Grannycore can be the Secret to Your Success

As we age, brain health becomes more important than ever. Senior moments, lost car keys, and forgotten words trigger worries about our brain health. But the latest trend, according to Eventbrite, for Gen Z is grannycore. And we believe every senior living marketing team should be embracing grannycore. Why? Because neuroscience studies have demonstrated a link between certain tactile pastimes and preserving our brain health. Your audience is already focused on their physical health, so this is a natural extension of that interest. 

Hands-on Brain Health

For those who’ve missed it, grannycore refers to hobbies popular among, you guessed it, the senior set. We’re talking knitting, sewing, and even playing mahjong among other old-fashioned hobbies. We’re not talking about solving puzzles, helps brains in a different way. For Gen Z, grannycore offers a way to leave the digital space behind and to focus on something in the moment. It’s also a new way for them to socialize in person. For senior living marketers, it’s a way to connect to their audience in a meaningful and beneficial way.

A July 2025 National Geographic article noted recent studies suggest slow, tactile tasks, like knitting,  activate our brain systems in a way that supports long-term cognitive health. These tasks engage our memory, require our attention and motor function, and help to regulate stress. (Unless you have to frog a full row or 10 of your knitting. Just saying!) But to enjoy this cognitive health benefit, it needs to be a skill for a hands-on hobby you haven’t mastered according to Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Harvard Medical School professor of neurology.

Learning an unfamiliar skill, like whittling or pottery, offers your brain a neurological boost because the act of learning something new forges new pathways in the brain. Learning requires time and repetition of motion, ideally with both hands. There is a challenge-to-mastery arc that helps maintain your brain’s neural plasticity. But here’s the catch: you must continually challenge your brain by learning new skill sets once you’ve mastered (or abandoned – hey, we’re a judgement-free zone) the first one. So, if you’ve been quilting for years, continuing to do so will bring joy, but it won’t keep improving your brain health.

In-House Expertise

Now, most communities, if any, have an in-house neuroscientist, who can walk your audience through the science that creative hobbies offer as low-stakes cognitive training. But you do have plenty of experts living in your community who can speak directly to the benefits of learning a specific tactile hobby. Science recognizes that fine motor coordination, creative planning, sequencing, problem solving, and rhythmic bilateral movement engage different brain systems simultaneously. But your experts can demonstrate the precise fine motor actions it takes to knit and purl. It’s a gender neutral hobby, just ask Tom Daley, the Olympian who knit a sweater while participating in the Paris games. They can talk about how they create their own patterns or choose wood or yarn. They can show each step involved in creating something, detailing how they solved problems that they faced in the course of the work. Each one can speak to what it feels like when they’re in the zone of mastery, where fingers know what to do, choices seem obvious, and time flies. In other words, their stress levels go down, they have improved focus, and they’re socially interacting with their quilting group or woodworking friends. 

Action instead of Passivity

Translating this concept into a non-traditional lunch-and-learn event might seem daunting. You might have noticed we haven’t been talking about photography or bird watching or even book clubs. All easy sources of in-house experts who have mastered a specific learning curve. But it’s important that the grannycore hobby is a new one for your audience. So where to find your in-house experts? Well, a customized MicroModelling Report has a host of psycho-social demographics to help guide you. Dive into the report, and you’ll see at least one grannycore hobby listed. Then a quick review of your files, and you’ve discovered who to tap. 

For instance, if bird watching is highly favored, then focus on sculpting birds in clay as the event. Reading books high on their list? Let’s offer a beginners’ class on creating a 3D version of their favorite hero or villain. You get the idea. Simple supplies, a room arranged so everyone becomes a part of the group, finger food to avoid a mess, and you’ve created an event that delivers helpful information, a fun activity, and an impression of a terrific community. You’ve created a memory.