Health and Wellness
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.
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 stressPainting, 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 
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Mental Health Benefits of Art Are for Everyone By Deane 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 skillsUnlike 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 accomplishmentWe stick our kids’ artwork on the fridge to boost their self-esteem. |
Make More Art: The Health Benefits of Creativity By JAMES CLEAR | CREATIVITY, HEALTHY HABITS
In 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published a review titled, The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health.
In that article, researchers analyzed more than 100 studies about the impact of art on your health and your ability to heal yourself. The studies included everything from music and writing to dance and the visual arts.
As an example, here are the findings from five visual arts studies mentioned in that review (visual arts includes things like painting, drawing, photography, pottery, and textiles). Each study examined more than 30 patients who were battling chronic illness and cancer.
Here’s how the researchers described the impact that visual art activities had on the patients…
- “Art filled occupational voids, distracted thoughts of illness”
- “Improved well–being by decreasing negative emotions and increasing positive ones”
- “Improved medical outcomes, trends toward reduced depression”
- “Reductions in stress and anxiety; increases in positive emotions”
- “Reductions in distress and negative emotions”
- “Improvements in flow and spontaneity, expression of grief, positive identity, and social networks”
The process of creating art doesn’t just make you feel better, it also creates real, physical changes inside your body.
Create More Than You ConsumeThe moral of this story is that the process of making art — whether that be writing, painting, singing, dancing, or anything in between — is good for you.
There are both physical and mental benefits from creating art, expressing yourself in a tangible way, and sharing something with the world. I’m trying to do more of it each week, and I’d encourage you to do the same.
In our always–on, always–connected world of television, social media, and on–demand everything, it can be stupidly easy to spend your entire day consuming information and simply responding to all of the inputs that bombard your life.
Art offers an outlet and a release from all of that. Take a minute to ignore all of the incoming signals and create an outgoing one instead. Produce something. Express yourself in some way. As long as you contribute rather than consume, anything you do can be a work of art.
Open a blank document and start typing. Put pen to paper and sketch a drawing. Grab your camera and take a picture. Turn up the music and dance. Start a conversation and make it a good one.
Build something. Share something. Craft something. Make more art. Your health and happiness will improve and we’ll all be better off for it.