Self-Care Exercise: Crochet as Part of Your Sleep Routine
Self-Care Exercise: Crochet as Part of Your Sleep Routine
Six-step daily crochet exercise with tips and ideas for self-improvement around issues of insomnia
As the title indicates, there aer one hundred original crochet-for-self-improvement exercises in my book Hook to Heal!: 100 Crochet Exercises For Health, Growth, Connection, Inspiration and Honoring Your Inner Artist. I wanted to share one of those here with you today.
The exercise: Make crochet a regular part of your nighttime ritual for good sleep.
Lack of good sleep causes / exacerbates a significant number of mood, mental health and physical health issues. Use crochet to help you improve your sleep hygiene.
Purpose:
Sleep hygiene is a term coined in recent years to describe the healthy habits we must engage in to get enough good quality sleep. It is a term that we need because a significant number of us aren’t getting enough sleep and/ or good enough sleep. Developing proper relaxing rituals at night can significantly improve sleep. Crochet, a calming and relaxing activity, can be one key part of your regular nighttime sleep routine.
Exercise steps:
Choose a simple, relaxing, long-term crochet project that you will work on a little bit each night before bed. Large blankets like granny rectangles, ripple blankets and repeating v-stitch blankets are a great choice.
Complete your normal before-bed activities, such as brushing your teeth, before you start your project.
Turn off all distractions, such as television. You might find that light music is good. Make sure that your home is a cool, but not cold, temperature. Light a candle. Turn other lights down, leaving enough on to work on your crochet but as few on as possible to create a low-light area for rest.
Settle into a comfortable position in a cozy place that is not your bed (unless you are bed-bound by illness of course). Good sleep hygiene says that your bed should be only for sleeping, not crafting or other activities. A chair in the bedroom is a great choice.
Work on your crochet project until you get sleepy enough that you think that you will be able to fall asleep. Eventually, your body should adjust to a specific cycle and you’ll find that you’re always working on your crochet for the same time (half an hour or an hour, perhaps) before you go to bed. Note that this is a great time to work on meditative crochet and crochet with affirmations.
Calmly and quietly set your work aside. You don’t want to disrupt your body too much before you go to bed so put the work in a project bag near your craft space so that you can resume it again the following night.
Bonus Tips:
Do what works for you in terms of your setting. The standard rules of not crafting in bed and keeping the TV off are good tips and worth at least trying as you establish a new sleep routine but you may find that they aren’t right for you and adjust accordingly. I personally always fall asleep to TV; it’s what works for me regardless of what the sleep hygiene “rules” are.
Try a light-up crochet hook to see if it works well for you. This allows you to see your stitches in the dark, which means that you can create a fairly dark space as you get ready for bed each night.
Some people (like myself!) have very little trouble falling asleep but struggle with insomnia that wakes them up in the middle of the night or they have early morning wakefulness. In some cases, staying in bed and crocheting for a very short period of time can help you relax enough to go back to sleep. If you find that you are still awake after twenty minutes, get up, make yourself a cup of soothing tea and crochet in your craft area before going back to bed.
Make sure that you engage in other good sleep hygiene habits throughout the day to promote healthy sleep. Some of these include eating right (limiting caffeine, for example), getting enough natural light and exercise and taking your medications properly.
Taking it further:
One great way to go further with this exercise is to crochet yourself items that you can use to improve your sleep hygiene. One terrific project is to crochet a sleep mask that you can put on when you lie down to block out the rest of the light. Some other helpful sleep items to crochet include:
Cozy pillows that you love
A stuffed animal to take to bed with you
Cozies for your phones and laptops to keep them out of sight at night
Cozies for candle holders in your craft space
Crochet basket or bag to keep your project in at night
Scented sachets to keep by the bed; lavender is great for sleep
This is perfect. I am a crocheter and love the quiet rhythm
Crochet in bed, last thing, brings me more peace than reading. It's a reflective moment, and something almost like doing the rosary or chanting - repetition, mental space to stray and return, slowing of breath and heart. Crochet first thing, in bed with a cup of tea, brings a similar reflective and pre-verbal moment to the start of the day. Absolutely a practice to try.