Stitching My Focus Back Together: How Crochet Saved My Reading Life

I picked up a hook to make a scarf, but I ended up fixing my attention span.

For the last few years, my relationship with reading has been… complicated.

I used to be the person who could inhale a 500-page novel in a weekend. But recently? I’ve become the person who reads the same paragraph four times, realizes I absorbed none of it, and then instinctively reaches for my phone to scroll through social media. My brain felt fragmented, constantly jumping to the next distraction. I wanted to read, but I just couldn’t stay in the book.

Then, on a whim, I picked up a crochet hook.

I didn’t expect much—maybe a lopsided scarf or two. But as I spent my evenings counting stitches and wrestling with yarn tension, I noticed something shifting. The quiet, repetitive focus required to turn string into fabric was training my brain to slow down.

Surprisingly, the more I crocheted, the better I got at reading again. It turns out that working with yarn is the perfect physical therapy for a distracted mind. Here are the top three ways crocheting helped me rebuild my reading skills.