How creativity helps support Mental Health

Art Musings

7 June

I owe a lot of the healing I’ve experienced to my two degrees in creative fields: a degree in Visual Arts and a degree in Acting (Theatre and Film). If I hadn’t had access to HECs to study these fields my life would have had a very different trajectory.

Art has a way of challenging our assumptions with the allure of alternate possibilities. Art can render elusive feelings tangible as they’re physicalised onto canvas. Art as a concept relies on the belief that human expression and human experience matter. When we decide that an object is ‘Art’ we are categorising it as an object that can offer transcendence on a spiritual, intellectual, emotional or visceral level. Below are some ways the worlds of visual art, theatre and film, and the arts at large, can improve mental well being.

EXPRESSION

Creativity offers a space to express yourself in the form of different ideas, medium approaches and styles.

Permission to practice and explore self expression is incredibly beneficial for anyone who:

was raised in an environment that discouraged healthy autonomy
represses or shames their contributions, emotions and desires
engages in self sacrificing behaviour and subconsciously disregards their own needs and intuition
struggles with self ownership and self confidence
needs an outlet for overwhelming emotions that they don’t have the vocabulary to put into words
is stressed and could add creativity (e.g meditative colouring in) to their options to regulate the nervous system

Self expression when practiced regularly can make us feel safe enough to be ourselves and help ease inhibitions that keep us scared and small. It can open up a world of open and honest communication, creative playfulness, and freedom. Engaging in regular self expression also encourages us to develop insight. Opportunities to practice self expression help validate our experiences and nurture emotional intelligence.

AUTHENTICITY

Creative expression leads to Authenticity (and in turn vice versa). Great art isn’t necessarily valued by how something is made but why. Why was it created? What is the intention and meaning behind it? Does the artist and the work have a story and a point of view? Is the work honest?

Creativity can help us ask similar questions in relation to our own lives: are we grounded in our why and showing up authentically in our day to day? Are we being honest with ourselves or are we engaging in self betrayal?

GROWTH MINDSET

The arts can stimulate a growth mindset. Rather than being rigid and fixed, the arts lean more toward abstract thinking, challenging our assumptions by posing questions, unsettling our perceptions and suggesting alternate possibilities.

Learning to express oneself through a creative medium takes practice and dedication. Dopamine gets attached to the process of practicing and learning which is much healthier and an enriching alternative to the many contemporary offerings that offer quick dopamine hits with little nourishment (e.g. scrolling on social media, junk food, drugs and alcohol etc). By becoming a creator rather than just a consumer we lean into a growth mindset demonstrating we can learn and develop and have an impact on elements outside of ourselves as a opposed to believing we are fixed, static and passive to elements outside our control.

The arts can remind us that our perceptions are not fixed but there are so many ways of drawing, painting and viewing an object and that there may be other ways therefore of viewing ourselves and the world too.

RESILIENCE: YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS

Whether it’s the long haul of mastering a creative skill, handling rejection when putting your work out there or meeting extreme deadlines, the creative industries can disrupt your comfort zone and help develop resilience (or provide an invitation to seek additional skills to galvanise resilience that you might not have considered if you being challenged). Some examples:

You‘re an actor who needs to learn 40 pages of dialogue, two accents & fight choreography for a play that opens in four weeks
You’re an artist entering competitions putting your work out there
You’re a photographer who has 15 minutes to take a photo at sunset before you lose the light
You’re an actor auditioning for a part who has been rejected the last forty auditions
You’re a contemporary artist putting together an installation in a mixed-medium you’ve never attempted before
You’re cast in movie project where your character is experiencing emotional extremes and you need to travel to those emotional landscapes and back again
You’ve been offered an amazing opportunity outside of your current comfort zone and have to learn on the go
A piece isn’t working but you’ve identified a solve so you’re going to start again

HOLDING SPACE

Because creative industries are enriched by diversity (diversity of styles, cultural & community backgrounds, individual perspectives, variety of stories etc) they can help us be more open minded. Explorative self expression in our own and in others work can encourage us to hold space for all the different parts of ourselves and to be more patient with others.

A specific experience I’m grateful for comes from acting school. Something we explored in acting school was how to acknowledge where we were at in the moment (emotionally and energetically) and the distance between where we were and where the character needed to be in scene. The ideal was to have a variety of tools so we could travel that distance as quickly as possible so that the performance would feel authentic (as opposed to fake or “bad acting”). We also acknowledged that because actors do numerous takes of a filmed scene, or multiple performances a week of a theatre production, inevitably sometimes closing that gap would be easier, sometimes harder and sometimes would just be different because humans are constantly in flux. Some of the insight gleaned:

We are not fixed and our thoughts and feelings and relationships to different stimuli are constantly changing. Feelings and thoughts come and go and we can encourage new ones.
It’s okay to feel all your feelings
You may have more in common with different characters (and other people) than you might have initially suspected
You can feel all your feelings and still be in control of your choices & behaviour (e.g. an actor can be really in the scene and still be hitting all their marks, following any choreography etc)
It takes many people to make a world and they all have value

In short, the arts can help us hold space for ourselves, and space for others.

CONTROLLING LESS, WELCOMING MORE

Creativity is enjoyed more when we lean into the process, adapt as things take shape, control less and welcome what unfolds more. It also helps the work feel and appear less laboured. An example I have heard somewhere goes something on the lines of: “A musician aims to have mastery of their instrument but endeavours to play the music, not the notes”.

When we are less rigid and let go of control we can enter a flow state which is a lovely state for the mind to be in.

FOCUS

The act of creating requires focus and keeps the mind engaged and stimulated. It is exercise for the mind.

HIRING YOUR INNER COACH

I noticed improv classes are quite good at teaching tactics that circumvent the inner critic who might shut things down before getting started. A fundamental rule in improv is to accept an offer made by another actor and expand on it by saying “yes, and….”. For example: Actor One might offer “Wow it’s raining” and Actor Two may respond “Yes, and it’s starting to hail”. Had Actor two retorted “No it’s not”, the scene would be dead and couldn’t go any further. Saying “yes, and…” opens up a dialogue for what’s possible. To create, is to ask again and again, “yes, and? or to ask ‘What if?’ and to answer “why not?”.

HEALTHIER EXPECTIONS

The psychological benefits of delayed gratification that can be gained from working hard on a piece or a body of work and finishing it etc cannot be underestimated in a world that favours selling quick fixes and isolating consumers from the process of making things. Delayed gratification adjusts our expectations from entitlement to appreciation and humility. We learn to value the labour that goes into making things possible.

A life surrounded in creativity is to be surrounded by experiences that seek to be human rather than perfect. When items are too “perfect” they can feel overly manufactured, eerie or disingenuous. In this way, creativity can help people plagued with perfectionism to embrace “imperfections” as welcome signs of authenticity and being “man made”. In art, the work is more moving and therefore “better” when it feels alive. When it’s too perfect it feels artificial.

APPRECIATION

The arts cultivate our appreciation for beauty, details, meaning and process. We are more likely to appreciate how things are made, appreciate artists choices and notice details that others may miss. Gratitude and appreciation are wonderful for mental health.

PRESENCE

Creating art encourages us to keenly observe and by observing the details of objects outside of ourselves we become present in the moment. Presence disrupts rumination. By observing what is happening around us we can engage and not miss out on what’s on offer.

CALMING NERVOUS SYSTEM

Colouring and painting and other tactile creative activities can be meditative. Singing, chanting and humming stimulates the vagus nerve which helps gets us into rest and digest (as opposed to fight or flight).

CONNECTION

Creativity is storytelling and storytelling helps us to share, connect to community and create shared memory.

Creativity is often abandoned in adulthood and incorporating a creative outlet in adult life can help reconnect us to our inner child and enjoy the benefits listed above (and any others you might discover or think of). We don’t have to create in a professional capacity to enjoy the benefits of creativity, just as we don’t have to be a professional athlete to enjoy the health benefits of movement.

Creativity can help our well being in so many ways. It’s important to remember that everyone is different and has their own challenges and these will shift over time. Whilst creativity offers many benefits to mental well being, working on your mental health through other avenues (therapy, movement, meditation etc) can also offer many benefits to your creativity. It’s all interconnected.