Art as Therapy

For me, there are two ways that art can act as therapy: through creating it, and through experiencing it.

Creating

In the same way that reading a book, or working out can help you to focus your mind solely on what you are doing, so can creating art. I find that if I am feeling particularly negative or frustrated with some part of my life - such as my career not going to plan or an injury forcing me to rest from the gym - channelling my focus into creating something helps me to make something positive out of the negative and put my mind at peace. For a few years during university and the first couple of years of my career, I stopped creating almost entirely. It wasn’t until I started feeling the physical effects of stress that I actually recognised that I needed a way to take a break from the pressures I was experiencing and find a way to manage my anxiety in order to prevent myself from continuing to get ill.

Mindfullness is a word that has come into focus particularly in the last year, with various guided meditation apps such as Headspace that coach you into clearing your thoughts and sharpening your mind. These are used as an approach to dealing with anxiety and its related issues, such as trouble sleeping. While these apps might suit some people (probably many people), I find it hard to do ‘nothing’ with my time so to speak and for me, drawing and painting is a form of meditation during which I feel completely focused, completely relaxed, and unaware of any pressure from the outside world. The adult colouring books that became popular a couple of years ago are a form of mindfulness that may suit those that prefer creating to traditional meditating, so even if you feel that you are not a natural artist, you can still benefit from its powers as a therapeutic channel.

Experiencing

I choose the word experiencing rather than ‘viewing’ or ‘appreciating’ because art can be truly moving and take you into another world. In my last post I discussed how art and music were, in my mind, truly aligned. By combining the viewing experience with well-matched music can help you to immerse yourself in it and how it makes you feel with no outside distractions. While it is pleasing to see art so often, rarely do we truly appreciate it when it sits on the wall of a coffee shop or in the lobby of a hotel or office block. In order for experiencing art to act as a form of mindfulness, it should be the sole focus which can be difficult to achieve but a couple of ideas would be to visit a gallery alone or to do a tour of local street art, both with a pair of headphones and a good playlist.

Research has supported this theory, with a study conducted in Emory University (2015) finding that viewing the work of artists including Monet and Van Gogh activates the brains reward system more strongly than viewing photographs of similar subjects.