How knitting can help you kick harmful habits

Cheap and easy to pick up, knitting can help to fight addictive behaviours, from nail-biting and doomscrolling all the way up to helping people struggling with street drugs. The only side-effect? Too many scarves and hats.

Amanda Wilson struggled with painful sensory-seeking habits for as long as she can remember. "I used to pick my skin to the point of creating scabs and bite my nails down so short that they'd get infected," says Wilson, a finance worker from Mississauga, in Canada, who suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Then she picked up yarn and needles. "I now have beautiful nails and a healthy scalp since I began obsessively knitting," says Wilson.      

While it's long been considered a hobby for the elderly, there's a growing respect for knitting as a legitimate healthcare intervention for people of any age. Personal testimonies and preliminary scientific studies suggest that knitting (and its sister, crochet) can improve emotional regulation and help people kick harmful habits, from nail-biting and doomscrolling all the way up to street drugs.

"There's a little bit of a leap of faith that people have to take to think that knitting is going to make a difference" for major traumas such as PTSD and severe eating disorders, says Carl Birmingham, a professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, in Canada. But for many, as Wilson found, that leap is well worth taking. Knitting is cheap, portable and its only side effect is an excess of hats.

Knitting has had something of a public relations problem in the scientific world. Betsan Corkhill, a wellbeing coach and trained physiotherapist who has authored several studies on the therapeutic benefits of knitting, says she's found that scientists and clinicians are always eager to entertain a "bilateral, rhythmic, psychosocial intervention" as a new mental health treatment – but once she mentions the "k-word", knitting, their enthusiasm evaporates. Mia Hobbs, a clinical psychologist in London, UK who runs a podcast on the mental health benefits of knitting, says she suspects it's because knitting has historically been an activity for women.

As a result, there are only a handful of scientific studies about the health impacts of knitting and crochet. Most are surveys that ask experienced knitters how they feel knitting helps them. These surveys are compelling – for example, 90% of respondents said crochet makes them calmer in one 2020 study – but what we're lacking are studies "introducing knitting to a group of non-knitters" in a way comparable to clinical trials for drugs, Hobbs says. And the respondents to these surveys are "almost exclusively white females", she adds. 

So far, the closest we've got are studies on knitting in residential treatment centres – healthcare facilities where patients live full-time as they receive treatment for conditions such as eating disorders or addiction. Although sample sizes are small, it's a helpful setup to study knitting, says Birmingham, since the study participants have time to devote to getting through the craft's learning curve and are motivated to learn a healthy new coping mechanism.

Birmingham, the professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, says he's been a knitting evangelist since 2009, when he conducted a study on knitting in a treatment centre for young women with severe eating disorders, including anorexia and bulimia. "They were following a strict protocol, including eating more, so it was very anxiety-provoking for them," says Birmingham. But the impact of knitting on their levels of distress was "remarkable", he says – about 75% of participants said knitting helped dispel........

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