Why Am I Suddenly Desperate to Make Things? (The Creativity Surge Nobody Talks About)

I’m 39 and a half. In the last few years, I have taught myself piano, taken up crochet, started growing my own food, filled my home with houseplants, and most recently, begun painting watercolours — which, as of a couple of months after picking up a brush for the first time, led to me opening an actual Etsy shop.

All I want to do is create and learn new things, and I genuinely could not explain why any of it was happening.

I’ve always been creative. Writing, photography, blogging — that’s been my world for over a decade. But somewhere along the way, the blog became the job. The writing became content. The creativity became deliverables. And at some point, my brain started quietly screaming that it needed something that was just mine. No brief. No SEO. No audience. Just me, a hook and some yarn, or a brush and some paint, with absolutely nothing to prove to anyone.

So I started making things. And I haven’t been able to stop.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you’ve recently found yourself inexplicably drawn to a pottery class, or suddenly desperate to learn to knit, or spending your evenings on YouTube watching someone grow tomatoes — this post is for you. Because it turns out there’s a real reason this happens. And it’s not a midlife crisis. It’s actually something much more interesting.

The Job That Ate the Hobby

I want to start here, because I think this particular version of the creativity surge doesn’t get talked about enough.

For a lot of women, the thing that used to fill their creative tank has now become work. You spent years writing, or designing, or making videos, or taking photos, and it brought you real joy — and then at some point it became your career. Which is brilliant, obviously. But careers come with clients and deadlines and the pressure to perform, and somewhere in that transition, the thing that once felt like freedom starts to feel like an obligation.

When that happens, your brain still needs a creative outlet. It just needs to find a new one.

This is what I think happened to me. The blogging, the writing, the photography — I love it still, genuinely. But it’s also my work. And work-brain and play-brain are different. Play-brain needs somewhere to go. Mine apparently decided it was going to learn piano, and crochet a shawl, and paint flowers, and grow pumpkins.

If you’re a creative professional who’s started feeling oddly drawn to making things with your hands, there’s your answer.

Your Brain Is Actually At Its Creative Peak

Here’s the bit of research that genuinely surprised me: psychologists who study creativity across the lifespan generally find that it peaks in the mid-to-late 30s and early 40s. Not your 20s. Now.

Your brain at this stage is exceptionally good at something called pattern recognition and connection-making — pulling together experiences, ideas, and knowledge you’ve built up over decades and combining them in new ways. It’s why so many writers, artists, and creators produce their most significant work later in their careers, not earlier. The popular idea that creativity is a young person’s game is, scientifically speaking, nonsense.

There’s also something called the midlife creativity surge, which researchers at Psychology Today describe as feeling like a brain that’s “busy and alive.” One woman they interviewed put it as feeling like a storm that seemed to be happening to nearly everyone she knew. That resonated with me a lot.

I have dyslexia, which I’ve written about before. What I’ve come to understand is that dyslexic brains tend to be particularly strong at divergent thinking — making unexpected connections, seeing things from unusual angles, approaching problems creatively. It’s not a coincidence that many of the most creative people across fields are dyslexic. The same wiring that made reading difficult as a child is, quite possibly, part of what makes making things feel so compelling and natural as an adult.

The Psychology Behind the Urge to Create

Psychologist Erik Erikson identified a stage he called generativity — the deep human drive to create something beyond yourself, to leave a mark, to contribute something meaningful. He associated it with midlife, roughly your late 30s onwards. The opposite of generativity, he said, is stagnation: the flat, going-through-the-motions feeling that life has become repetitive and pointless.

Generativity doesn’t just mean having children. It means building, growing, making, nurturing — anything that creates something new in the world or develops a skill over time. Gardening. Painting. Learning an instrument. Making something with your hands that didn’t exist before you made it.

Research bears this out. Creative hobbies pursued consistently — what researchers call “serious leisure” — are directly linked to higher life satisfaction, better mental health, and something called a redemption narrative: the psychological tendency to turn difficult experiences into positive growth. People who engage in creative activities regularly are more likely to frame their lives as stories where things improve, where setbacks lead somewhere better.

That’s not nothing.

What It’s Actually Doing for Your Mental Health

I didn’t start crocheting for my mental health. I started because I met a woman at a hen party who showed me photos of things she’d made, and I went home and ordered a starter kit from Amazon that same night. But the mental health benefits showed up almost immediately, whether I’d planned for them or not.

There’s a state called flow — described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as the feeling of being completely absorbed in something, where time stops, self-consciousness disappears, and you’re just fully present in what you’re doing. He called it the state where we feel most alive.

Creative hobbies are one of the most reliable ways to get there. The right level of challenge (enough to hold your attention, not so much that you’re overwhelmed) combined with something physical and absorbing — watercolour painting, learning a piece on the piano, following a crochet pattern — produces it consistently.

And that flow state isn’t just pleasant. It’s restorative. It gives your brain a proper rest from the relentless decision-making, admin, overthinking, and low-level stress of everyday life in a way that scrolling simply doesn’t.

The Hobbies That Found Me

I want to be real about the timeline here, because I think it helps to hear that this stuff builds gradually rather than all arriving at once.

Piano came first, back in 2019. I started with a teacher, on a cheap piano that eventually became a Kawai upright that I now love unreasonably. I’ve been playing for six years. Some months I barely touch it. Other months I play every day. It ebbs and flows, but it’s mine, and I’ve never regretted it for a single second.

Then came gardening. We moved to the countryside, I suddenly had actual outdoor space, and something in me just needed to grow things. I’ve since grown pumpkins, vegetables, and flowers. I have a whole garden diary on this blog because it turns out I had a lot to say about it.

The plants came next. First, a few indoor plants, then more, then I started propagating them, then I had a full plant collection, a propagation station and a borderline problem (my husband’s words, not mine). There is something deeply satisfying about keeping a living thing alive and watching it grow. It turns out keeping something alive — even a fishbone prayer plant with very particular feelings about water — is good for the soul.

Crochet arrived at 39, after that hen party. Within three weeks, I had made granny squares, hats, a headband and a shawl. I don’t know what happened — something clicked, and I was off. I am now crocheting a top for myself. I wrote about how to get started here if you’re curious. I have tried to knit but I just can’t get it to click the same way!

Watercolour painting started in January of this year, and that one really surprised me. I picked up a £25 starter kit with zero expectations. By the end of the first week, I was painting flowers I was actually pleased with. Within a couple of months I had opened A Little Painted Hello — a shop selling hand-painted cards on Etsy. I started painting because I wanted to make thoughtful birthday cards for people. I didn’t expect it to turn into anything more than that.

Not one of these things has failed to stick (well, apart from a brief affair with some knitting needles). Every single one of them has brought me something.

So What Does This Mean For You?

If you’re reading this and recognising yourself in it — the vague pull towards making something, the sense that something is missing even though life is objectively fine, the inexplicable interest in a hobby you’ve never tried before — that’s not random.

Dr Connie Zweig, a psychologist who writes about midlife transition, puts it well: in moments of transition, the barriers to connecting with your creative self grow thinner, and the call to create grows stronger.

You don’t have to be “a creative person” for this to apply to you. You don’t have to have been arty at school, or musical, or good at making things. That’s not what this is about. Creativity isn’t a fixed trait you either have or don’t. It’s something the brain does naturally when you give it the space and the raw materials.

The question isn’t whether you’re creative enough to start something. It’s whether you’re going to give yourself permission to try.

I started crochet at 39 with a cheap Amazon kit. I started painting watercolours with absolutely no idea what I was doing. I started piano as a complete beginner in my mid-thirties. None of it required talent. All of it required only the decision to begin.

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Where To Start (If You’re Ready To)

In this series, I’m writing honestly about each of the things I’ve taken up — what it was like to start, what surprised me, what it’s actually done for my brain and my days. If something in this post has sparked something, here’s where to go next:

• I Taught Myself to Crochet at 39 — Here’s What I Wish I’d Known
• How To Start Watercolour Painting (My First Week)
• My Watercolour Palette Setup
• My Plant Collection 2025

And if you want to see the watercolour cards I’ve been making, you can find them at A Little Painted Hello.

Whatever it is that’s been quietly pulling at you lately — the pottery class you keep looking at, the instrument you’ve always wanted to learn, the garden you keep thinking you’d like to start — I genuinely think you should do it.

Your brain is ready. It’s been waiting.