Anytime you sit down to practice your art you feel it, that sense of calm that is like a coming home. You just know it’s good for you…or is it?
Is doing art just another way to check out of reality for a while?
That kind of thinking can make it feel selfish to sit and do art when there are so many things you “should” be doing and it’s actually just not true.
We know we need to be in a healthy mental state in order to be a good parent, a good friend, a good human, and even a good person to ourselves. Being in constant crisis mode pulls you away from others and locks you down into the grind.
So, look at it this way.
Your mental health is not just about you and how you feel right now. It’s also about your whole existence in the web. By learning to recognise varying mental health states and to maintain them in a positive way you benefit others, they in turn benefit you…so you can be of benefit to others…and they can come back to you. Do you see the circle?
Taking time to do things like meditation, focused breathing, exercise, or art for ourselves is never selfish. It’s part of how we “be human” and step into ourselves in our humanly existence.
Here are three ways making art benefits mental health.
One- It contributes to brain health
When you do art, you are forcing your brain to go outside of its normal routine thinking patterns and see something in a new way. This can give you a wonderful sense of accomplishment because doing things in new and exciting ways is one way we grow. Art is also a way for you to express (or uncover) feelings that do not normally see the light of day. When you bring something out on the page, you can see it right there and that helps you to process it. Art gives you new opportunities for problem-solving and you use creativity to do it. All this flexible thinking stimulates the brain and the brain remembers when tackling tasks in the rest of your life.
Two- It helps you understand yourself better
When you are creating things in your art journal or on a canvas, you enter a flow state that lets you go and go. How many of us have looked up from what we are creating and suddenly realise it has become dark outside. It’s the feeling of getting off a plane after a long flight from a cold place to a warm one. The door opens and you still have your heavy coat on. What a shock! You’ve been on a journey!
When you’re in this state you can leave all the things you’ve had weighing your mind down behind and just connect to your true self, your soul. You learn so much about what you want, what you like, and what you don’t like because normally our connection to ourself is covered by all the other noise of life. Purposefully sitting to make some art, doesn’t mean those things go away, but it does mean that they become background noise while you remember who you are.
Three- It increases your self esteem
Contrary to popular belief, we don’t increase self-esteem by doing great things. We do so by making “mistakes” and then figuring out what to do next. Society tells us to be perfect, yet none of us is. Even if we were “perfect”, everyone has a different interpretation of what that means and so it’s completely unachievable.
But what IS achievable is increasing your own self-love and acceptance so you can recognise your brilliance. One way that happens is when find yourself in what you might interpret as a disastrous situation, and then once you’ve come out of it, you look back and realise you’ve managed it all on your own. Because you’re awesome!
Sometimes we forget to look back and see how good we are at surviving disasters and so it’s good to practice. I used to be so afraid to put something into my journal after I spent so much time and effort in making it, but I slowly learned to trust myself and take the plunge.
Art is very forgiving. If you don’t like how something has turned out, you can paint over it. Then what happens? You realise you’ve come through another “disaster” and everything is fine. Aren’t you amazing? Art is like life. Use it as a practice. As John Lennon is quoted as saying,
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Gracias a Girl with red hat on Unsplash para la imagen bonita <3 Thank you for the beautiful image!
