Have you done anything creative today?
Research shows that creativity boasts remarkable mental health benefits, including emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and social connectedness (Jean-Berluche, 2024).
Whether you’re painting, writing, playing music, or making a craft, art can provide imaginative ways to express ideas and feelings, a process that can be therapeutic. The important thing is to focus on the process, not the product, in order to tap into the full mental health benefits of art (Kumar et al., 2024).
One study found that both active (e.g., painting) and passive (e.g., walking around an art museum) engagement with the arts consistently activates neural circuits in the brain associated with emotion regulation, offering a glimpse into the mechanisms underlying the association with art and better mental health (Barnett & Vasiu, 2024).
Daisy Fancourt, PhD, Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology, and Head of the Social Biobehavioural Research Group at University College London, has focused her research on the connection between the arts and health. In her new book, Art Cure, she shares insights from her research findings on art and mental health and offers tips on practicing creativity in the same way we prioritize diet and exercise for better health.
Heather Rose Artushin: Share a bit about your background and what inspired you to write Art Cure.
Daisy Fancourt: I’ve worked as a scientist researching how the arts affect our health for 15 years. But when I tell people what I do, they’ve rarely heard about the evidence base—it has remained this bizarrely well-kept secret.
People often talk about their own experiences of feeling happier or more relaxed when they engage in the arts, but they are often unaware that there is this incredible evidence base comprising thousands of studies using neuroimaging, physiological monitoring, blood samples, wearable sensors, big data, even DNA. So my inspiration with Art Cure was to share this incredible science to hopefully transform the way people think about and engage with the arts in their own lives.
HRA: How can everyday acts of creativity improve our mental health?
DF: The arts are a remarkable tool for supporting mental health. At a psychological level, creative activities can help us to understand, process, and regulate our emotions, build a sense of control and mastery, help us build positive self-identities and self-esteem, and provide us with meaning and purpose.
At a physiological level, when we engage in creative activities, we activate reward centers at the heart of our brains involved in our pleasure response, including increasing levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is involved in feelings of happiness. We also experience decreases in stress hormones like cortisol and autonomic nervous system activity, leading to lower heart rate and blood pressure. We even experience changes in our immune systems, with regular arts engagement helping to lower levels of inflammation that are linked to both our physical and our mental health.
HRA: Why do you think, despite this evidence for its benefits, that the majority of adults don’t engage in creative pursuits on a regular basis? What barriers are there to creative expression in adulthood?
DF: Unfortunately, just one in 20 American adults engages with the arts on a day-to-day basis. And just one in six reads for pleasure each day. Some of the reasons for this are practical ones—people might not have access to arts venues, or there may be financial and logistical barriers. But arts engagement is something we could all do in our homes. The barriers here, though, are often more psychological—not feeling we’re “good” at art, or “creative” or “artistic,” or not knowing how to do arts or crafts activities. Most of all, many people are unaware that engaging in the arts is a health behavior, like exercise and diet, that can have tangible and sizable benefits for our health. Fortunately, as I show in Art Cure, there are simple behavioral science hacks we can all use to identify and unblock these barriers.
HRA: How can we work to include the arts as a pillar of health, alongside sleep, diet, and exercise?
DF: A great tip is to think about arts like we think about food. It’s not about crash-dieting on lots of arts and then quitting those habits, but more about finding sustainable ways of integrating creative practices into our day-to-day lives.
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Having a simple rule (the equivalent of “eat five vegetables a day”) can be a great place to start, like 15 or 20 minutes a day of creative activities. Just like diversity in our diet is key, it is in our arts engagement too—each arts experience brings different health benefits, so having a combination of participatory and receptive, social and solo arts hobbies is most valuable.
And just like we don’t need to be a great chef to cook nice food, we don’t need to feel “good” at the arts to get the health benefits. In Art Cure, I share lots of simple tips like swapping reading the news on the commute to reading a novel, starting each day with a piece of music as your alarm to set the mood you want to get up with, and substituting drinks or meals out with friends for going to gigs or arts events.
HRA: How can mental health professionals embrace this approach in their work with clients? In what ways does bibliotherapy, the therapeutic use of literature and writing, align with your research findings?
DF: I talk a lot in Art Cure about the benefits that specific arts therapies can bring, like bibliotherapy, dance therapy, music therapy, and visual arts therapy. When mental health professionals are working with people experiencing mental illness, there can be a great value to bringing in additional expertise from trained creative arts therapists. These therapists can combine the arts activities with additional psychotherapeutic processes. But increasingly we’re seeing that referring clients to community arts projects can bring enormous value too. Schemes like “arts on prescription” have been producing some impressive improvements in mental health symptoms in clinical trials that I describe in the book.
HRA: What do you hope readers take away from spending time with Art Cure?
DF: I write in the closing chapters of the book, “Can you imagine if a drug had the same catalogue of benefits as the arts? We would be telling everyone about it, fighting to get our hands on it, paying premium prices, taking it religiously every day, investing billions into further research and development. It would be revered as our elixir.”
We often deprioritize arts engagement in our own lives as we think that it’s a luxury, and when our lives get busy, it drops off our schedule. But the evidence base is now showing so strongly that we really should be prioritizing it, because engaging in arts is actually an investment in our current and future health.
And it’s also one of the most enjoyable pieces of health advice we could be given.