Knitting for health
What can I tell you? I’ve had a totally boring week. Every day, whether I like it or not I always wake up at the same time: 6 a.m. And the day stretches out before me like a long national highway. I go through my usual ritual including watering my plants and by 8 a.m. I am done.
Mornings I spend fixing my home. I don’t have a live-in maid, you see, just a cleaning lady who comes in once a week but I love living my life this way, subject to a kind of routine and most importantly alone, pleasantly alone. No one is around to annoy me or to get annoyed by me and things generally happen when I want them to.
I get hungry for lunch early so I put the cooked food that I buy for myself from different sources in my steamer at around 11 a.m. then have an early lunch. Usually I’m finished eating a huge lunch, my main meal for the day, by around 12:15 p.m. What do I do next? I sit in front of the TV set and knit.
Why do I knit? Once upon a time, when I was a top executive of various companies, I earned a lot of money and accumulated a lot of things, among them thread. Now that I am in life’s pre-departure lounge I decided to get rid of most of my things or to convert them into something wearable. Since I am by now an expert knitter because of all the knitting I have done, I am knitting more complicated patterns and enjoying the time knitting and watching TV. I think they call that multi-tasking these days.
But then one morning when I was hunting for someone on the Internet I came across a piece on the healthy benefits of knitting. It said that while knitting was an enjoyable hobby it also had other effects on your physical and emotional well-being some of which surprised even me.
The piece says that knitting has the same effects as meditation. You see when you know how to knit and when you’ve learned the pattern you are knitting, it can be extremely relaxing because you knit without actively thinking about what you are doing. You knit repetitively and this creates a rhythm that clears your mind just like meditation does. What makes it better than meditation is that at the end of your project you have something new to wear. When you do the formal meditation at the end you may have a clear mind but nothing to wear. When I wear the sweaters I knit for myself using double cotton thread people praise them and envy me.
Knitting can also help your motor skills. When I teach writing I talk about the left and right brains. Now I find out that knitting exercises your frontal lobe, which is responsible for attention, planning and reward processing; the occipital lobe, which processes visual information; the temporal lobe, which stores memory; the parietal lobe, which deals with sensory information and spatial awareness and finally the cerebellum, which is responsible for precise and deliberate movement. Wow, I didn’t know it would do all those things to my brain. That is so good to know.
Lately I ran into an old friend who told me that I must have killed thousands of my brain cells with all the drinking I used to do when I was young. Next time I see her I can say but I brought them back to life with my knitting.
This article also says that the benefits of knitting have been known to help people with Parkinson’s disease improve their motor skills, which I interpret as their ability to control their movements.
Research by the Mayo Clinic has found that seniors who regularly knit and/or have artistic hobbies are around 30 to 50 percent less likely to develop “mild cognitive impairment” than those who do not. I wonder if that means another way of avoiding Alzheimer’s disease. I always knitted. My mother, who had Alzheimer’s, did not.
If you want your joints to remain healthy, then use them often. Moving the joints in your fingers will encourage fluids to move in and out of surrounding cartilage. It reduces the risk of arthritis. Knitting is one of the best ways you can keep your finger joints supple. I didn’t know that. I thought knitting exhausted my hands and therefore could lead to arthritis but apparently not.
Finally, knitting helps fight anxiety, stress and depression. Because of the rhythm established, the repetitive motions of knitting gives us a vacation from our problems. Our focus on our project helps keep us present, stops us from worrying about the future, moderates our heart rates and blood pressure too.
And at the end of the knitting project we have a sense of accomplishment that’s excellent for our well-being.
My knitting must be the reason why I generally feel so healthy. You want good health? Take up an artistic hobby and you will stop worrying about your health.
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