10 health benefits from getting creative

Does creativity have anything to do with our health and wellbeing? In 2010, researchers analyzed more than 100 studies about the impact of creativity on our health: music, writing, dance, painting, sculpting, weaving. And everything in between.

Photo by rawpixel.com on Unsplash

The researchers published an article about their review, The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health: A Review of Current Literature, in a National Institutes of Health publication.

From the combined research, it was determined that creativity and the arts can help us:

1. Improve our medical outcomes, with a trend toward reducing depression

2. Reduce stress and anxiety (Did you know during and after World War I, knitting was used as therapy for soldiers who suffered from shell shock?)

3. Shift our focus away from pain

4. Relax and therefore feel calmer and happier

5. Process grief and loss

6. Express our thoughts and emotions that otherwise are hard to put into words

7. Feel more positive about our worth

8. Find meaning in life experiences

9. Form new connections with others

Here’s a final benefit that wasn’t included on any of the lists I came across — creativity and the arts can help us:

10. Contribute to the wellbeing of others by adding more beauty to the world; by stitching warm things for people to wear against the cold; by designing a wedding ring that is a unique, one-of-a-kind, gorgeous expression of love between bride and groom.

What’s keeping us from producing a video and posting it to YouTube? Building a window box and planting it with lacey geraniums? Recording our family history for siblings, children, grandchildren?

Go ahead, design a fabulous evening gown. Build a log cabin. Paint a picture of your grandparents’ homestead from that old photograph. Unpack your nyckelharpa, your bass drum, your clarinet, and join a local band. Invent a better way to travel cross country without fold-up maps … oh, wait, that’s already been done.

Garden. Quilt. Sing. Sculpt. Weave. Throw some pottery. Needlepoint. Write a poem. Design a gorgeous outdoor entertainment space and invite friends over. Take a ballroom dance class. A jewelry design class. Sit long by the sea and sketch. Or create a tree-limb-supporter.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

Or repurpose an old barn into a warm, welcoming, wood-beamed home, which happens to be on my creativity-to-do list.

In an article entitled “Make More Art: The Health Benefits of Creativity,” James Clear writes:

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.

I learned to knit in high school and then it fell by the wayside. When cancer caused my husband, Gary, to slow down—after first living nine high-volume years with terminal disease, ha! take that cancer—I picked up needles and soft fuzzy wools and began knitting again.

It allowed me to be in the same room with the guy in the hospital bed, and I was actually accomplishing something—Christmas gifts—not to mention it was incredibly therapeutic, mesmerizing, invigorating to watch something of use and beauty take shape in soft graceful fuzziness.

And just like that, knitting made several things right with my world at that time.

As a recent contribution to my own sanity and physical health, I knitted a sweater blanket (or maybe it’s a blanket sweater) from donated shades of blues and greens paired with scraps from my yarn basket. And I’m feeling quite healthy, thank you.

Both photos: Gary Wirth

This reminder from Maya Angelou:

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.

What’s going on in your creativity department? I’d love to hear about your projects!

P.S. If you found this post inspiring — like, inspiring enough to sign up for a water color class, or start writing the next great American novel, or pick up that long-neglected crochet project — please share, tweet or pin!