The case for making something, anything, with your hands
Cross-stitching. Embroidery. Soap making. Pottery. Film cameras with actual film in them. Handwritten letters. We might have called some of these hobbies a lost art a couple of years ago. As we all flocked around shiny new technology, we left some of the “old school” way of doing things behind because none of it is efficient. And that might just be the point. Twenty-four-seven efficiency has us exhausted and bringing a bit of nuance back into our lives feels like our only hope to not turn into a efficiency-hungry robots. It felt worthwhile to dig deeper and get into the layers of why we’re craving tactile activities again. It turns out, we’re built that way.
There's a fascinating concept in cognitive science called embodied cognition, which essentially means that your brain doesn't just sit there processing abstract information while your body carries it around like luggage. The two are entangled. Researchers like Lawrence Barsalou and Margaret Wilson have argued that touch, movement, the physical weight and texture of things aren't extras layered on top of "real" thinking, they're part of how thinking happens in the first place. When you feel the resistance of dough under your palms or the click of a needle finding its next stitch, you're not just occupying your hands while your mind does something else. You're giving your mind something to think with. A screen, by comparison, gives you almost none of that. A flat pane of glass under a finger has the same texture whether you're touching a recipe, a spreadsheet, or a photo of someone you miss. It's cognitively thin in a way we're only now starting to feel the cost of.
When we’re doing tactile activities, we’re more likely to reach flow state. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent a career describing the particular kind of focus where the task is just hard enough to hold your attention and just repetitive enough to let your thoughts settle. Knitting is a great example of this: a small decision, then another, then another, the row lengthening while some other part of you goes quiet, calm. I can see why knitting has been compared to a light form of meditation.
There's also a nervous system piece underneath. Screens are very deliberately engineered to spike our attention and reward systems over and over, in short unpredictable bursts. Tactile hobbies do the opposite: slow, rhythmic, predictable motion, the kind that's been shown to bring cortisol down rather than up.
A sixteen-country study published in Nature Medicine in 2023 followed adults over time and found that having a hobby at all was linked to measurably fewer depressive symptoms and better self-reported health later on. It’s not a correlation people had to squint to see, but one that held up across very different countries, incomes, and living situations. The tactile ones in particular seem to hit a spot the others don't, precisely because they ask the body to do something the screen never does: slow down, repeat, finish.
I don't think this is nostalgia, exactly, even though we’re quick to label tactile hobbies as "grandma hobbies". I think it's closer to a correction. We spent a couple of decades outsourcing more and more of daily life to a flat, frictionless surface, and it turns out some friction in life isn’t all bad. The dough needing two days to rise. The stitch needing to be pulled out and redone. The letter needing a stamp and a walk to the mailbox. All of it slow on purpose, and all of it, it turns out, is essential to who we are and how we operate.
If you’re wanting to bring some tactile hobbies into your life, you could start with a few rows of knitting after dinner. Write a page in a notebook instead of a note in your phone. Anything that asks your hands to do the thinking for a while. You’d be surprised how grounded and calm you’ll start to feel, as if your brain and the rest of your body are working in unison.
A few ideas for tactile hobbies
- Pottery or hand-building with clay — a single evening class will tell you if this is for you
- Bread baking — a recipe to follow
- Letter writing — real paper, a stamp, someone specific in mind
- Film photography — this is the camera I use
- Journaling — this is my favorite one
- Gardening — soil under your nails is its own kind of tactile reset
- Mending and repairs — sashiko stitching on a worn pair of jeans, a favorite sweater's elbow
- Jigsaw puzzles — here’s a great 500-piece puzzle
