Creativity has been a huge part of my recovery. Learning to crochet and create jewelry was one of my best coping skills to deal with the anxiety that was brought upon by eating and weight gain. It kept my hands and mind busy, and the repetitive, detailed work was calming.

It appears that making things is part of what is known as the effort-driven rewards circuit. The effort is the actual crafting part: the drawing the yarn over the needle, the making of the wire-wrapped loops. And the reward is the end product, knowing that you have created something totally unique.

Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert found that

"a well-engaged “effort-driven rewards circuit” helps us effectively meet emotional challenges, thus ameliorating depressive symptoms to some extent. Brain-wise, moving our hands activates larger areas of the cortex than movement of other parts of the body such as our legs or back muscles."

Writes Cathy Malchiodi (author of the blog post cited above):

So does “making things” offer a possible intervention for depression? It seems it might, at least as part of a program to treat what is not always alleviated by pharmacology plus talk therapy. While the arts serve as a means of self-expression and perhaps emotional reparation, we humans have consistently returned to the pleasure of crafting things with our hands for some more fundamental reason. Lambert’s research also brings new questions to the perennial debate about connections between depression and artists (more about that in a future post). But for now, it is exciting to know that we all may have access to an internal effort-driven rewards circuit to simply chase our blues away.