TEDx Kings College London
Is hand knitting a mindfulness based intervention for fidgeters?
James McIntosh MA
ABSTRACT
James McIntosh is a self-confessed fidgeter.
Living in the present moment using traditional mindfulness-based interventions is impossible for someone with a brain that constantly runs at 50MHz.
A world award-winning food writer, TV presenter in China and Global Ambassador for AGA cookers, James was living his dream. That was until 2015, when he was confined to bed with what was diagnosed as a ‘moderately severe depressive episode’.
A lost career, a failed company, panic attacks, low self-worth and esteem. Add into the mix the death of parents and suffering from homophobic and narcissistic abuse.
Was the answer to simply rebuild his life, one stitch at a time?
TALK
Have you ever thought about what thoughts went into hand-knitting a jumper?
In my fabulous 44 ¾ years on this earth I have learnt the importance of gratitude.
Saying thank you, and appreciating what I have, what others have given to me, how they have helped and encouraged me, makes me feel good about myself and hopefully they may even feel valued, and worth something too.
I’m grateful for my life, my late parents, Thomas my fiance, the country I live in and for the healthcare that is free at the point of need from the cradle to the grave in the UK that we call the NHS.
However, the process of being grateful can be difficult and mentally painful.
Mistakes and actions, regrets and other painful memories can resurface in our minds when we are trying to be ‘mindful’.
Life experience has taught me the hard way that the only thing I can change is myself.
That’s all I have control over in this world.
But to change myself for the better, I need to see within myself what needs to be changed. And consider my findings carefully with what I have learnt throughout my life.
I have learnt I can do this by fidgeting.
Do you like my jumper?
Isn’t it glorious? I love it.
It gives me a boost of colour, matches my shoes and gives me a cuddle. It’s hand knit by me in pure wool, supports British Farmers and does not need washing. Pure wool is natural, sustainable, biodegradable, renewable, odour resistant and easy to care for.
If you had not realised, I am totally obsessed with the wonder fibre that is wool.
And I’m positively evangelistic about hand knitting too.
I want to make it very clear so nobody gets confused. This is NOT a scientific talk about proving that hand knitting, or indeed wool for that matter, have any mental health benefits.
Knit for Peace in 2017 published an extensive literature review with over 150 citations called ‘The Health Benefits of Knitting’. In their review, significant health benefits from hand knitting were found, however, many of the data originated from non randomised controlled trials and hence are not published in the high impact academic journals.
A study published in 2013 in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy carried out an online survey of around 3,500 knitters worldwide reporting on their perception of the impact knitting had on their well-being. Indeed it concluded that knitting has significant psychological and social benefits which can contribute to well-being and quality of life.
But what is well-being?
Psychology Today suggests it is:
“the experience of health, happiness and prosperity to include having good mental health, high life satisfaction, a sense of meaning or purpose and the ability to manage stress”.
I think this sounds terrific.
Would you like some more of this? I know I would.
The World Health Organization intrinsically links well-being with health.
In many of the reviewed papers by Knit for Peace, ‘well-being’ is the used term for the effects of knitting on the body and mind.
Surely humans have been been knitting for centuries.?
But my own experience was so fundamental to my personal well-being that I feel it needs to be shared. If only to create an appetite to encourage academic research into hand knitting because, in my view, this needs and deserves to be scientifically and robustly evaluated.
Kindly indulge me for the next few minutes as I explain why.
So, who has brought their knitting with them today? Hands up. Crochet is allowed too.
Personally, I never go to a party without both taking and wearing my knitting these days!
Sit back, make a few stitches and let’s consider the process …
Hand knitting, for me, is what ‘mindfulness’ is for others. You see, I am a fidgeter.
I fail at mindfulness, I can not embrace the present moment without judging, analysing or changing it.
And that’s what we are supposed to do in mindfulness, not judge, analyse or change.
It’s impossible for me to be in ‘the present moment’ – as called for in Mindfulness based interventions – I have a very fast head and I end up not only judging, analysing and changing but then progressing to Googling it as well! Forgetting to go back to the breath as my anchor.
I get myself all in a muddle, a tiz, and realise that I’ve done it all wrong. I failed mindfulness, resulting in living in the past, worrying about the future and not enjoying my life in the present.
I suppose the only thing I’m mindful of, is that I was being mindful wrong!
This is all highly ironic as my fiance, Dr Thomas Ernst, practises Mindfulness for 3 hours a day, every day, and prescribes it to his patients.
In a time of increased media awareness of mental health issues and increased popularity of the concept of ‘social prescribing’ which enables medical professionals to refer people to a range of local, non-clinical services that support their health and wellbeing for example a knitting club. I feel we need to generate an evidence base for interventions which broadly fall into this category.
My hypothesis would be that a mindful approach to hand knitting has similar benefits compared with the well established evidence base of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction :
- Anxiety and depression may decrease
- Improved immune function
- Lower blood pressure
- Improved sleep and self confidence
- Reduced burnout in nurses
- Reduction in chronic pain
What a truly wonderful list.
Things happened in my life. Things that should not have happened.
Homophobic and narcissistic abuse being constant themes of my fabulous 44 ¾ years on this earth.
Depression set in. I collapsed. Diagnosed with a ‘moderately severe depressive episode’ I was confined to my bed for a year. I did not know what to do and even if I did, I did not have the energy to fix it. All I could do every day was to watch TV. I had lost me.
Thomas kept loving me. I was prescribed antidepressants, and self medicated with alcohol. A year of psychodynamic psychotherapy left me confused. I was left to feel like a lesser person, a second class human by society.
I needed to do something, my personal experience of antidepressants is simply they allowed me to stand up, but not move forward and thrive.
It’s at this point I learnt to hand knit.
My starter kit contained 2 chopsticks, a piece of string and a tutorial on YouTube.
I could barely create a stitch and ordered some beige alpaca wool. I started to knit a jumper on large 12mm knitting needles.
The resulting item is somewhat shapeless but will live as a testimony to my wellness for the rest of my life, albeit at the back of my wardrobe. Why do moths never eat the ugly items? Knitting Magazine called it ‘the most godawful thing’.
Thomas and I started to notice a huge change in both my mood and my want to do things on the days I would knit.
And in the middle of my personal darkness, light had started to arrive. I kept knitting.
I call it ‘knititation’, a mindful approach to hand knitting. It allowed me to enter a parallel world to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and my body and soul started to heal. I knit for at least an hour a day, every day.
These days my depression has not returned, I stopped taking antidepressants 3 years ago, stopped smoking 2 years ago and I am living and succeeding and have an international company called McIntosh where I sell wool.
Here is how it works. A breath becomes a stitch. The next stitch becomes a feeling, the next an emotion. As these tangible stitches are crucial to the knitted project, so too my thoughts and feelings are integral to me. If a single stitch is broken, the knitted item unravels, so too my thoughts and feelings will unravel if they are not seen as integral to me. My mental health, stability and my financial success arguably derives from embracing my thoughts and feelings, after all, they are mine and it is for no one to judge me or tell me what to feel.
When I realised this, I was free from both the homophobic and narcissistic abuse.
By its very nature, knitting is fidgeting.
A residue of negativity remained within me. My personal reflection upon my depression is of the destruction of my own self worth due to homophobia and others taking advantage of me for their own narcissistic supply, this was abuse, it was not ok, thus affecting my image of self. An intimate emotion that should and deserves to be healthy. Rather I was not able to fully stand up within all of society. Now I know: that I am worth something. Perhaps I simply heard negative things about myself too often and started to assimilate them and feel them within my own physical body. Perhaps I should have also learnt to knit in my early years of life.
I dealt with these negatives, a stitch at a time, by considering the definition of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction as outlined by its founder; Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn:
“Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally”.
The evidence base for Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is strong in terms of reducing stress, anxiety and relapse prevention into depression. It is recommended for patient treatments in the UK by The National Institute for Health Care Excellence , commonly known as NICE.
I was fidgeting, I needed to restart my life. So I kept knitting.
Hand knitting takes time. It’s a slow, creative and rhythmic process. Allowing the knitter to deal with thoughts and emotions stitch by stitch. I held my knitting tighter when my Mother died, I was broken, but depression did not return. I knit stitches of love, of grief, through anger and upset, tears and beautiful memories flowed. All tangible and real in a finished project.
I’m under no illusion; knitting does not solve the world’s problems. Rather, it has allowed me to find my answers, for myself, by myself – one stitch at a time – as someone who has a fast head and is unable to access other interventions.
Have you ever considered what went into the making of a hand-knitted jumper ?
What was the knitter feeling?
Would you want the knitter to have been angry or upset, confused or feeling let down when hand knitting your jumper?
I would argue yes, you would, as by allowing the knitter to process these thoughts, feelings and negatives, they would be healing as they create beautiful new stitches.
When I knit, a sense of calm arrives, my worries disappear, my reality is in the now and the present. I enter a meditative state as I work my way across the rows of stitches.
I was listening to Michelle Obama on BBC Radio 4 reading an extract from her book ‘The Light We Carry’. The former First Lady of the United States of America was speaking about her personal feelings at the end of her husband’s second term as President, she says:
“I was in a low place when I got around to picking up the 2 beginner size knitting needles I had ordered online. I was wrestling with the sense of hopelessness of not enoughness when I unrolled a small bit of the thick grey yarn that I bought and looped it over a needle for the first time, something in the tiny and precise motion on repeat, the gentle rhythm of the those clicking needles moved my brain in a new direction, after stalling on coming up with [for my] convention speech I now knew what I wanted to say.”
You see, in the jumper I am wearing, each and every stitch was knit by hand with 2 sticks that we call knitting needles. No machines. Just basic equipment that is easily accessible.
All 112,608 stitches in this jumper were knitted by hand, each stitch acknowledged, understood and loved by me as I hand knit into the stitches on one needle to create new ones, passing this new life from one knitting needle to the other. Going back and forth diligently and rhythmically to increase the length and shaping the work where required.
I’ve learnt, the journey is as important, if not more so, than the destination.
So, while I wait for the research into the benefits of hand knitting to be published.
And contemplate my thoughts and feelings over a few more stitches.
I’m mindful that the point is, like all of the research suggests, because of its therapeutic value, hand knitting simply just works for me.
So. I’m just going to stick to my knitting.
That’s one place that I do know.
Photography by Claire Blundell-Jones and Will Bouch
It is a great honour to announce that I have been asked to be a TEDx speaker at Kings College London on Sunday 5th March 2023 at Greenwood Theatre, 55 Weston Street, London, SE1 3RA under the theme ‘Heads or Tales’.