Studies prove it: Embroidery is good for your mental health! 5 advantages at a glance

Embroidery has a relaxing and stress-relieving effect, you will probably have heard that before. But now there is a real study that provides evidence and what does it show? People who start embroidering experience less stress-related complaints than before and there is a whole further laundry list of benefits. So let’s go and buy an embroidery kit!

The advantages of embroidery at a glance:

– Stress relieving
– Lowers your blood pressure
– Develops your creativity
– Relieves feelings of anxiety
– It boosts your brain function

Because you are concentrated when embroidering, but at the same time you perform precise work in which you use both your hands and your eyes, these parts of your brain are trained at the same time. The reason doctors often give patients with brain damage similar brain exercises is because it turns out to be a super good exercise for the brain. It stimulates hand-eye coordination and at the same time works to improve your concentration. Brains can be trained just like muscles and embroidery is a very nice exercise for your brain, just like push ups would be for your muscles, for example!

When you are focused on something, you forget the world around you, as it were. This is exactly what the purpose of embroidery is. When you are working with needle and thread your brain has to focus on a number of different things such as controlling your hands, thinking about next stitches etc. this ensures that there is no room For thinking about other bad things because you are doing something at that moment that is stimulating enough to ‘turn off’ all other thoughts. At that moment there is simply no room for anxious feelings or stress. This is also reflected in the levels of the various ‘bad’ stress hormones in your blood. After a handicraft activity such as embroidery these appear to be significantly lower. Embroidery is even included in the UK government program to help people with mental health problems!

Besides the fact that there are all kinds of physical and mental benefits, you also develop your creativity. I believe that everyone is creative, you just have to take your time! Everyone can make their own cool embroidery pattern or match beautiful colors of embroidery thread with each other. It’s a matter of taking the time and really believing that you can do it. Many people drop out in advance with the words “yes, but I’m not creative at all”. Really! Everyone is creative in their own way, because yes, what art is, that’s just a matter of taste. Embroidery is therefore just like a job, the more often you do it, the better it will succeed. Those embroidery stitches will look a bit neater every time until you don’t even need a pattern or manual anymore because you already know them all by heart! So just start with it, I recommend a starter cross stitch kit but I might be a bit biased ;).

Creativity and high sensitivity

Through this website about high sensitivity I also found out that creativity in general is very good for people who are highly sensitive. Being creative is a good source of energy, especially for the highly sensitive brain that is often very creative but can no longer pay attention to it due to overstimulation. The best advice is – break the circle! Just start and you will see how beautiful things can eventually arise naturally and it brings you a lot of peace.

Sources

The study on the benefits of embroidery for your mental health was done at the University of Brighton by Heidi Von Kurthy. Here’s the link if you want more information! https://cris.brighton.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/21618800/von_Kurthy_final_thesis.pdf

This text also refers to other studies on the benefits of embroidery.