Have you ever wanted to do painting? Here is to buy all these canvases, easels and paints, and then start painting masterpieces that are understandable only to you? If you have experienced such aspirations and every time you shelved them as inappropriate and untimely, then it is completely in vain. Modern science asserts that the practice of fine art is not only natural for any person, but also very useful.
In the course of the study, the results of which were published G. Kaimal, K. Ray, J. Muniz. Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making / Art Therapy in the journal Art Therapy, scientists invited participants to take up painting. After 45 minutes, the subjects had a significant decrease in the level of cortisol, the stress hormone. The psychological impact of various types of creativity is so pronounced that it is becoming increasingly widespread as a therapy for victims of domestic violence, people affected by criminal acts or bereaved.
Art acts on our brain at the neural level. In 2014, a scientific paper was published in the journal PLOS ONE, proving that fine art can improve A. Bolwerk, J. Mack-Andrick, F. R. Lang, A. Dörfler, C. Maihöfner. How art changes your brain: Differential effects of visual art production and cognitive art evaluation on functional brain connectivity / PLOS ONE connections between neurons of the human brain. According to scientists, this helps us to focus better on the subject and learn new knowledge faster.
Focusing on creativity really helps to forget about many problems. If you want to escape from sad thoughts and experiences, then take an easel, paints, pencils and crayons in your hands. This was once again confirmed by the experiment, the results J. Drake, E. Winner. Confronting sadness through art-making: Distraction is more beneficial than venting / Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts which were published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
Its participants were invited to watch the film "The Laramie Project", which usually causes very negative and even depressive emotions. After that, the audience was divided into two groups. In one, people began to discuss the events from the film, while the participants of the second were asked to draw a landscape. Subsequent testing showed that the emotional state of the "artists" very quickly returned to normal, while the rest of the participants experienced depression and anxiety for a long time.
Do not think that you can benefit only from serious painting. Sometimes even mechanically created doodles on paper can help out in a difficult situation. For example, if you are sitting at a meeting or a boring lecture, take a piece of paper and start filling it with some patterns. It is important to do this completely unpredictably, without any idea and purpose. According to the authors of the study J. Andrade. What does doodling do? / Applied Cognitive Psychology , this simple technique will help your brain stay focused and remember 29% more than if you just sat and listened.
Scientists have long noticed that it is much easier to find a way out of a situation if you describe it on paper. But the authors of this scientific work J. W. Pennebaker, J. D. Seagal. Forming a story: The health benefits of narrative / Journal of Clinical Psychology went even further and invited the participants to draw their main problems. The results exceeded all expectations: more than half of the participants said that after the art therapy session their problems seemed to them not so big and in some ways even funny.
The concept of flow was proposed by Mihai Csikszentmihalyi and is defined by him as a mental state in which a person is fully involved in what he is doing. It is characterized by active concentration, full involvement and focus on success in the process of activity. Creativity is one of the classic ways to achieve this state, when the creator is not interested in any particular end goal, but is fully focused on the process itself.
