feel productive and fulfilled, knitting, crocheting, cross-stitching—any goal-directed pursuit you can do at home—might be worth looking into.
suggests that manual tasks like these may help improve your attentiveness overall and boost your mood, for example. Other have found that learning new skills that require hand-eye coordination (like quilting or digital photography) seem to help combat cognitive decline in older age. Here are all the things you may gain from this type of hobby (aside from a really sweet scarf).
1. It’ll give you a sense of control. , a Boston-based psychiatrist, often “prescribes” these crafty types of activities for stressed-out clients.
“I recomm.