> [!NOTE]+ Meta > Author:: Hannah Yang, Psy.D > Reference:: https://balancedawakening.com/blog/creative-healing-simple-crafts-for-better-mental-and-physical-healthnbsp > Date:: 2024 > Tags:: #warp > WeftLinks:: [[Psychological value of craft]] > Claim:: [[Claim - Craft improves well-being]] > [!SUMMARY] Summary > Crafts can significantly improve mental health by promoting relaxation, emotional expression, and body awareness. ### Highlights Arts and crafts can significantly improve mental health by promoting relaxation, emotional expression, and body awareness. Different crafting activities, like paper crafts, textile work, and pottery, offer unique benefits for managing stress, anxiety, and trauma. Engaging in these creative processes helps individuals connect with themselves and others, enhancing their overall well-being. > Gauntlett (2011) described craft as “the inherent satisfaction of making; the sense of being alive within the process; and the engagement with ideas, learning, and knowledge which come not before or after but within the practice of making.” > > Kinesthetic activities also promote relaxation, stress, reduction, and increased bodily awareness. Crafting not only accesses different levels of the human experience, but is also beneficial because it acts as a more accessible art form for people who might feel intimidated by the art making process. It also offers the potential for greater socialization by engaging in craft groups. > > Through folding and origami you can reduce stress through the meditative like qualities, and through collaging you can enhance motor skills and coordination through cutting, folding, and manipulating. > > Knitting, crochet, and embroidery provides a rhythmic, repetitive activity that allows for the decrease of stress and anxiety and increased awareness in the present moment. Sewing, quilting, or fabric collage can be used for symbolic expressions of emotion and grief work. > > The calming and shaping of clay, the rhythmic motion of a wheel, and the feeling of clay in your hands can improve your mood and mental well-being, center your mind, and can help with emotional processing. The motions of working clay - squeezing, kneading, flattening, and rolling - can reveal emotions from our subconscious. This is an ideal way to express and explore strong emotions and can also provide emotional catharsis, or emotional release, with the ability to destroy, squeeze, separate, and transform it, which also can help reduce depression and anxiety. The use of clay and pottery also provides bilateral stimulation which helps with emotional regulation, trauma processing, reduced anxiety and stress, and an increase in the mind-body connection.