Benefits of Painting for Mental Health

Reduce the stress with Art

Excessive stress is nothing new to many people across the country, both young and old. Whether it’s a busy home or work life or you’re dealing with mental or physical health issues that are putting you on edge, there are alternative forms of treatment that may help relieve your stress.

Art therapy has been used as a positive stress reliever for years. Nowadays, its benefits are becoming more and more well known, making art a common choice as an alternative way to help deal with stress and other mental health conditions.

Art plays a different role in every person’s life in an intricate way, allowing many people to process emotions and reduce stress as they are creating art. Therefore, art therapy is one of the best natural ways to help combat stress in your everyday life. And it’s fun!

What Is Art Therapy?

Art therapy is a form of mental health treatment using media and the patient’s creativity to therapeutically process and understand emotions while creating art. This form of therapy is used to help deal with many issues, from rehabilitation to processing past trauma, and usually includes a licensed therapist. But there are art therapy exercises that you can practice on your own.

Why Does Art Help Mental Health?

The main goal of art therapy is to help the person struggling to finally be able to relax enough to get in touch with their emotions. By creating art and doing something as simple as coloring, stress levels are seen to drop exponentially in patients. Helping the patient finally relax allows them to focus their mind on other things such as processing emotions, focusing on themselves, and working on emotional release.

Don’t worry; art therapy does not require anyone to be a good artist. Instead, the client can just put their thoughts on paper by creating whatever comes to mind, many times without speaking. This form of therapy helps many people who struggle to put their feelings and problems into words. Art therapy is widespread among children, too, as many of them prefer to draw as a form of communication and understanding.

How Can Drawing and Painting Reduce Stress?

Studies done on art and active creativity’s impact on the brain have shown that dopamine levels often increased in patients who had newly creative outlets. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that often is low in patients with anxiety, depression, and excessive stress.  Because art therapy has been seen to help increase these dopamine levels and help a patient feel happier, it is also an excellent choice for people with mental illnesses, such as chronic depression and anxiety.

Top 7 Psychological Benefits of Painting

1. Painting develops your creativity

Painting is an all-brain exercise, strengthening the mind and triggering dopamine activity in the brain. So spending time indulging your creative spirit is basically aerobics for your brain!

2. Painting supports your emotional wellbeing

They say a picture says a thousand words, and painting can be a hugely cathartic experience, allowing you to access feelings buried deep within your subconscious.

Painting can also help us deal with those feelings by giving them a physical shape, removing the anguish involved when keeping feelings hidden. This is why psychologists often prescribe art therapy for patients who have suffered psychological trauma: it helps to release emotions in a safe, non-threatening environment.

By learning to better express yourself, through the medium of art, painting can be an act of self-care that supports your emotional wellbeing.

3. Builds your problem-solving skills

This can be frustrating and disappointing, it turns out that this can actually be good for you! Unexpected results have two benefits: for starters, you pretty quickly learn to deal with disappointment, and in time (often through repeated error) to realize that when one door closes, another opens. You quickly learn to adapt and come up with creative solutions to the problems the painting presents, and this means that thinking outside the box becomes second nature to the painter!

Creative problem solving skills are incredibly useful in daily life, and mean you’re more likely to be able to quickly come up with a solution when a problem arises.

4. Improves memory and concentration

Your brain is essentially working out whenever you paint, which means that painting boosts memory function and sharpens the mind. In particular, painters exercise the parts of their brain responsible for memory and concentration.

People who regularly practice creative activities such as painting are shown to have less chance of developing Alzheimer’s and dementia. So not only is your painting hobby sparking joy and making you feel better, it’s also looking after your health and safeguarding your brain functions for the future!

5. Painting can develop communication skills

Painting helps you to tap into your subconscious and allows you to communicate your feelings to yourself and the outside world through the pieces you create. Not only this, but it also, in simple terms, acts as an ice-breaker – giving you a shared interest with thousands of other artists and art appreciators around the world!

Our painting holidays are pretty social affairs, and inevitably you end up discussing each other’s art. Little wonder that many come back from our holidays not just with a portfolio of paintings, but also an address book full of new friends!

6. Spending time painting relieves stress

Painters enter a world of their own as they create, and this allows them – albeit unconsciously – to separate themselves from the stresses and strains of everyday life. No mortgage, no office politics – just colour and shade, and “how on earth do I do justice to those incredible poppies and that terracotta rooftop?”, instead.

Painting allows us to escape our daily struggles, and it lifts us. By focusing on our painting, we achieve what art critic and philosopher, Arthur Danto, calls “transfiguration of the commonplace,” as our painting becomes imbued with meanings that go well beyond their literal worth.

In other words, your painting may not turn out like you thought it would, but somehow just by contemplating it, studying it, you feel lifted by its beauty.

7. You can practice mindfulness through painting

You may struggle to capture the full beauty of that hilltop town or cypress-studded skyline, but just trying can have a hugely positive impact. Painting is a meditative act – it takes you out of yourself, freeing yourself from your physical limitations. This means you are only focusing on the present and on the artwork in front of you as you paint, freeing your mind from worries and intrusive thoughts.

Art can be a healing act, a balm for the soul and the mind. There’s also cases where art has helped with physical rehabilitation as well. For instance, Renoir and Gauguin are two famous examples of artists, who through painting’s transcendental bliss, were able to move atrophied hands, experiencing a remarkable temporary healing.

As it turns out, not only is painting a generally enjoyable activity, but it’s incredibly good for your mental health and wellbeing! The psychological benefits are astounding, even though you might not notice them whilst you’re painting your own masterpiece. So, now it’s time to dig out the sketchbook and paintbrushes, and embrace your creativity! Go on – it’s good for you!

Source : sageclinic.org , flavoursholidays.co.uk