Primitive Wellbeing: Why using your hands is essential to your mental health
The more I work regularly with my hands alongside analyzing and thinking with my brain and talking with my mouth, I know firsthand that using them in complex and engaged creativity is essential to our good mental health. Now that so many of us sit in chairs and at computers for work, we talk a lot about the hazards of sitting all day and not moving our body in terms of physical health and mental wellbeing, but there has not been so much focus on how we have shifted dramatically in how we use our hands and the effects of that. There are many makers who have been thinking and writing about how this affects our wellbeing and I believe it is time the field of psychology incorporates how we use our hands into our ideas about mental health.
Ellen Dissanayake in her article “Art and Intimacy” included “hands on competence” as an essential need of all humans that links us to our hunter-gather nature still embedded in our psychology. She equates not creatively using our hands as living with a vitamin deficiency. Melanie Falick in her book “Making a Life” describes her decision to leave publishing to knit, craft, garden and immerse herself in making as a need to use her hands to connect herself to her own survival - something I believe many of us are hungry for without realizing it. Falick profiles the thinking and life of many makers who describe how using your hands creatively is essential to wellbeing. One, Peter Korn shares “There is a certain type of emotional hunger we have that isn’t answered by anything but making physical objects. There is something that most people don’t get nearly enough of. . . .because more fabrication is done by pushing buttons and watching output rather than by taking a tool in our hands and understanding how to use it.” “Anna Zilboorg writes “These days our fingers are primarily trained to push buttons. . . . to leave your fingers untrained for anything beyond pushing and perhaps writing is like leaving a voice without singing.”
As children, we start using our hands to manipulate early and we encourage this in our youth. The sad fact is that this often dies off by early adulthood and is not recognized socially as an essential need. I would like to see this shift and have considered requiring my clients to find a way of using their hands creatively as a part of our work together. This thinking comes out of watching patients attain deep resiliency with their mental health when they took up gardening, rediscovered playing a musical instrument, or started cooking more.
Recently, quarantining during Covid provided the opportunity to reconnect to using our hands creatively in ways we have really abandoned. Many of us were freed to be at home and found ourselves cooking, baking, gardening, knitting and crafting during this time. There was pleasure and joy in this during the midst of great panic and overwhelm - a hugely important comfort and anchor for people. In a way, this is much closer to how our human ancestors have lived for thousands and thousands of years - with greater risk and greater connection to using one's hands for survival and the inherent satisfaction in this. If you are looking to add handwork into your life, I invite you to think about a simple pleasure that you get from using your hands - like arranging flowers or wrapping special presents and packages or making food at home and try to add this practice into your week three times, like you might try to get a workout in.