Chapter 1: What is driving the resurgence of crafting among younger generations?
Scrolling, streaming, swiping, for so many of us, our days are spent moving from one screen to the next. But lately, there's been a noticeable shift in the other direction. Crochet kits are selling out, knitting circles are filling up, embroidery and quilting, hobbies once stereotyped as old-fashioned, are booming. especially among younger generations.
So what's behind the rise of these so-called analog hobbies? Is this just nostalgia or are brains and bodies pushing back against digital overload? Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, March 4th, 2026.
Today, we're taking a deeper look at what science says about creative hobbies and whether picking up yarn, thread, or paint might actually be good for our health. Joining me now is Daisy Fancourt, professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and author of the recently released ArtCure, The Science of How the Arts Save Lives. Daisy, it's so good to have you here.
Wonderful to be with you. We're seeing a surge in craft hobbies like knitting, crocheting, painting, and woodworking. From your perspective, what's driving this spike right now? Is there something about this historical moment that makes us more receptive to hands-on creativity? We're actually seeing this pattern as particularly being driven by younger adults. And I think that tells us a lot.
We know that younger adults are actually a group that is starting to struggle with the volume of screen time and phones in their lives. But these hobbies use hands in the same way. They've got a very similar focus in being short-term things you can do in just a few minutes. And I think part of it is this move away from our digital lives to more analog activities.
But it's also a response to some of the mental health and wellbeing feelings that we're seeing in society. Many people are now experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression and stress, but activities like crafts are very good ways of regulating our emotions and reducing those symptoms.
In your book, you talk about the ingredients of art, the sensory, emotional, and social components that make something artistic. When we think about a craft like knitting or quilting, what are the active ingredients at work? Some of it is the sensory input we're getting.
So actually the feel of the yarn or the thread that you're working with, the visual stimulation that we're getting from the colors and shapes that we're playing with. and also the creativity and imagination in terms of what our brains are imagining and then producing.
And these ingredients are actually really powerful in then activating various mechanisms like psychological or biological processes that then help us to feel happier and better. You write that art is the, quote, forgotten fifth pillar of health alongside things like sleep, diet and exercise. That's a bold claim. What makes the arts powerful enough to sit in that category?
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Chapter 2: How do creative hobbies affect mental health and well-being?
You describe how the brain's reward system, especially dopamine, is activated not just by pleasure, but by anticipation. Tell me about that. Well, if we're doing things like listening to stories or making music, listening to songs, there's a temporal element there as well. We can start to predict what might be about to come.
So many people will know that the chorus in their song is about to come back and the anticipation of those pleasurable moments in that song starts
actually lead to dopamine release as well as those peak moments like the chorus itself so essentially because the arts play on our expectations giving us moments of tension and resolution that's why they're so effective at manipulating our reward networks and giving us that dopamine response These hobbies are repetitive, they're rhythmic.
Do those patterns help quiet the brain's tendency toward rumination and overthinking? Is that part of why they feel calming to some people? Absolutely. When we get into the groove of things like knitting or crochet, for example, there's a rhythm to that.
And actually that rhythm that you might have with your fingers, with the needles you're using, we actually automatically synchronize to that rhythm with our brains, with our breathing, with our heart rate. It's a process called entrainment. And actually, as we synchronize to that, we actually find ourselves reducing the rate of our heart rate and breathing.
So that helps us to physiologically relax. So actually, and also we can get into the flow of the activity. Sometimes people will be crafting and they'll suddenly realize an hour has gone by and it only felt like 10 minutes.
And that feeling of flow is because we actually have synchronization across the medial central part of our brain, which means that we're so deeply engrossed in what we're getting that all of our attention gets very focused. And this is a really positive state for our brains to experience. I wanna circle back to something that you mentioned earlier.
Do we have evidence that regular creative practice, even at an amateur level, can lower stress hormones and inflammatory markers? And then what about the risk of depression? We actually do have evidence that if people are regularly engaging, because they have that hobby they keep coming back to, that it actually does have longer-term physiological effects.
In fact, people who are regularly engaged in arts activities actually have patterns of gene expression, which indicate a slower pace of biological aging. They have clinical physiological markers, like markers in their inflammatory systems and their circulatory systems, that indicate a slower biological age as well.
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Chapter 3: What are the psychological benefits of engaging in crafts?
Daisy, for someone listening who's intrigued but unsure where to begin, what might a small, realistic dose of creativity look like? We're all used to having these kind of rules in our lives about how many vegetables to eat each day, for example. And I think it can really help to figure out what's our personal equivalent of that. Can you manage 10 or 15 or 20 minutes a day of creative activity?
Or can you try and make swaps in your life? So instead of scrolling your phone on your commute, is that a great time to do 20 or 30 minutes of a craft activity? Or if you're meeting up with friends, instead of just meeting up for drinks or dinner, can you meet up and do something that's creative together?
I think a bit like with our diet as well, it's good to remember that variety is really important. So actually trying different arts experiences can bring different benefits to your health. So it's a really positive thing not to worry about how good you're going to be, but just to focus on the enjoyment of the experience and sampling lots of different things till you find something you like.
And I'm just going to ask, do you have a favorite creative activity that you look forward to? Well, I love playing the piano and making music, but actually recently I've been trying to sort of test new things. I recently tried embroidery and I've really loved it. What I'm producing doesn't look that great, but that's not the point.
The point is, is that I'm really enjoying that sensory experience, that joy of learning a new skill and the excitement of being able to show friends what I've produced. Daisy's new book, Art Cure, The Science of How the Arts Save Lives, is on bookshelves now. Daisy, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for our senior producer, Kaylee Monahan, for her production assistance.
Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts at usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA Today's The Excerpt. Draft season means millions of fans are refreshing their team's pages on USA Today Network right now.
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