> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: Anne Kirketerp > Reference:: Anne Kirketerp, Craft Psychology: How Crafting Promotes Health, Mailand > Date:: 2024 > Tags:: #warp > WeftLinks:: [[Psychological value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Craft improves well-being]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Research shows that crafting reduces stress, alleviates anxiety and depression, and enhances overall well-being. This field recognizes the therapeutic benefits of crafting, promoting it as a valuable tool for recovery and personal fulfillment. ### Highlights > “One becomes calm, when one sits with sewing or has something else in one's hands; that goes for all age groups.” Quote: Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark’s last New Year's speech, 31 December 2023. The Queen of Denmark is an accomplished embroiderer and lifelong proponent of craft. > Craft psychology is the psychology of why people craft. It identifies and supports the theory that crafting has positive effects on our physical and mental health. It can be used intentionally to effectively promote wellbeing. It has thus been documented that craft: - Reduces stress and lowers blood pressure. - Reduces depression and anxiety. - Alleviates mental illnesses such as anorexia and schizophrenia, as well as - addiction. - Diverts focus from chronic pain and illness. - Strengthens muscular mobility. - Increases wellbeing, joy of life, and the feeling of being useful as well as - satisfaction from achieving something that creates value for others. - Reduces loneliness and social isolation. - Slows early stages of dementia. - Stimulates neuroplasticity. Craft psychology is based on: - Scientifically well-founded theories and methods. Including: Self-determination theory, flow theory, the theory about System 1 and 2, self-efficacy theory, Broaden & Build theory, neuroanatomical theory (brain research), stress theory, mindfulness theory, and effectuation theory. - Empirical data consisting of nearly 200 answers to the question "why do I do craft?" - In-depth interviews with 30 individuals about "why do I do craft, and what is the effect?" - A literature study consisting of 470 articles about the cross-field of "craft" and "health," "well-being, knitling," “crochet,” “textile,” "woodwork," "occupational therapy," “flow” and “well-being,” etc. - And then I have done more than 30,000 hours of craft myself and am trained both as a crafts teacher, psychologist, and Ph.D > "The evidence suggests that creative activities can have a healing and protective effect on mental well-being. Their therapeutic effects promote relaxation, provide a means of self-expression, reduce blood pressure while boosting the immune system and reducing stress." (Leckey, 2011) A report from England estimates that 25 percent of the British population engage in some form of craft (Harrison & Ogden, 2019). In Finland, a study in the 1980s showed that a whole 86 percent of the population engaged in some form of craft (Kouhia, 2016). That number had dropped to 67 percent in a new study in 2016 (Kouhia, 2016). Although that is a quite significant decrease, the Finns' joy of “Hobbycraft" is still said to be enormous. Later, craft has come to mean what I today would define as: a mastery of passion-driven skills, resulting in products with some form of materiality. In other words, as a passionate and competent creation process with a material product as the goal. an experiment performed by the Dutch art therapist and researcher Ingrid Pénzes and her colleagues, EEG brain scans were conducted while test subjects engaged in craft with either "step by step” explanations also called “high structure" and craft "without instructions” also called “low/loose structure" (chapter 7). Here they could measure that the brain is more relaxed with high structure (step by step explanations) and more cognitively focused with low/loose structure. People experience meaning, engagement, competence, well-being, and joy in creating craft together just as in making music together.