Beyond Guarding Against Dementia

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When Age’s Brain-Changes Come Knocking

A woman guarding in a red dress.

This is Dr. Amy Friday. She’s a psychologist, specializing in geropsychology and neuropsychological assessments.

In other words, she helps people optimize their aging experience, particularly in the context of brain changes as we get older.

What does she want us to know?

First: be not afraid

Ominous first words, but the fact is, there’s a lot to find scary about the prospect of memory loss, dementia, and death.

However, as she points out:

  • Death will come for us all sooner or later, barring technology as yet unknown
  • Dementia can be avoided, or at least stalled, or at least worked around
  • Memory loss, as per the above, can be avoided/stalled/managed

We’ve written a little on these topics too:

Managing Your Mortality

…or if the death is not yours:

Bereavement & Managing Grief

As for avoiding dementia, the below-linked feature is about Alzheimer’s in particular (which accounts for more than half of all cases of dementia), but the advice goes for most of the other kinds too:

How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk

And finally, about memory loss specifically:

How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements)

this one is especially about cementing into one’s brain the kinds of memories that people most fear losing with age. People don’t worry about forgetting their PIN codes; they worry about forgetting their cherished memories with loved ones. So, if that’s important to you, do consider checking out this one!

What is that about managing or working around the symptoms?

If we’re missing a limb, we (usually) get a prosthetic, and/or learn how to operate without that limb.

If we’re missing sight or hearing, partially or fully, there are disability aids for those kinds of things too (glasses are a disability aid! Something being very common does not make it not a disability; you literally have less of an ability—in this case, the ability to see), and/or we learn how to operate with our different (or missing) sense.

Dr. Friday makes the case for this being the same with memory loss, dementia, and other age-related symptoms (reduced focus, increased mental fatigue, etc):

❝We are all screwed up. Here’s my flavor … what’s yours? This is a favorite saying of mine, because we ARE all screwed up in one way or another, and when we acknowledge it we can feel closer in our screwed-up-edness.

We are all experiencing “normal aging,” so that tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon that starts in our thirties and slowly gets worse is REAL. But what if you’re having more problems than normal aging? Is it time to throw in the towel and hide? I’m hoping that there is a group of people who say HELL NO to that idea.

Let’s use lessons from research and clinical practice to help all of us work around our weaknesses, and capitalize on our strengths.  ❞

~ Dr. Amy Friday

Examples of this might include:

  • Writing down the things most important to you (a short list of information and/or statements that you feel define you and what matters most to you), so that you can read it later
  • Making sure you have support (partner, family, friends, etc) who are on the same page about this topic—and thus will actually support you and advocate for you, instead of arguing about what is in your best interest without consulting you.
  • Labelling stuff around the house, so that you get less confused about what is what and where it is
  • Having a named go-to advocate that you can call / ask to be called, if you are in trouble somewhere and need help that you can rely on
  • Getting a specialized, simpler bank account; hiring an accountant if relevant and practicable.

The thing is, we all want to keep control. Sometimes we can do that! Sometimes we can’t, and if we’re going to lose some aspect of control, it’ll generally go a lot better if we do it on our own terms, so that we ourselves can look out for future-us in our planning.

Want to know more?

You might enjoy her blog, which includes also links to her many videos on the topic, including such items as:

For the rest, see:

This Beautiful Brain | The Science Of Brain Health

Enjoy!

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  • The Truth About Handwashing

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    Washing Our Hands Of It

    In Tuesdays’s newsletter, we asked you how often you wash your hands, and got the above-depicted, below-described, set of self-reported answers:

    • About 54% said “More times per day than [the other options]”
    • About 38% said “Whenever using the bathroom or kitchen
    • About 5% said “Once or twice per day”
    • Two (2) said “Only when visibly dirty”
    • Two (2) said “I prefer to just use sanitizer gel”

    What does the science have to say about this?

    People lie about their handwashing habits: True or False?

    True and False (since some people lie and some don’t), but there’s science to this too. Here’s a great study from 2021 that used various levels of confidentiality in questioning (i.e., there were ways of asking that made it either obvious or impossible to know who answered how), and found…

    ❝We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed.❞

    ~ Dr. Laura Mieth et al.

    Source: Do they really wash their hands? Prevalence estimates for personal hygiene behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic based on indirect questions

    Note: the abstract alone doesn’t make it clear how the anonymization worked (it is explained later in the paper), and it was noted as a limitation of the study that the participants may not have understood how it works well enough to have confidence in it, meaning that the 78.1% is probably also inflated, just not as much as the 94.5% in the direct questioning group.

    Here’s a pop-science article that cites a collection of studies, finding such things as for example…

    ❝With the use of wireless devices to record how many people entered the restroom and used the pumps of the soap dispensers, researchers were able to collect data on almost 200,000 restroom trips over a three-month period.

    The found that only 31% of men and 65% of women washed their hands with soap.❞

    Source: Study: Men Wash Their Hands Much Less Often Than Women (And People Lie About Washing Their Hands)

    Sanitizer gel does the job of washing one’s hands with soap: True or False?

    False, though it’s still not a bad option for when soap and water aren’t available or practical. Here’s an educational article about the science of why this is so:

    UCI Health | Soap vs. Hand Sanitizer

    There’s also some consideration of lab results vs real-world results, because while in principle the alcohol gel is very good at killing most bacteria / inactivating most viruses, it can take up to 4 minutes of alcohol gel contact to do so, as in this study with flu viruses:

    Situations Leading to Reduced Effectiveness of Current Hand Hygiene against Infectious Mucus from Influenza Virus-Infected Patients

    In contrast, 20 seconds of handwashing with soap will generally do the job.

    Antibacterial soap is better than other soap: True or False?

    False, because the main way that soap protects us is not in its antibacterial properties (although it does also destroy the surface membrane of some bacteria and for that matter viruses too, killing/inactivating them, respectively), but rather in how it causes pathogens to simply slide off during washing.

    Here’s a study that found that handwashing with soap reduced disease incidence by 50–53%, and…

    ❝Incidence of disease did not differ significantly between households given plain soap compared with those given antibacterial soap.❞

    ~ Dr. Stephen Luby et al.

    Read more: Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial

    Want to wash your hands more than you do?

    There have been many studies into motivating people to wash their hands more (often with education and/or disgust-based shaming), but an effective method you can use for yourself at home is to simply buy more luxurious hand soap, and generally do what you can to make handwashing a more pleasant experience (taking a moment to let the water run warm is another good thing to do if that’s more comfortable for you).

    Take care!

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  • Elon Musk says ketamine can get you out of a ‘negative frame of mind’. What does the research say?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    X owner Elon Musk recently described using small amounts of ketamine “once every other week” to manage the “chemical tides” that cause his depression. He says it’s helpful to get out of a “negative frame of mind”.

    This has caused a range of reactions in the media, including on X (formerly Twitter), from strong support for Musk’s choice of treatment, to allegations he has a drug problem.

    But what exactly is ketamine? And what is its role in the treatment of depression?

    It was first used as an anaesthetic

    Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic used in surgery and to relieve pain.

    At certain doses, people are awake but are disconnected from their bodies. This makes it useful for paramedics, for example, who can continue to talk to injured patients while the drug blocks pain but without affecting the person’s breathing or blood flow.

    Ketamine is also used to sedate animals in veterinary practice.

    Ketamine is a mixture of two molecules, usually referred to a S-Ketamine and R-Ketamine.

    S-Ketamine, or esketamine, is stronger than R-Ketamine and was approved in 2019 in the United States under the drug name Spravato for serious and long-term depression that has not responded to at least two other types of treatments.

    Ketamine is thought to change chemicals in the brain that affect mood.
    While the exact way ketamine works on the brain is not known, scientists think it changes the amount of the neurotransmitter glutamate and therefore changes symptoms of depression.

    How was it developed?

    Ketamine was first synthesised by chemists at the Parke Davis pharmaceutical company in Michigan in the United States as an anaesthetic. It was tested on a group of prisoners at Jackson Prison in Michigan in 1964 and found to be fast acting with few side effects.

    The US Food and Drug Administration approved ketamine as a general anaesthetic in 1970. It is now on the World Health Organization’s core list of essential medicines for health systems worldwide as an anaesthetic drug.

    In 1994, following patient reports of improved depression symptoms after surgery where ketamine was used as the anaesthetic, researchers began studying the effects of low doses of ketamine on depression.

    Depressed woman looks down
    Researchers have been investigating ketamine for depression for 30 years.
    SB Arts Media/Shutterstock

    The first clinical trial results were published in 2000. In the trial, seven people were given either intravenous ketamine or a salt solution over two days. Like the earlier case studies, ketamine was found to reduce symptoms of depression quickly, often within hours and the effects lasted up to seven days.

    Over the past 20 years, researchers have studied the effects of ketamine on treatment resistant depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic sress disorder obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and for reducing substance use, with generally positive results.

    One study in a community clinic providing ketamine intravenous therapy for depression and anxiety found the majority of patients reported improved depression symptoms eight weeks after starting regular treatment.

    While this might sound like a lot of research, it’s not. A recent review of randomised controlled trials conducted up to April 2023 looking at the effects of ketamine for treating depression found only 49 studies involving a total of 3,299 patients worldwide. In comparison, in 2021 alone, there were 1,489 studies being conducted on cancer drugs.

    Is ketamine prescribed in Australia?

    Even though the research results on ketamine’s effectiveness are encouraging, scientists still don’t really know how it works. That’s why it’s not readily available from GPs in Australia as a standard depression treatment. Instead, ketamine is mostly used in specialised clinics and research centres.

    However, the clinical use of ketamine is increasing. Spravato nasal spray was approved by the Australian Therapuetic Goods Administration (TGA) in 2021. It must be administered under the direct supervision of a health-care professional, usually a psychiatrist.

    Spravato dosage and frequency varies for each person. People usually start with three to six doses over several weeks to see how it works, moving to fortnightly treatment as a maintenance dose. The nasal spray costs between A$600 and $900 per dose, which will significantly limit many people’s access to the drug.

    Ketamine can be prescribed “off-label” by GPs in Australia who can prescribe schedule 8 drugs. This means it is up to the GP to assess the person and their medication needs. But experts in the drug recommend caution because of the lack of research into negative side-effects and longer-term effects.

    What about its illicit use?

    Concern about use and misuse of ketamine is heightened by highly publicised deaths connected to the drug.

    Ketamine has been used as a recreational drug since the 1970s. People report it makes them feel euphoric, trance-like, floating and dreamy. However, the amounts used recreationally are typically higher than those used to treat depression.

    Information about deaths due to ketamine is limited. Those that are reported are due to accidents or ketamine combined with other drugs. No deaths have been reported in treatment settings.

    Reducing stigma

    Depression is the third leading cause of disability worldwide and effective treatments are needed.

    Seeking medical advice about treatment for depression is wiser than taking Musk’s advice on which drugs to use.

    However, Musk’s public discussion of his mental health challenges and experiences of treatment has the potential to reduce stigma around depression and help-seeking for mental health conditions.

    Clarification: this article previously referred to a systematic review looking at oral ketamine to treat depression. The article has been updated to instead cite a review that encompasses other routes of administration as well, such as intravenous and intranasal ketamine.The Conversation

    Julaine Allan, Associate Professor, Mental Health and Addiction, Rural Health Research Institute, Charles Sturt University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Paracetamol pack sizes and availability are changing. Here’s what you need to know

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Changes are coming into effect from February 1 about how paracetamol is sold in Australia.

    This mainly affects pack sizes of paracetamol sold outside pharmacies and how paracetamol is accessed in pharmacies.

    The changes, announced by Australia’s drug regulator, are in line with moves internationally to reduce the harms of liver toxicity and the risk of overdose.

    However, there are no new safety concerns when paracetamol is used as directed. And children’s products are not affected.

    Bowonpat Sakaew/Shutterstock

    What is paracetamol?

    Paracetamol is commonly sold under brand names such as Panadol, Dymadon and Panamax. It’s used to treat mild pain and fever for short periods or can be prescribed for chronic (long-term) pain.

    Millions of packs of this cheap and accessible medicine are sold in Australia every year.

    Small packs (up to 20 tablets) have been available from supermarkets and other retailers such as petrol stations. Larger packs (up to 100 tablets) are only available from pharmacies.

    Paracetamol is relatively safe when used as directed. However, at higher-than-recommended doses, it can cause liver toxicity. In severe cases and when left untreated, this can be lethal.

    Why are the rules changing?

    In 2022, we wrote about how the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) was considering changes to paracetamol access because of an increase in people going to hospital with paracetamol poisoning.

    An expert review it commissioned found there were about 40–50 deaths every year from paracetamol poisoning between 2007 and 2020. Between 2009–10 and 2016–17, hospital admissions for this increased (from 8,617 to 11,697), before reducing in 2019–20 (8,723). Most admissions were due to intentional self-poisonings, and about half of these were among people aged ten to 24.

    After the report, the TGA consulted with the public to work out how to prevent paracetamol poisonings.

    Options included reducing pack sizes, limiting how many packs could be bought at once, moving larger packs behind the pharmacy counter and restricting access by age.

    Responses were mixed. Although responses supported the need to prevent poisonings, there were concerns about how changes might affect:

    • people with chronic pain, especially those in regional areas, where it may be harder to access pharmacies and, therefore, larger packs
    • people on limited incomes, if certain products were made prescription-only.

    Although deaths from paracetamol poisoning are tragic and preventable, they are rare considering how much paracetamol Australians use. There is less than one death due to poisoning for every million packs sold.

    Because of this, it was important the TGA addressed concerns about poisonings while making sure Australians still had easy access to this essential medicine.

    Pharmacist typing at computer behind the counter
    If you buy large packs of paracetamol for chronic pain, you’ll need to go to the pharmacy counter. StratfordProductions/Shutterstock

    So what’s changing?

    The key changes being introduced relate to new rules about the pack sizes that can be sold outside pharmacies, and the location of products sold in pharmacies.

    From February 1, packs sold in supermarkets and places other than pharmacies will reduce from a maximum 20 tablets to 16 tablets per pack. These changes bring Australia in line with other countries. These include the United Kingdom, which restricted supermarket packs to 16 tablets in 1998, and saw reductions in poisonings.

    In all jurisdictions except Queensland and Western Australia, packs sold in pharmacies larger than 50 tablets will move behind the pharmacy counter and can only be sold under pharmacist supervision. In Queensland and WA, products containing more than 16 tablets will only be available from behind the pharmacy counter and sold under pharmacist supervision.

    In all jurisdictions, any packs containing more than 50 tablets will need to be sold in blister packs, rather than bottles.

    Several paracetamol products are not affected by these changes. These include children’s products, slow-release formulations (for example, “osteo” products), and products already behind the pharmacy counter or only available via prescription.

    What else do I need to know?

    These changes have been introduced to reduce the risk of poisonings from people exceeding recommended doses. The overall safety profile of paracetamol has not changed.

    Paracetamol is still available from all current locations and there are no plans to make it prescription-only or remove it from supermarkets altogether. Many companies have already been updating their packaging to ensure there are no gaps in supply.

    The reduction in pack sizes of paracetamol available in supermarkets means a pack of 16 tablets will now last two days instead of two-and-a-half days if taken at the maximum dose (two tablets, four times a day). Anyone in pain that does not improve after short-term use should speak to their pharmacist or GP.

    For people who use paracetamol regularly for chronic pain, it is more cost-effective to continue buying larger packs from pharmacies. As larger packs (50+ tablets) need to be kept out of sight, you will need to ask at the pharmacy counter. Pharmacists know that for many people it’s appropriate to use paracetamol daily for chronic pain.

    Natasa Gisev, Clinical pharmacist and Scientia Associate Professor at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney and Ria Hopkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • The Alzheimer’s Gene That Varies By Race & Sex

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    The Alzheimer’s Gene That Varies By Race & Sex

    You probably know that there are important genetic factors that increase or decrease Alzheimer’s Risk. If you’d like a quick refresher before we carry on, here are two previous articles on this topic:

    A Tale of Two Alleles

    It has generally been understood that APOE-ε2 lowers Alzheimer’s disease risk, and APOE-ε4 increases it.

    However, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, research populations for genetic testing are overwhelmingly white. If you, dear reader, are white, you may be thinking “well, I’m white, so this isn’t a problem for me”, you might still want to read on…

    An extensive new study, published days ago, by Dr. Belloy et al., looked at how these correlations held out per race and sex. They found:

    • The “APOE-ε2 lowers; APOE-ε4 increases” dictum held out strongest for white people.
    • In the case of Hispanic people, there was only a small correlation on the APOE-ε4 side of things, and none on the APOE-ε2 side of things per se.
    • East Asians also saw no correlation with regard to APOE-ε2 per se.
    • But! Hispanic and East Asian people had a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s if and only if they had both APOE-ε2 and APOE-ε4.
    • Black people, meanwhile, saw a slight correlation with regard to the protective effect of APOE-ε2, and as for APOE-ε4, if they had any European ancestry, increased European ancestry meant a higher increased risk factor if they had APOE-ε4. African ancestry, on the other hand, had a protective effect, proportional to the overall amount of that ancestry.

    And as for sex…

    • Specifically for white people with the APOE-ε3/ε4 genotype, especially in the age range of 60–70, the genetic risk for Alzheimer’s was highest in women.

    If you’d like to read more and examine the data for yourself:

    APOE Genotype and Alzheimer Disease Risk Across Age, Sex, and Population Ancestry

    Want to reduce your Alzheimer’s risk?

    We have just the thing for you:

    How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk: It’s Never Too Early To Do These 11 Things

    Take care!

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  • New News From The Centenarian Blue Zones

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    From Blue To Green…

    We sometimes write about supercentenarians, which word is usually used in academia to refer to people who are not merely over 100 years of age, but over 110 years. These people can be found in many countries, but places where they have been found to be most populous (as a percentage of the local population) have earned the moniker “Blue Zones”—of which Okinawa and Sardinia are probably the most famous, but there are others too.

    This is in contrast to, for example “Red Zones”, a term often used for areas where a particular disease is endemic, or areas where a disease is “merely” epidemic, but particularly rife at present.

    In any case, back to the Blue Zones, where people live the longest and healthiest—because the latter part is important too! See also:

    • Lifespan: how long we live
    • Healthspan: how long we stay healthy (portmanteau of “healthy lifespan”)

    Most of our readers don’t live in a Blue Zone (in fact, many live in the US, which is a COVID Red Zone, a diabetes Red Zone, and a heart disease Red Zone), but that doesn’t mean we can’t all take tips from the Blue Zones and apply them, for example:

    You may be wondering… How much good will this do me? And, we do have an answer for that:

    When All’s Said And Done, How Likely Are You To Live To 100?

    Now that we’re all caught-up…

    The news from the Blues

    A team of researchers did a big review of observational studies of centenarians and near-centenarians (aged 95+). Why include the near-centenarians, you ask? Well, most of the studies are also longitudinal, and if we’re doing an observational study of the impact of lifestyle factors on a 100-year-old, it’s helpful to know what they’ve been doing recently. Hence nudging the younger-end cutoff a little lower, so as to not begin each study with fresh-faced 100-year-olds whom we know nothing about.

    Looking at thousands of centenarians (and near-centenarians, but also including some supercentenarians, up the age of 118), the researchers got a lot of very valuable data, far more than we have room to go into here (do check out the paper at the bottom of this article, if you have time; it’s a treasure trove of data), but one of the key summary findings was a short list of four factors they found contributed the most to extreme longevity:

    1. A diverse diet with low salt intake: in particular, a wide variety of plant diversity, including protein-rich legumes, though fish featured prominently also. On average they got 57% and 65% of their energy intake from carbohydrates, 12% to 32% from protein, and 27% to 31% from fat. As for salt, they averaged 1.6g of sodium per day, which is well within the WHO’s recommendation of averaging under 2g of sodium per day. As a matter of interest, centenarians in Okinawa itself averaged 1.1g of sodium per day.
    2. Low medication use: obviously there may be a degree of non-causal association here, i.e. the same people who just happened to be healthier and therefore lived longer, correspondingly took fewer medications—they took fewer medications because they were healthier; they weren’t necessarily healthier because they took fewer medications. That said, overmedication can be a big problem, especially in places with a profit motive like the US, and can increase the risk of harmful drug interactions, and side effects that then need more medications to treat the side effects, as well as direct iatrogenic damage (i.e. this drug treats your condition, but as the cost of harming you in some other way). Naturally, sometimes we really do need meds, but it’s a good reminder to do a meds review with one’s doctor once in a while, and see if everything’s still of benefit.
    3. Getting good sleep: not shocking, and this one’s not exactly news. But what may be shocking is that 68% of centenarians reported consistently getting enough good-quality sleep. To put that into perspective, only 35% of 10almonds readers reported regularly getting sleep in the 7–9 hours range.
    4. Rural living environment: more than 75% of the centenarians and near-centenarians lived in rural areas. This is not usually something touted as a Blue Zones thing on lists of Blue zones things, but this review strongly highlighted it as very relevant. In the category of things that are more obvious once it’s pointed out, though, this isn’t necessarily such a difference between “country folk” and “city folk”, so much as the ability to regularly be in green spaces has well-established health benefits physically, mentally, and both combined (such as: neurologically).

    See: The health benefits of the great outdoors: A systematic review and meta-analysis of greenspace exposure and health outcomes

    And showing that yes, even parks in cities make a significant difference:

    The association of green space, tree canopy and parks with life expectancy in neighborhoods of Los Angeles

    Want to know more?

    You can read the study in full here:

    A systematic review of diet and medication use among centenarians and near-centenarians worldwide

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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  • Knitting helps Tom Daley switch off. Its mental health benefits are not just for Olympians

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    Olympian Tom Daley is the most decorated diver in Britain’s history. He is also an avid knitter. At the Paris 2024 Olympics Daley added a fifth medal to his collection – and caught the world’s attention knitting a bright blue “Paris 24” jumper while travelling to the games and in the stands.

    At the Tokyo Olympics, where Daley was first spotted knitting, he explained its positive impact on his mental health.

    It just turned into my mindfulness, my meditation, my calm and my way to escape the stresses of everyday life and, in particular, going to an Olympics.

    The mental health benefits of knitting are well established. So why is someone famous like Daley knitting in public still so surprising?

    Africa Voice/Shutterstock

    Knitting is gendered

    Knitting is usually associated with women – especially older women – as a hobby done at home. In a large international survey of knitting, 99% of respondents identified as female.

    But the history of yarn crafts and gender is more tangled. In Europe in the middle ages, knitting guilds were exclusive and reserved for men. They were part of a respected Europe-wide trade addressing a demand for knitted products that could not be satisfied by domestic workers alone.

    The industrial revolution made the production of clothed goods cheaper and faster than hand-knitting. Knitting and other needle crafts became a leisure activity for women, done in the private sphere of the home.

    World Wars I and II turned the spotlight back on knitting as a “patriotic duty”, but it was still largely taken up by women.

    During COVID lockdowns, knitting saw another resurgence. But knitting still most often makes headlines when men – especially famous men like Daley or actor Ryan Gosling – do it.

    Men who knit are often seen as subverting the stereotype it’s an activity for older women.

    Knitting the stress away

    Knitting can produce a sense of pride and accomplishment. But for an elite sportsperson like Daley – whose accomplishments already include four gold medals and one silver – its benefits lie elsewhere.

    Olympics-level sport relies on perfect scores and world records. When it comes to knitting, many of the mental health benefits are associated with the process, rather than the end result.

    Daley says knitting is the “one thing” that allows him to switch off completely, describing it as “my therapy”. https://www.youtube.com/embed/6wwXGOki–c?wmode=transparent&start=0

    The Olympian says he could

    knit for hours on end, honestly. There’s something that’s so satisfying to me about just having that rhythm and that little “click-clack” of the knitting needles. There is not a day that goes by where I don’t knit.

    Knitting can create a “flow” state through rhythmic, repetitive movements of the yarn and needle. Flow offers us a balance between challenge, accessibility and a sense of control.

    It’s been shown to have benefits relieving stress in high-pressure jobs beyond elite sport. Among surgeons, knitting has been found to improve wellbeing as well as manual dexterity, crucial to their role.

    For other health professionals – including oncology nurses and mental health workers – knitting has helped to reduce “compassion fatigue” and burnout. Participants described the soothing noise of their knitting needles. They developed and strengthened team bonds through collective knitting practices. https://www.youtube.com/embed/dTTJjD_q2Ik?wmode=transparent&start=0 A Swiss psychiatrist says for those with trauma, knitting yarn can be like “knitting the two halves” of the brain “back together”.

    Another study showed knitting in primary school may boost children’s executive function. That includes the ability to pay attention, remember relevant details and block out distractions.

    As a regular creative practice, it has also been used in the treatment of grief, depression and subduing intrusive thoughts, as well countering chronic pain and cognitive decline.

    Knitting is a community

    The evidence for the benefits of knitting is often based on self-reporting. These studies tend to produce consistent results and involve large population samples.

    This may point to another benefit of knitting: its social aspect.

    Knitting and other yarn crafts can be done alone, and usually require simple materials. But they also provide a chance to socialise by bringing people together around a common interest, which can help reduce loneliness.

    The free needle craft database and social network Ravelry contains more than one million patterns, contributed by users. “Yarn bombing” projects aim to engage the community and beautify public places by covering objects such as benches and stop signs with wool.

    The interest in Daley’s knitting online videos have formed a community of their own.

    In them he shows the process of making the jumper, not just the finished product. That includes where he “went wrong” and had to unwind his work.

    His pride in the finished product – a little bit wonky, but “made with love” – can be a refreshing antidote to the flawless achievements often on display at the Olympics.

    Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University and Gabrielle Weidemann, Associate Professor in Psychological Science, Western Sydney University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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