I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to get a little bit personal in this column. Since I began knitting about ten years ago, I’ve used the craft to address my anxiety. Specifically I have PTSD, and I’ve found that certain anxiety-combatting techniques, like mindfulness, don’t always work well for me when I’m feeling panicked: I’m already hyper vigilant during an anxiety episode due to the trauma part of PTSD. Being mindful often makes that hyper-awareness worse. I needed a means of calming my mind without feeding into my hypervigilance. I never set out to knit to ease my anxiety. It was just a super cool side effect I didn’t expect it to have.
Knitting puts me into a meditative state. Some of it is the rhythmic movement and clicking of the needles. I’ve noticed that my breathing evens out and slows as I fall into the rhythm of my knitting. Some if it is due to the fact that both my hands are occupied, which keeps me from fidgeting. A lot of it is because knitting focuses my mind on something and prevents the hamster from running so hard he falls off the wheel.
In short, knitting slows my brain down and calms me.
What I didn’t understand until I read Knit for Health and Wellness by Betsan Corkhill is that knitting is good for my chronic pain too. I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia in 2013, although I began experiencing symptoms as far back as 2007. Fibro is a chronic condition that isn’t widely understood yet. It causes widespread or localized pain, sometimes intensely, and fatigue during episodes called “flares.” When I am flaring up I feel a general body ache, sort of like when you have the flu, and I am hypersensitive to touch (allodynia). It feels a lot like I have a sunburn over my entire body. Everyone’s experience with fibro pain is different, by the way, so my experiences are not universal to everyone who has the condition.
So what does that have to do with knitting? Nothing, or so I thought. Since knitting is something I enjoy, I often found it distracted me from my pain (provided I wasn’t into too much pain to knit in the first place). It turns out the relationship between knitting and pain management is more profound.
Corkhill is a physiotherapist and developed a program of Therapeutic Knitting for some of her patients suffering from chronic pain. At first it was designed to help people who were isolated by chronic illness enter a group setting where they could socialize and also be creative. Corkhill noticed that the act of knitting itself seemed to have an impact on her patients’ pain.
Some of this has to do with spacial awareness:
As a physiotherapist specializing in neurological treatments, I was immediately interested in the nature of the movements [of knitting] and their potential impact on the brain. Physiotherapists have been using bilateral patterns of movement for the treatment of brain injury for years.
We tend to believe the information our brain gives us…but sometimes it comes to the wrong conclusions. Habitual behaviors or long-term illness can change your perception of the world–physically and psychologically. Those with long-term pain, for example, often have an altered perception of space. This can vary from limbs that feel a different shape or size to not being able to accurately gauge the space their body occupies. Similarly someone who is normally housebound can feel very unsafe in an open or crowded environment. The brain’s perception of reality isn’t necessarily accurate.
Okay, so what does that have to do with knitting, you ask?
Corkhill continues:
Knitting involves a complex bilateral, coordinated pattern of movements. This will require a lot of integration in your brain to fine tune the movements to enable your hands to work together in a precise way, which means your brain will be working quite hard.
The fact that these movements cross the midline of the body is interesting too–cross midline movements take up even more brain capacity.
The midline of the body is a significant reference point for the brain. Research is at an early stage, but crossing the midline can affect your perception of pain in a limb for example. It’s not fully understood why.
Performing a bilateral, coordinated pattern of movement across the midline of the body that you’re also looking at is a complicated process–it uses up a lot of brain capacity leaving it with less capacity to pay attention to other issues. Add in some counting plus an intricate knitting pattern and you use even more. A large number of narratives collected from knitters describe knitting as highly effective in distracting the brain’s attention, and you can take advantage of this to take control of your life.
Okay, so knitting increases our spacial awareness, helps distract from pain and anxiety, and there’s some science that suggest crossing the midline of your body is beneficial. That’s cool!
But wait! There’s more!
Studies in animals have shown that repetitive movement enhances the release of serotonin. Serotonin raises mood, but also it also calms and is an analgesic. People often instinctively engage in repetitive, rhythmic movement when they are stressed or traumatized. They are intuitively self-soothing as they rock, pace or tap.
I had already associated the repetitive movements of knitting with being soothing, but I’d never thought it could potentially be releasing serotonin as well.
Knit for Health and Wellness offers suggestions for Therapeutic Knitting, including modifications for people who have pain in their arms and hands, positioning for people with back pain, and advice on having a “quiet” knitting practice for when you need to relax and self-soothe, as well as joining a knitting group for socialization.
I do modify my knitting to accommodate my fibro. I often rest my elbows on pillows that I tuck on either side of me, which takes pressure off my shoulders. I also use an analgesic gel on my hands when they get achey.
One thing that wasn’t discussed in the book very much is all of the sensory input that comes from knitting. I love working with really, really soft yarns in vibrant colors. The sensation of the yarn in my hands and the color playing out across what I’m making feels uplifting and joyful.
Right now I’ve got a lot of stress to manage, and I’m taking periodic breaks to work on a Peace of Wild Things Shawl. I love knitting shawls, although I find them tricky to wear.
My shawl is in the stage where it’s lumpy and hard to photograph, but here’s a shot of the very beginning. The yarn is Hedgehog Fibres Skinny Singles in the colorway Hold Your Tongue. I got the shawl pin at my local little yarn store.
Now that I know knitting has some benefit to managing pain as well as anxiety, I’m going to pay more attention to how knitting makes me feel physically. I would imagine the benefits from knitting would also translate to other crafts with repetitive motions.
Are you a knitter or crafter? What benefits do you get from your hobby?
That’s fascinating! Especially the part how the motions help with pain. I’ll go order that book now 😉
I don’t have chronic pain, but have suffered from depression and anxiety for years and knitting is one of the best things for that. As you said, the repetitive movements, having both of my hands occupied (I tend to pick at my face or eat nervously when my hands are free), and of course the sensuous joy of touching and working with soft wool. It’s also empowering (if that is the right word) to come out of these dark days and realise I’ve produced something lovely even when I’ve felt so worthless. Even if I can’t do much else beside losing myself in Netflix or YouTube, knitting means I have a good memory to go with that. And on better days, it gives me something to do when I need a break and some alone time, when checking Twitter would just rile me up.
I’d love to have kneeing friends though. But there doesn’t seem to be a knitting group in my town.
Very interesting! I’ve also got fibro and have been knitting steadily since 2011. I do find it useful most days, except if brain fog/fatigue is too high to allow knitting (those are the worst). Nice to know the pro knitting sentiment is backed up by science.
I’ve also started spinning in the last year, which I find useful because it’s different hand movements to knitting, so I can usually do one if I can’t do the other. Plus making your own yarn is such fun.
I’m a crocheter, occasional beginner knitter, and sometime jewelry maker. It has always proven to be soothing and relaxing for me, when I have the time for it. My biggest issue is that while crocheting is the most soothing for me, weather here in the New Orleans metro area makes it less than physically comfortable. There’s something about handing even the lightest, laciest of yarns that makes me sweat, and not in a good way.
Oh, yes! I feel like I get a lot out of knitting and crochet, the physical process of it and the reward of making something. I love that you mention the tactile interaction with the yarn. So often, I find (or am given) yarn that I just cannot work with, and that’s so hard to explain to other people.
Thanks so much for this post!
@Isi there are some cool online knitting groups. I belonged to one for awhile where we all Skyped in on a Saturday night. If you belong to Ravelry you might be able to find some in the group section
I love to knit, bit unfortunately it is the cause of pain for me, so I’ve had to give it up. I’ve found a book by Carson Demers called “Knitting Comfortably: The ergonomics of hand knitting” that will hopefully allow me to knit again.
The author doesn’t sell on Amazon, so you have to buy the book from his website: https://www.ergoiknit.com/knitting-comfortably/
I know this reads like an ad, but I am totally unaffiliated with the author–just desperate to finish my Ribbon wrap (sob) https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/ribbon-wrap
I don’t know how to knit, and crocheting makes my hands hurt! I do bead, most recently bead looming, and love the color. I also love that it can be done anywhere, like knitting. (I recently took a metal working class and made 2 rings in an evening, but that can’t be done in the living room!) I have thought about seeing if I can join the local fiber guild to have a community of crafters, since we don’t have a bead shop within a 3 hour drive, but I’m not sure it out interests overlap enough…
I love painting and drawing. I’m not trained in either and I never know exactly what I’m making until it’s done. It’s very soothing, though. I’m curious to try knitting now!
Elyse, the science behind knitting is fascinating – thank you for sharing. There’s been a lot of research and progression in the field of neuroscience in recent years, which sounds like a complementary field to what’s in this book.
You may want to check out resources like the Curable Health app, videos by Lorimer Moseley (e.g. Ted Talks), Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Howard Schubiner, and/or Mind Over Medicine by Lissa Rankin. All of these resources talk about how all pain – migraines, fibro, broken bones, arthritis – starts in the brain. Scientifically, chronic pain can exacerbate one’s experience of pain because those neural pathways become so strong, like a well-worn pathway on a trail (those trails can be especially pliable to change if you’ve experienced trauma). Pain psychology teaches you how to build new neural pathways to disrupt the brain’s patterns and loops for less intensity, severity, and/or duration of pain.
For me, it’s helped with two of my chronic conditions, one of which has a structural cause and the other does not. It doesn’t matter if you have a structural or physiological cause for your pain – it all works on the same principles.
I know you’ve probably tried a lot; most of the people I’ve met with chronic pain have. Apparently though there’s a (scientifically) distinct difference with how your brain can change when studying pain psychology and its techniques vs. typical treatment paths including acupuncture, therapy (and cognitive behavioral therapy), meditation, physical therapy, etc. It can also help those other therapies and medications work better.
Hope something in there helps! Everyone is different of course, but I have met people with fibro (and migraines, CFS, back pain, etc.) who’ve found some relief through it and I hope you do, too.
@Nicolette my fibro most likely came from having trauma at a young age. There’s a correlation between children who suffer trauma and then develop fibro, CFS, or autoimmune disorders as adults. I treat my fibro through a rheumatologist which involves medication and things like massage, but also through a psychologist working through rewiring the neural pathways like you suggested . There’s a definite mind/body connection there
My boyfriend likes to point out that for someone who claims to find knitting relaxing, I spend a lot of time swearing at it.
I do genuinely find knitting soothing, though, so much so that it significantly contributed to giving myself a repetitive strain injury, and now I shouldn’t knit at all. Who knew knitting could be bad for you? But if you get obsessive and/or have a tendency to ignore pain (because for example everything always hurts so you kind of have to discount it) you may want to be cautious about how much you rely on the serotonin released by repetitive bilateral movements.
There have been studies around for a long time about handwork putting your brain in the same beta wave state as meditation. I encouraged my mother to take her needlework with her to her chemo appointments and to take it out for an hour or two everyday, especially when she was feeling side effects.
Stress make my brain work like a hamster on a wheel. I do find, after a particularly stressful day that I yearn for my handwork. My knitting is terrible, but I do have beading and an English paper piecing project that should take me into the next decade. After a few hours my brain is settled enough to sleep.
Elyse while I am sorry that you have fibro it’s interesting to me that you don’t find mindfulness useful at times because it brings your hyper-vigilance to the fore. I have a chronic pain problem and have found I need to be extremely careful with mindfulness as, for instance, doing a body scan just reminds me that that bit of my abdomen is hurting, as is that other bit, but also that the passive observational nature of mindfulness is at times counter productive – if I realise I am tensing round the pain I need to relax now, not make a mental note to relax when I’ve finished the session. The specialist pain psychologist I saw recommended using mindfulness a little more actively than it is traditionally taught, and acting on what you see going on in your mind or body if doing so would relieve the pressure of physical pain or mental whirring.
But yes, knitting for the win! *eying purple superchunky merino waiting to be made into a poncho*
I learned to knit and crochet at age 12, and am now in my mid 60s. Hand crafts not only have helped destress me through the years, but gave me a great sense of creativity and pleasure in making wearable art.
I learned to crochet at 12 and loved the activity. I taught myself to knit, k, p ,yo, simple stuff, in my early twenties. Then I read how to knit socks. Knitting socks was one of my favorite things to do. I can’t see the tiny stitches with my new contacts and holding the needles is too painful now that I have arthritis in my thumbs.
I use knitting as a meditation, as I am unable to meditate in the conventional way. I knit my way through two grad school programs. I can knit and read. I also would knit during class.
Knitting keeps my mind from wondering away…
My husband grumbles about all my yarn, but I could have more costly addictions.
Elyse, never doubt you are a force for good in the world. Your mention of allodynia may have answered the question of what has plagued me for years. Now I have a starting point to take to my doctor, something more definitive than “my elbows are very sensitive.” I cannot thank you enough.
This is fascinating information, Elyse, thank you! I learned to crochet when I was 7 or 8, and I blame that for my inability to knit – I get so freaked out at the possibility of the stitches slipping off the needles that my whole body tenses up. But I do find the mindfulness of the pattern in crochet very soothing. It also keeps me from eating while I watch tv. Lately I’ve been working on scarves and cowls for all my friends for Christmas, and the idea that I’m making something for someone to show my affection, as well as something I hope they will love, makes it a very joyful activity and hopefully gives it a seratonin boost.
I’ve also been experiencing a lot of joint pain over the last week or so, so I spent this weekend resting the afflicted knee and hip and doing a lot of stitching on a wedding sampler I designed for a dear cousin’s granddaughter. The repetitiveness of the stitches relaxes me all over, and I’m so pleased at how well it’s turning out. It has done me a world of good.
That is quite a collection of related and fascinating information. Especially the part about effects of bilateral movement. It made me think of the theory behind eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movement_desensitization_and_reprocessing
This information came my way in the years I worked as an emergency medical technician, and I was amazed at the concept. Now I’m even more amazed after reading what you had to say.
I am a knitter too, and love having a useful way to keep busy during meetings, concerts, church, etc. I’m counting on the mental exercise to keep my brain sharp…
I took up knitting again in grad school, just at the time that Ravelry began to conquer the world, and I credit both with keeping my sanity intact. The neuroscience is fascinating, and the midline/cross-brain concentration piece reminds me a bit of why equine therapy/riding horses is starting to get the attention it deserves, for many of the same reasons. It’s also supposed to be very good for people with PTSD.
Knitting is helpful for people with ADD (attention deficit disorder), because it helps focus. The crossing of the midline is also good. Who Knew???? I have been knitting in meetings for years as it helps me pay attention.
I can understand that, I do a lot of knitting, keeps my mind occupied an my hands busy
I love knitting for how deep an interest it can be. I love to learn new techniques. It keeps me busy when I’m watching tv. I can be social and have met lots of new people at knitting meet ups and I always have a new LYS to check out when I go to a new city. Also I’ve listened some great (and some not as good) podcasts. Ravelry is also great.
I don’t wear shawls, but I just gotta say, I need that shawl pin like BURNING. NEED IT.
I did an interview with Betsan last year which you can find here: https://knitigatingcircumstances.com/2018/06/24/knitting-and-wellness-an-interview-with-betsan-corkhill/.
If this has encouraged anyone to learn knitting, please also be open to crochet. I have taught both and have found that some people have a much easier time with one or the other. My guess is that it has something to do with how our brain works. I would guess that both would provide the same benefit since they are both rhythmic, require both hands and concentration, and cross the mid-line of the body. Great article.
I love this so much. I have fibro too and I’ve always found knitting incredibly meditative, but I must have changed my technique somewhere because the little finger on my right hand started to swell and cause me all kinds of problems so I let my practice fall by the wayside. This post has given me the kick in the butt I needed to pick my needles back up and see if I can make knitting work for me again. Thank you, Elyse!
I find knitting most relaxing when also listening to a favourite audio book. I also use circular needles all the time because that can relieve the weight of the knitting. There’s also no chance of losing a needle when I swap sides. Used to do this a lot in the car (passenger) and when we changed cars I couldn’t retrieve the needle any more. And my husband refused to stop to let me find it.
I find knitting most relaxing when also listening to a favourite audio book. I also use circular needles all the time because that can relieve the weight of the knitting. There’s also no chance of losing a needle when I swap sides. Used to do this a lot in the car (passenger) and when we changed cars I couldn’t retrieve the needle any more. And my husband refused to stop to let me find it.
Love this! I’m a crocheter once the weather turns cold. I tried embroidery this year but it feels like I need a magnifying glass to do it. Switching to a large counted cross stitch has been fun, though, and using patterns with curse words makes me smile.
Doing something creative is a great thing for the brain and is scientifically proven to complete the stress cycle. Check out the book Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski for more info about that.
Thanks for this post! I love to knit and love to buy beautiful yarn (which outpaces my knitting speed, unfortunately) …and am glad to learn that my hobby has such therapeutic benefits. I wonder if I learned to love it because it has these benefits? I’m glad that it helps alleviate your anxiety and pain and I plan to stick with it to help head off possible cognitive declines as I age.
[…] “Knitting for anxiety and pain“. […]
My knitting mojo has been in hiding for nearly a year now. I’m hoping it’ll come back soon! But I still have some projects I’m working on I’m boys and pieces.
Aside from pain management, I’ve also heard knitting (and crochet and other needle arts) are excellent for staving off Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, because it keeps the mind active and engaged.
I have extreme anxiety. I knit every night while listening to audio books. This is almost the only thing that will give me peace and thanks to this article for validating it
This is fascinating. I have (among other things) mega-ADHD and lower back pain from scoliosis, and now that I think about it, knitting has always helped with both. (Helped with the pain. Not the curvature. How cool would that be, though?) It’s always a little disappointing when it gets too hot to comfortably handle all that yarn — I have Sally’s exact same ribbon wrap on my knitting to-do list.