Your Better Health
“Expressive art therapy integrates all of the arts in a safe, non-judgmental setting to facilitate personal growth and healing. To use the arts expressively means going into our inner realms to discover feelings and to express them through visual art, movement, sound, writing or drama. This process fosters release, self-understanding, insight and awakens creativity and transpersonal states of consciousness.”
Natalie Rogers
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The title of a recent documentary film, I Remember Better When I Paint, sums up the findings of a growing body of research into the cognitive effects of making art. The movie demonstrates how drawing and painting stimulated memories in people with dementia and enabled them to reconnect with the world. People with dementia aren't the only beneficiaries. Studies have shown that expressing themselves through art can help people with depression, anxiety, or cancer, too. And doing so has been linked to improved memory, reasoning, and resilience in healthy older people.
The beneficial effects of creating aren't dependent on a person's skill or talents. ...READ MORE
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Some pursue creative activities as a hobby and some do it for a living, but no matter what road we’ve taken to unleash our imaginations and need for free self-expression, it’s pretty clear that making things is part and parcel of being human.
We have been creating since prehistoric times: more than 39,900 years ago, our ancestors left some of their first marks — the outlines of their hands and crude drawings of animals — on the walls of caves. ...READ MORE
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Over the past decade, health psychologists have cautiously begun looking at how the arts might be used in a variety of ways to heal emotional injuries, increase understanding of oneself and others, develop a capacity for self-reflection, reduce symptoms, and alter behaviors and thinking patterns.8 Given the ubiquity of creative expression, as well as the relative ease of engagement, the extent to which psychological and physiological effects are sustainably health enhancing is an important area for public health investigation. ...READ MORE
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Activities like painting, sculpting, drawing, and photography are relaxing and rewarding hobbies that can lower your stress level and leave you feeling mentally clear and calm.
Creating art provides a distraction, giving your brain a break from your usual thoughts.
The average person has roughly 60,000 thoughts per day and 90% of them are exactly the same, day in and day out! (1)
When you are totally immersed in a creative endeavor, you may find yourself in what’s known as “the zone” or a state of “flow.”
This meditative-like state focuses your mind and temporarily pushes aside all your worries.