7 Benefits of Working with Your Hands

Physical Health: Some of the clearest benefits of working with your hands come from how it activates the body. While sitting at a desk in a sedentary state for eight hours a day can cause your metabolism to drop, muscle mass to fall off, and play havoc with blood sugar levels, physical work has the opposite effect. Moving while on your feet burns 50% more calories alone than sitting, while adding in other actions, such as carrying or lifting, even only intermittently, can boost muscle activation and calorie usage.

Keeping Active Good for the Brain: Another of the health benefits of working with hands is how it forces the mind to consider a varying range of factors. Of course, this is also possible in office work, but rarely will the brain have to contemplate physical aspects in 3D, such as how an object will sit when left alone, what the best way to steady a ladder is, or how two or more different parts can come together to make a whole. This joined-up work between the brain and the rest of the body also helps build and maintain synapses and physical necessities for life, such as balance and coordination.

Getting Away from Boredom: The dissatisfaction with white-collar jobs stems from performing repetitive tasks every day with no tangible outcome. After a few years, it can all seem to be blending into one without giving any great feeling of accomplishment other than hoping your numbers this year were better than last. This monotonous drudge of staring at a computer screen for a very large chunk of your life can be avoided by taking on a new kind of work. The benefits of working with your hands are that every day is going to be unique and a different kind of challenge.

More Job Prospects: Though it was drilled into the American psyche for years that going to college was the only way to get ahead, tuition fees have increased 4-fold in the last 30 years, and that might no longer be the case. In fact, the Department of Education has even bemoaned the fact that there are millions of well-paid jobs in professional trades going unfilled because people haven’t pursued blue-collar skills.

Improving Your Sleep: One of the major benefits of working with your hands is how well you sleep. This is not just because you’ve physically expended your energy for the day, but manual work causes the body to release relaxing endorphins while also reducing the stress hormone cortisol. It could also be to do with the fact that manual work often gets started early, keeping you more in tune with your natural circadian rhythm.

Satisfaction of Creativity: Making and fixing things feels good, and there’s just something about building or changing something into a different form with your hands that gives a sense of accomplishment and joy. The results are there for you and everyone else to see, and you can take pride in the work. The benefit of working with your hands over an office job in this respect is the feeling of adding something real to the world rather than just processing or passing on a digital document.