Although anxiety may rear its head in our household, never did the fidget spinner craze of 2017 resonate, nor the squish ball era of last year. That said, it remains increasingly relevant that many a grown up and child alike need something to hold onto in search of a little calm.
Anxiety - the palpable feeling of unease in the body, is so often misunderstood amongst families. For many, its always been the norm in their household, and no one had the tools to identify it as something that can be overcome with any number of modern tricks (aka: presence). I recall being introduced to the world of mindfulness with a dear friend and how that opened up a world of awareness that was previously curtained under a guise of regular old coping. But alas, in our modern world, we now grow up with insights that allow us to shift away from patterns that encourage anxiety to fester and instead are able to raise a new generation with so many more tools.
As the science of neuroaesthetics catches up to what designers have long suspected - that the spaces and objects we surround ourselves with shape how we feel - even the humble fidget toy is finding its place. What once sat in the novelty drawer is being reconsidered as something more useful: a small, legitimate tool for emotional regulation, sitting pretty at the intersection of considered decor and mental health.
What's actually happening when you fidget
The mechanism is unglamorous and well-understood. Repetitive tactile stimulation - the kind your thumb makes when it traces a smooth surface - activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Remind me what this is, you say? This is the branch of your autonomic nervous system responsible for what physiologists call rest and digest: the opposite of fight-or-flight.
In practical terms: your heart rate slows. Your breathing deepens slightly. The intrusive cognitive loop - the thing your mind was doing two minutes ago, replaying an email or rehearsing a difficult conversation - loosens its grip.
This is why grounding techniques also work. The 5-4-3-2-1 exercise that therapists teach - name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste - is a structured way of doing what a worry stone does in one motion: pulling attention out of the spiraling mind and back into the sensing body.
A good fidget object is another option, a grounding technique made tangible.
The worry stone, briefly
We have always loved stone. The shapes handcarved by DAR are part of a very old lineage of stone carving. Smooth, palm-sized stones with a thumb indentation - variously called worry stones, palm stones, thumb stones, soothing stones - appear across cultures and centuries. Beads to be worn, from Greek komboloi beads to Tibetan prayer practices to the polished pocket stones carried, have long moved about the world with simple and wise people who have occupied just enough of the nervous system with these tools to interrupt anxiety.
In Peru, the relationship between stone and person run deeper than self-soothing; it has always sat within a worldview in which stones were never considered inert. The Andean cosmology sees stones as powerful, evocative living agents that hold relationship with the landscape. Ancient traditions from pre-Inkan cultures of Peru create small stone carved animated elements that are given back to the earth as living offerings, stones carrying energy as actual sentient agents that hold space (more on this rich history in our next post on the Intiraymi solstice festival). These stone objects were small enough to hold, often inherited across generations, and considered to remain alive, reflecting the deep link between stone and something grander than our daily worries.
Why the object you choose matters
Back to that fidget spinner, a disservice to the actual therapeutic objective of its function. Though this, pop-its, squish balls, clickers all technically work, in the narrow sense that your hand is doing something that takes your mind away from itself, the experience falls short of generating a direct shift in the nervous system in the way that natural materials can.
The aesthetic connection of playing with something beautiful matters more than it sounds. The nervous system, as the neuroaesthetics research we wrote about [earlier this week] makes clear, is constantly processing the objects in your environment for information. A cheap, petroleum-based object communicates something about the moment you are in. A considered one communicates something else. Both are real signals. The body responds to both. Which moment do you want more of ?
The stones we make in Pacasmayo were not designed as fidget objects. They were designed as objects - proportioned for the hand, finished by people who have spent years listening to the stone. That they function, for many of the people who own them, as anxiety tools is something we noticed slowly, through how customers described them. The most common feedback has been that ‘I keep it on my desk and reach for it before calls.’ None of these people had set out to buy a fidget object. They had bought something beautiful, and the beauty turned out to be functional.
We think this is the right order of operations. Wellness describes an outcome, not a discipline; objects designed to it tend to confuse the two. An object designed as a considered piece of material culture, which happens to do what wellness objects do, makes no such request. It simply integrates into a life, and the body responds.
It is, in the most literal sense, a calming presence rather than a calming product.
A small practice for the week ahead
If you'd like to try something this week, here it is. Take something natural and pleasing to hold - a stone, a piece of sea glass, a smooth coin, a wooden bead - and find a moment once a day for the rest of the week:
Hold it in your dominant hand. Rest your thumb on the smoothest surface and begin moving it in a slow, even motion across the surface - not absently, but with some simple rhythm. You may notice things like its initial temperature (and does it warm up?), the constant weight, the variation in texture as you move from one part to another. Add breath, maybe 3 in and 4 out, try 6 in and 8 out. Continue for at least a nice long minute, or until the next thing you have to do begins.
This is not a meditation practice, but instead a small way of educating your nervous system that there is, available to it at any moment, an off-ramp from whichever loop it has gotten stuck in.
You may find, as we have, that the right object makes it easier to bring the attention where you want it to be.
This concludes our two-part series for Mental Health Awareness Month. If you are struggling with anxiety or your mental health more broadly, fidget objects are tools, not treatments. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and SAMHSA's 988 lifeline are good places to start. Mental Health America's 2026 theme — More Good Days, Together — is a reminder that the work of building a good day is, often, a collective one.
If you'd like to see the stones we make, shop our shop . If you'd prefer to make your own practice with an object you already own, that works too.
Further reading
On neuroaesthetics - Magsamen, S., & Ross, I. (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Random House.
On fidget objects and adults with ADHD - (one of the few peer-reviewed studies focused specifically on adults rather than children) Coyne, A. et al. (2025). Impact of fidget devices on anxiety and physiological responses in adults with ADHD. Research in Developmental Disabilities. link
On grounding and the parasympathetic nervous system - Fincham, G. W., Strauss, C., Montero-Marin, J., & Cavanagh, K. (2023). Effect of breathwork on stress and mental health: A meta-analysis of randomised-controlled trials. Scientific Reports.
On the cultural history of the worry stone and worry bead - Evangelinos, A. (1998). The Komboloi and Its History. Komboloi Museum, Nafplion, Greece.
On Andean stone traditions and animism - Allen, C. J. (2016). Miniatures and Animism: The Communicative Role of Inka Carved Stone Conopa. Journal of Anthropological Research, 72(4).