Working with your hands is good for your brain

Working with your hands is to enhance our psychological health. Modeling, knitting, transforming, sculpting, harvesting, sewing, painting… All of these tasks stand out as valuable activities with which to stimulate the brain. They are, in turn, a sensational way to relieve stress, improve neuronal plasticity, optimize our dexterity, as well as concentration and even mental calm.

The hand-brain connection represents for the human being that essential alliance that acts as feedback to promote our neuronal development.. This is a reality that has been known from anthropology and psychology for decades. Hence, for example, the need to encourage manual games and tasks in children to promote fine motor skills and thus contribute to brain development.

However, Something that most of us know is that when we reach adulthood, in many cases we leave behind the magic of those manual activities.. Unless it is part of our job, we usually do without such tasks. So much so, that media such as the mobile phone or the computer are even replacing handwriting. When it comes to exercising, for example, we focus the activity on our body, but we forget about our hands, their mobility and, above all, their great creative potential. Using them actively through the most varied tasks can improve our mood. Let’s see more data below.

Working with your hands: creation and psychological well-being within your reach

In some ways, we could almost say that We have reached a point in our society where manual competence is being devalued. Office jobs, thinking work teams, marketing, advertising, engineering, economists, technology companies… All of these work areas undoubtedly prioritize other basically intellectual skills.

However, professions as essential as masonry, agriculture, car repair, plumbing or electricity, still require a pair of skillful hands to solve our lives, to ensure that we never lack the most basic things. Both spheres, intellectual productivity and manual productivity, continue to be essential in our daily lives.

Now, it should be noted that currently, another very interesting vision is emerging from the area of ​​neuropsychology. This tendency of recent decades to glorify intellectual work over manual work should decline. What’s more, depriving ourselves of working with our hands would go against our nature. So much so that, Neuroscientists such as Dr. Kelly Lambert, from the University of Richmond, United States, point out something more than interesting: doing manual work reduces the rate of depression.

Manual work and our psychological well-being

In the past, tool manufacturing made it easier for homo species will evolve to what we are now. This axis constituted between the eye, the hand and the brain, stands as a fabulous intellectual and emotional ‘constellation’ that continues to benefit us multiple times. However, we are neglecting them.

Working with your hands does not mean spending all day in front of a computer. Not even fixing a clogged pipe. It is something deeper, something that requires enhancing our neuronal connections and thus facilitating brain plasticity. In what way? Through creation and transformation. There must be a series of processes where a result that satisfies us is given. So, Tasks such as sculpting, modeling, knitting, drawing or even planting a flower generate a material transformation that has an emotional impact.

This is what at least Dr. Kelly Lambert explains to us in her book Lifting Depression: A Neuroscientist’s Hands-On Approach to Activating Your Brain’s Healing Power. Is about look for a type of manual activities that activate our neural reward circuit, there where there is a certain cognitive effort, as well as concentration and pleasure in what we are capable of achieving.

Effort, creation and satisfaction: neurochemistry that reverses depressive processes

Something that we must be clear about is that the mere fact of learning to model, sculpt or knit will not make our depression disappear. Working with your hands is a catalyst, a means to change our brain chemistry, to induce a state of internal well-being that, added to other strategies such as psychological therapy, can undoubtedly give great results. However, let’s see in detail what working with our hands accomplishes in our brain:

Changes the physiology and chemical response of the brain: endorphins, serotonin, endorphins are released, the hormone cortisol associated with stress is reduced…Manual tasks improve neuronal plasticity, new connections are created and with this, we cope with cognitive deterioration. Furthermore, as Dr. Robin Hurley, from Baylor University, Huston, explains to us, manual tasks that are meaningful for patients (playing an instrument, performing artistic tasks such as painting or modeling) even reverse the effects of chronic stress. This is very important, because in this way, the person feels more receptive and relaxed to face their depression.

To conclude, it is important to clarify one last detail. Not all manual tasks generate psychological benefits. If we work in a factory or on an assembly line, this repetitive task will hardly generate well-being. It would therefore be about finding that activity with which to work with your hands from curiosity, passion and interest.

We must look for a task that satisfies us, that motivates us and relaxes us at the same time, reached that state flow which the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi told us about. They are those states where the world stops and only we exist, our self fully in tune with the creative process. Few things are more satisfying.

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