Depression, like other psychological disorders, doesn’t simply germinate from an unfortunate seed that blows into one’s genetic landscape.
With rare exception, psychological disorders are forged of biological, psychological, and social ingredients (e.g. Sampogna et al, 2024), and psychiatric medication alone isn’t a silver bullet.
As a teenager struggling with OCD, social anxiety, and depression, I took to making fishing flies, especially like the Victorian-era Atlantic salmon fly in the photo at left, to keep myself distracted from the intrusive thoughts—and occupied, given I wasn’t socializing much.
It did the trick. While tying, my mind was at ease, and when I wasn’t tying, I had something to look forward to. Further, I felt satisfaction at the results of the creative process, providing me some semblance of self-esteem.
Until reading the research of neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, I thought the cure lay simply in having something constructively distracting and the whole satisfaction in creation phenomenon, not fine motor activity itself.
The fine motor activity factor
Lambert wrote that in the late 1990’s,when she was a researcher at Johns Hopkins, she learned that people who lived through two world wars and the Great Depression reported fewer incidents of depression than those in younger generations.
She was stumped, so she began a research project. The results led to a 2008 book, Lifting Depression, and an article in Scientific American called “Depressingly Easy” later that year. The latter title foreshadows the research results. Lambert wrote that the conveniences of modern life (a social factor) are depriving people of engaging their effort-driven rewards circuitry (biological), contributing to more depressive states.
Anyone familiar with depression knows that the fatigue, cognitive troubles, and dysphoric feelings it brings on can easily lead to negative thinking (psychological), which in turn compounds lack of motivation, etc., reducing the fine motor activity or any activity and keeping the cycle in motion.
Lambert described being struck by how modern conveniences meant people were much less active. This didn’t relate just to exercise like walking to school or biking to work: Seemingly small daily tasks like churning butter, sewing, harvesting the garden, and washing clothes on a board, which added up to a lot of activity at the end of the day, are no longer part of our daily routine. “Did we lose something vital to our mental health when we started pushing buttons instead of plowing fields?” she asked, and offered her opinion that, “From a neuroanatomical point of view, I believe the answer is an emphatic yes.”
The role of effort-driven rewards circuitry
Lambert tells us, “Our brains are programmed to derive a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure when our physical effort produces something tangible, visible, and—this fact is extremely important—meaningful in gaining the resources necessary for our survival.”
She named this the “effort-driven rewards circuitry.” It consists of the nucleus accumbens, or pleasure center; the striatum, or motor activity control area; and the prefrontal cortex, which manages our thinking. This increased perception of control over our environment leading to consistent positive emotions might be thought of as also being a natural repellent for any depression or anxiety that might be more genetic or environmental from acutely settling in.
Clearly, this is a cycle of complex movements coupled with intricate thought processes. In a nutshell, it makes sense that we evolved a system that provides psychological rewards for the engagement of fine motor skills used for meaningful tasks, originally meant to keep us alive. In fact, our hands and fine motor skills are so important, about a third of the motor cortex is dedicated to their functioning.
Even more interesting, Lambert wrote, the anticipation of the rewarding activity creates more action in the pleasure center than achieving the task. It might be thought of as an inborn motivator to do the necessary things.
Combating the convenience fallout
We might not need fine motor skills as much for activities of daily living today, but that doesn’t mean we are not still wired for it, or that they shouldn’t be used for maximum well-being. Unless you’re, say, a fine artist, tradesman, surgeon, or dedicated fly tier, chances are your daily work involves sedentary activity in front of a screen, which, while involving lots of finger motions, is more of repetitive reach-and-tap, and does not involve a variety of more complex maneuvers as the aforementioned activities do.
So, when I’m tying flies or someone is sculpting or you’re preparing meal ingredients, the variety of fine motor activity is producing something useful and meaningful and engaging the effort-driven rewards circuitry. In turn, such action, Lambert notes, encourages the secretion of neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin that help with maintain a positive mood. In the meantime, neural connections are strengthened and reinforced as new brain cells are believed to be produced, which is correlated to recovering from negative emotions like depression.
As I wrote about in my earlier posts, Mental Illness Isn’t Just About Chemical Imbalances and 2 Things Not to Say to Someone who is Depressed, Lambert’s research is another example that depression is not always about neurochemistry or unsettling life events. This is of course not to say that learning to the play the piano will magically resolve deep-seated emotional complications, but it is reasonable to believe it can be an effective adjunctive activity.
If nothing else, it seems that increasing fine-motor activity contributes to emotional resilience—and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.