Get in touch with your inner artist! Reduce stress with painting and drawing.

While appreciating art is a worthy pursuit, making art — drawing, painting, sculpting and the like — has pretty beautiful health benefits too. You don’t have to call yourself an artist to make art and to benefit from it. “When you immerse yourself in the act of creating something, common thoughts and worries fall away, and you enter a state known as ‘flow,’” notes Melissa Young, MD, integrative medicine specialist at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Integrative Medicine. Finding your “flow” may sound a little far-out, but it’s the subject of considerable research and has been linked to happiness and success. 

It doesn’t matter whether you think you are talented or not.

Do it for yourself because you enjoy it, and with lessons and practice, your hidden talents will blossom.

Do it because creating art is a wonderful way to stimulate your brain, improve your well-being, and possibly get healthier!

Hanging your latest work of art on the wall can instill you with the same feeling.

Art reduces stress. Painting, sculpting, drawing, and photography are relaxing and rewarding hobbies that can lower your stress levels and lead to an overall improvement in well-being.

Art enhances cognitive abilities and memory, even for people with serious brain conditions.

Dr. Arnold Bresky is a physician who has created a program he calls the “Brain Tune Up” that utilizes art for patients that have Alzheimer’s and dementia.

He has seen a 70% success rate in improvement of his patients’ memories.

He believes that by drawing and painting, they are connecting the right and left hemispheres of the brain and growing new brain cells.
Art & Healing: Can Art Be Medicine?
Besides helping patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s, creating art has successfully helped people with anxiety, depression, PTSD, chronic pain, cancer, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder, and other serious health condition

Mental Health Benefits of Art Are for Everyone

By Dean Alban

Creating art is a very effective way to stimulate the brain and anyone can do it. 
Learn the many benefits of art and why it’s so helpful for mental health.

There’s a huge misconception about art and artists.

Most people believe that you are born with talent or not, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

While we can’t all be Van Goghs, the desire to create, along with proper instruction, can take a person of modest talent a long way towards creating art.

The Brain Benefits of Art are some of the best ways that picking up your paint brush can benefit your brain and mental health.

Art stimulates the imagination. If you consider yourself a right-brained (artistic) person, you can enhance creative skills you already possess.

If you think of yourself as left-brained (analytical), creating art will stimulate your creativity and imagination.

Harness the power of the subconscious for self-improvement

While this view of personality typing (or stereotyping!) can be a handy short-cut for identifying your strengths and talents, in fact this is outdated thinking.
Art makes you more observant.
Leonardo da Vinci said, “Painting embraces all the ten functions of the eye; that is to say, darkness, light, body and color, shape and location, distance and closeness, motion and rest.”

Creating art helps you learn to “see” by concentrating on detail and paying more attention to your environment.

Art enhances problem-solving skills. Unlike math, there is no one correct answer in art.

Art encourages out-of-the-box thinking and lets you come up with your own unique solution.

Art boosts self-esteem and provides a sense of accomplishment. We stick our kids’ artwork on the fridge to boost their self-esteem.