Inktober 2020, day 5.
My art isn't good; it isn't even decent. I know so very little about ways to get human — or any proportions, really — right, so little about shading, and so little about the materials I'm using. If I were in it for the end results of the art itself, I'd be sorely disappointed. But I'm not.
When my teenage daughter invited me to participate in Inktober, an annual art event where you (at least the way we're doing it) create one piece of art with ink a day for a month, I immediately said yes. After all, "anyone can do Inktober; just pick up a pen and start drawing".
Frankly, this whole year flew by in a blur, as it must have for countless people all across the world. We dealt with curfew, an altogether new and quite unwelcome way of life, financial insecurities, and then also COVID-19 itself. My brain has been on autopilot, if that, and I'm pretty sure I've been suffering from low-key depression manifested through unbearable boredom and lack of motivation.
So, I needed something to shake it all up.
It worked.
Inktober gives my daughter and me a steady daily bonding moment for now, and that's cool. More than that, though, I find my stress flowing out with the violent movements I'm discovering I like to make with my brush. As my daughter makes meticulous, small motions with her fine liner, I'm whacking away at my paper, scratching all over it, telling it that I'm fed up with this surreal new existence and in search of more meaning.
How can engaging with art and creativity boost your (mental) health?
Research has shown that both sides of the art equation — creating and sharing in others' creations — can positively impact mental health, identifying four separate art forms that are good for you in the process. Those are music, visual arts and visual arts therapy, movement-based creative expression, and creative writing.
While plenty of studies have looked into how and why making art benefits children, there's also evidence that it can immensely help adults. As a whole, engaging with art can alleviate stress, boost your mood, help combat depression, and increase your introspective abilities. In doing all that, one study noted, making art can "reduce the burden of chronic disease". When done together or shared with others, engaging with art can also boost your sense of belonging and feeling of community, which, these days, matters a whole lot.
Specific art forms have been found to have slightly different health benefits, though, interestingly enough. Let's take a look:
- Music (and music therapy) calms the amygdala, the emotion center of the brain, reducing anxiety and potentially either alleviating the subjective feeling of chronic pain or helping chronic pain patients better manage pain. All this neurological activity has even been suggested to boost immune system functioning, and quite a few studies specifically show that music therapy can reduce feelings of stress and pain in cancer patients.
- Visual arts, which would mean things like drawing and painting but also crocheting, knitting, sculpting, and many other art forms, were shown to help people express feelings and events that they either find hard to talk about, or simply don't have words for. This makes engaging in visual arts especially wonderful for people who have lived through traumatic experiences. Research among cancer patients has shown that visual arts therapy boosts measurable physical health parameters. This kind of art therapy is also excellent for reducing stress in caregivers.
- Creative writing can do a whole lot for your health, according to research, from lifting depression and stress to processing trauma, but also reducing physical pain levels, strengthening immune system functioning, and improving fatigue levels.
- Movement-based arts, like dance and tai chi, like other art forms, reduce stress levels, pain levels, and boost your mood. They're unique in that they're also used to improve range of motion, body image, and physical fitness.
How to embrace art into your heart and your life
Those are all good reasons to at least strongly consider engaging artistically yourself — but just how do you get started?
I'm going to leave scientific studies behind, now, and share my personal experience. I've been writing professionally for over two decades now, for instance, and while that can certainly be fulfilling, creativity on demand, for pay, or for an audience just doesn't have the same impact as the creative endeavors you embarked on for no reason other than that you wanted to.
Likewise, many people feel very self-conscious about their creative talents, or perceived lack thereof — even embarrassed, like they're not good enough or not real artists.
To convince you that anyone can truly just pick up a pen, hack away at their keyboard vomiting their innermost thoughts onto the screen, dance the night away, sculpt the heck out of that clay, or spin and knit that truly obnoxious Christmas sweater that you'll nonetheless be proud of, I'm gonna share the ink I made for today's Inktober prompt — blade.
I share it with joy not because I'm thrilled with the results, but because I like the way it made me feel. Try it for yourself. You may be surprised what adding more creativity into your life will give you.
Your thoughts on this