Do You Use Art to Benefit Your Mental Health?
Do you use art to benefit your mental health? If not, you might want to consider it. Creating art can lead to feelings of inspiration, happiness, calm, and relaxation. The ability to express yourself can help you feel more connected to the world. Expression through art can help alleviate stress, anxiety, and depression. As a result, art is a powerful tool for mental health support.
Discover how creating art can benefit your mental health.
Stress Relief
Research shows that doodling, drawing, coloring, painting, and other methods of creating art for as little as 20 minutes at a time can reduce stress. You can engage in the art form you like best to support relaxation.
Therapy
Visual arts, movement, drama, music, writing, and other expressive arts support personal growth. You can laugh, relax, and let go of stress. These activities help reduce anxiety and depression.
Healing
Regularly engaging in art can facilitate healing from trauma. You can process pain and better connect with your mind and body during the healing process.
Self-Esteem
Consistently practicing art helps create a feeling of accomplishment. Expressing creativity validates your unique ideas and increases confidence in your abilities.
Art as a Release
You can use words, drawings, colors, images, or other forms of art to represent something you want to let go of. Then, you can take your art and cover it up with something that inspires you, rip it up, throw it away, burn it, put it in water, or take another action that feels right to you.
Art as a Response
You might use art to cope with pain and negativity. For instance, you might write to someone who hurt you or take pictures of a place that used to be meaningful to you. Or, you could use music, writing, painting, or another art form that resonates with you to respond to an issue that is affecting your mental health. Then, you can break down what you want to capture through the piece and how it makes you feel to help you work through the issue.
Collage Your Feelings
Consider using magazines and newspapers to create a collage that expresses your thoughts and feelings about a specific situation. Then, use these words and images to process your emotions and response to the situation.
Color a Feeling Wheel
You might want to draw a circle, divide it into eighths, and write an emotion in each section. Next, choose a color that represents the feeling and color in the section. Then, focus on which emotions you associate with which colors, the emotions you wrote first, and how this applies to your everyday life.
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