What I Gave Up — And What I Crocheted Instead

There’s a version of me from three years ago who would have laughed at this post. She was busy, caffeinated, perpetually behind on emails, and absolutely certain that a hobby involving a small hook and a ball of yarn was not for her. She had things to do. Meetings to prep for. A Netflix queue that wasn’t going to watch itself.

That version of me did not own a single skein of yarn. She had never heard the word “amigurumi.” She thought “frogging” was something that happened in a pond.

And then one slow Sunday in February, when the sky was the particular shade of gray that makes the indoors feel both cozy and suffocating, something shifted. I picked up a crochet hook for the first time, watched a beginner tutorial on YouTube, and produced something that looked vaguely like a rectangle — if the rectangle had anxiety.

It wasn’t pretty. But I was hooked. (Pun completely intended, and I will never apologize for it.)

What followed wasn’t just learning a new craft. It was a slow and genuinely surprising reorganization of how I spend my time, what I reach for when I’m stressed, and what I actually get out of the hours I used to consider “off” time. I gave up a lot to make room for crochet. Some of those things I barely miss. Some I had to grieve a little. And in exchange, I got something I didn’t expect to value as much as I do.

This is that story.

I Gave Up Doom-Scrolling. I Crocheted a Blanket.

Let’s start with the obvious one, because it’s probably the one you already suspected.

Before crochet entered my life, I was a committed and enthusiastic doom-scroller. Morning coffee? Paired with forty-five minutes of Twitter discourse I would have been genuinely better off not consuming. Evenings on the couch? Phone in hand, thumb moving in that hypnotic upward flick, absorbing an endless stream of content that was neither relaxing nor genuinely interesting but somehow impossible to stop.

I wasn’t unusual in this. Research consistently shows that the average person spends well over two hours a day on social media, much of it in a kind of passive, low-engagement consumption that doesn’t feel good while we’re doing it and doesn’t leave us feeling better afterward. We know this. We still do it. Because the alternative — being alone with our own thoughts, sitting in silence, not being stimulated — feels weirdly uncomfortable.

Crochet solved this problem in a sideways sort of way. When both hands are occupied with a hook and yarn, the phone stays on the table. This is not a discipline thing. This is a logistics thing. I cannot scroll and work a stitch count at the same time without dropping stitches, and dropped stitches mean frogging back several rows, and frogging back several rows is its own special kind of misery. So the phone stays down.

The first project I made during what would have been scrolling time was a chunky throw blanket in a dusty sage green. It took me three months. It now lives on the back of my couch, and every time I pull it over my lap, I feel something I can only describe as a quiet smugness. Three months of would-have-been-wasted evenings, transformed into something warm and real.

I Gave Up Expensive Stress Purchases. I Crocheted a Hat.

Here is a pattern I identified in myself somewhere around my mid-twenties: when I was stressed, I bought things. Not big things. Little things. A new candle. A book I never read. A piece of clothing I didn’t need in a color that seemed appealing at 11pm but less so in daylight. Online checkout was my emotional regulation strategy, and it was costing me, conservatively, way too much money a month.

The psychology behind this is well-documented. Retail therapy provides a brief dopamine hit — the anticipation of an item arriving, the novelty of something new. But it’s a borrowed feeling. The package arrives, the novelty fades in about forty-eight hours, and the underlying stress has not moved an inch. It just has more company now, in the form of another thing shoved into an already full drawer.

Crochet gave me something retail therapy was trying to provide but never quite managed: a genuine sense of creation, progress, and tangible reward for effort.

When I’m stressed now, my hands reach for yarn instead of a phone. There’s something about the repetitive motion — the pull, loop, and draw through that makes up the basic crochet stitch — that is measurably calming. Neurologically speaking, repetitive hand movements have been shown to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the one responsible for rest and digestion and generally lowering your blood pressure. Knitters, crocheters, and weavers have been reporting this for centuries. Science is just now catching up.

I still occasionally buy yarn I don’t need. I want to be fully honest with you. But the yarn at least becomes something. The candle from the stress-buy era did not.

I Gave Up “I’m Not Creative.” I Crocheted a Sweater.

For most of my adult life, I had quietly filed myself under “not a creative person.” This felt like a neutral fact rather than a judgment. Some people are creative. They paint, they write poetry, they make things with their hands. I analyzed spreadsheets and made excellent playlists and once assembled IKEA furniture without consulting the instructions, but I did not consider these to be acts of creativity.

Crochet dismantled this story fairly efficiently.

The first time I modified a pattern — changed the color sequence, added length to the body, swapped a standard neckline for something that would actually fit my proportions — I felt something that took me a moment to identify. It was the particular satisfaction of having made a decision and having it work out. Of having looked at a set of instructions and thought, I know better for this specific situation, and having been right.

That is a creative act. A small one, maybe. But a real one.

By the time I attempted my first sweater — a top-down raglan in a soft heathered gray that I wore approximately thirty times in its first winter — I had stopped thinking of myself as someone who doesn’t make things. I make things. I make things frequently. Some of them are slightly uneven or have a seam that doesn’t lie quite flat, but they exist in the world in a way they wouldn’t if I hadn’t made them.

There’s a term in the crafting world: “handmade with love,” and I used to find it a little cloying. Now I understand it. The sweater contains decisions I made. It contains about forty hours of my evenings. It contains the particular memory of sitting by a window in October, watching the leaves turn, finding the rhythm of a stitch pattern and settling into it like a groove. When I wear it, all of that comes with it. That is not nothing.

I Gave Up Passive Watching. I Crocheted While Watching Better Things.

I want to be clear: I didn’t give up television entirely. I’m not a monk. I gave up passive, unintentional television — the kind where you’re watching something purely because it’s on and the alternative requires choosing, and choosing requires energy, and energy is in short supply.

Crochet made my TV habits more intentional by accident. When I sit down to crochet in the evenings, I need something to watch or listen to, but it has to be something that doesn’t require my full visual attention. This rules out subtitled films, dense plot-driven dramas where missing thirty seconds means losing the thread, and anything with a lot of visual information happening quickly. What it opened up: long documentary series, podcasts, audiobooks, comfort rewatches of shows I already know well, and conversation-heavy dramas where the dialogue carries the story.

I have listened to more books in the past two years than I had in the decade before. This is not hyperbole. Audible became one of my best investments once I had something to do with my hands during the listening. Narratives I would never have sat still for — long historical fiction, multi-volume fantasy series, literary novels that reward patience — became deeply enjoyable because the crochet kept my restless-brain occupied just enough to let the story in.

There’s something philosophically interesting here about attention. We often think of focus as a resource that gets spent on one thing at a time. But for many people, there’s a kind of unfocused, restless attention that doesn’t serve anything well — the attention that makes us flip channels, pick up the phone, abandon one thing for another. Crochet seems to occupy that layer specifically. My hands get what they need, the restless layer quiets down, and the part of me that can actually follow a story gets to come forward.

I Gave Up Going It Alone. I Crocheted My Way into a Community.

This one surprised me more than any of the others.

I am, by nature, fairly introverted. I like people, but I recharge in solitude. Group activities have always required a certain amount of activation energy. So it didn’t occur to me that picking up a solitary craft — something done alone on a couch — would lead to a more connected social life.

But the internet crochet community is vast, warm, and genuinely welcoming in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Ravelry, Instagram, Reddit’s r/crochet, YouTube tutorial channels with comment sections that feel like a neighborhood — these are spaces where people share projects, answer questions, encourage beginners, and celebrate each other’s work with an enthusiasm that feels almost radical in how sincere it is. Nobody is competing. Everybody is just making things and showing them to each other.

I’ve had strangers on the internet troubleshoot my tension issues with the patience of a saint. I’ve been genuinely moved by someone sharing that they crocheted a stuffed animal for their child who was sick in the hospital. I’ve left encouraging comments on the first scarves of absolute beginners and felt disproportionately happy when they come back a month later to show their second project.

I also joined a local craft night at a library branch near my apartment, which I walked into alone feeling approximately like a first-day-of-school kind of awkward, and which I now look forward to every week. The table is made up of knitters, crocheters, one embroiderer with very strong opinions about thread count, and a woman who is learning to spin her own fiber from scratch. We talk about our projects and also about our lives. It’s one of my favorite hours of the week.

Making things with your hands, it turns out, is a very good conversation starter. Sharing that making with other people is something better still.

I Gave Up Finished Things Being “Good Enough to Share.” I Crocheted Gifts.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being embarrassed about giving people things I’d made.

This took a while. Early on, handmade gifts felt presumptuous in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. Like, who was I to give someone something imperfect and handmade when a gift card was right there, being perfect and exactly the right amount? I worried it would feel like I was centering my own hobby in their birthday.

But then I gave my mother a crocheted cardigan for the holidays. She cried. Not in a polite, trying-to-be-kind way — in a real way, tracing the stitches with her fingers and asking how long it took, wanting to understand the thing that I had made specifically for her in her specific size in her specific favorite color. She has worn it more times than I can count. She sends me pictures of herself in it.

No gift card has ever gotten a picture.

Handmade gifts are unusual now. We live in a world of two-day shipping and perfectly-matched preferences tracked by algorithms. Something made by hand, sized to the person, chosen in colors they love, finished at midnight because you wanted it to be done by a certain date — that communicates something that can’t be approximated by commerce. It says: I thought about you, specifically, for a long time. My hands did this work. It is for you.

Not everyone will receive a handmade gift with the same recognition. That’s real. But the making of it, regardless of reception, has its own reward. There is something deeply human about making a thing for another person with the intention that it should keep them warm.

What Crochet Actually Gave Me

If I’m being honest, the things I gave up weren’t really things I wanted. The doom-scrolling wasn’t making me happy. The stress purchases weren’t solving anything. The passive watching wasn’t restoring me. The story about not being creative was a limitation I’d accepted too early and held onto too long.

Crochet didn’t just replace bad habits with better ones, though it did that too. What it did more fundamentally was give me a relationship with my own time that feels like it has more meaning. An evening with crochet is an evening I can point to. That blanket: those were Tuesday nights in autumn. That sweater: that was the month I was anxious about a work transition and needed something my hands could do while my mind sorted through it. That little stuffed rabbit I made for my friend’s daughter: that was made from love, in the most literal sense I have ever used that word.

There is a thing that happens at the end of a long crochet session that I didn’t know to look for before I started. Your hands are a little tired, in a good way. Something exists that didn’t exist before you sat down. It is small, or large, or in-between — but it is real and textile and specific. You made it.

I gave up a lot of time I was wasting without knowing I was wasting it.

I crocheted things that exist in the world now, that keep people warm, that I wear on cold mornings, that sit on the back of a couch in sage green and remind me what a slow February Sunday turned into.

That seems like a pretty good trade to me.