Why Creative Activities Are Good for Your Brain: What the Research Says

Creative activities like painting, printmaking, gardening, and working with your hands may do more than give you an enjoyable break. Research has linked creative activity with lower stress and anxiety, improved mood and well-being, and better cognitive health as we age.

And you don't have to consider yourself artistic to for your brain to benefit from creative activities.

I spend most of my workdays thinking, talking, listening, writing, and looking at a screen.

Which may be one reason I've become increasingly interested in doing things that require none of those things.

Making something with your hands feels different.

You can sit down to paint, garden, work with clay, make a cyanotype print, or try some other creative project and realize an hour later that you haven't checked your phone, thought about your inbox, or mentally reorganized tomorrow's schedule.

It turns out there may be a reason for that.

Researchers have been studying what happens when people engage in creative activities, and the findings are surprisingly compelling. Making art has been associated with reductions in stress and anxiety, changes in physiological measures such as cortisol, improvements in mood and well-being, and, over the longer term, better cognitive functioning.

And perhaps my favorite part of the research is this: You don't have to be good at it.

Even a Short Creative Activity Can Reduce Stress and be Good for Your Brain

You don't necessarily need to develop a serious art practice to experience some of the benefits.

In one study, college students facing the stress of final exams spent just 30 minutes painting, coloring mandalas, or working with clay. Compared with a control activity, the students who made art experienced significantly greater reductions in anxiety.

Other research has found decreases in cortisol, one of the hormones involved in the body's stress response, following art-making sessions.

Researchers have also used brain-imaging techniques to investigate what happens while people create. Creative activity appears to engage brain regions involved in processes such as reward, attention, and emotional regulation.

In other words, that feeling of becoming absorbed in what you're doing isn't necessarily just your imagination.

Something different really is happening.

What Creative Activities Do to Your Brain

One of the things I find particularly interesting as a psychologist is what creative work does with our attention.

Our brains are very good at thinking about things that aren't happening right now.

Sometimes that's useful.

Sometimes it's 11:30 at night and you're replaying a conversation from Tuesday.

Hands-on creative projects give the brain a very different assignment.

You're deciding where to put something. You're noticing shape and color. You're figuring out why something didn't work. You're making another attempt. You're paying attention to what your hands are doing and what is happening directly in front of you.

That is good for your brain.

Researchers are studying how creative activities interact with brain systems involved in attention, self-reflection, emotional regulation, and mind-wandering. This may help explain why becoming absorbed in a creative project can interrupt rumination—that repetitive loop of worries and thoughts that can otherwise be remarkably difficult to turn off.

It's hard to simultaneously obsess about your to-do list and figure out why one leaf made a beautiful cyanotype print while the one next to it produced an indistinct blue blob.

Your brain has been given another job.

Learning a New Creative Skill May Be Especially Good for Your Brain

The research gets even more interesting when we look beyond stress.

Creative activities have also been associated with cognitive health as we age.

In the AGES-Reykjavík Study, which included nearly 3,000 cognitively healthy older adults, people who regularly participated in creative leisure activities had a 36% lower likelihood of developing cognitive impairment during the study period, even after researchers accounted for other activities such as physical exercise and social engagement.

That doesn't mean taking up an artistic hobby is going to prevent dementia. An observational study can't establish that kind of cause and effect.

But the finding fits with a larger body of research on cognitive reserve: the idea that mentally stimulating experiences throughout life may help the brain become more resilient to age-related changes.

And there seems to be something particularly useful about learning a skill you don't already know.

When you're a beginner, your brain can't run on autopilot.

You have to remember instructions. Make decisions. Solve small problems. Notice what happened. Adjust. Try again.

That's a surprisingly demanding cognitive workout disguised as an enjoyable afternoon.

You Don't Have to Be Artistic to Benefit

This may be the best news of all.

You do not have to identify as a "creative person" to benefit from doing something creative.

Studies of art-making routinely include people without formal artistic training, and research suggests that the psychological benefits of creative activity don't depend on producing accomplished artwork.

The important part appears to be the doing, not whether anyone would pay money for the finished product.

And there may even be something valuable about being a beginner.

If you've been painting for 30 years, some of what you're doing is familiar. If you've never tried printmaking before, your brain has to figure everything out.

You're experimenting.

You're making mistakes.

You're solving problems you didn't know existed 15 minutes earlier.

You're learning.

From your brain's perspective, that may be part of the point.

Why I Teach Cyanotype Workshops in Sacramento

All of this research has made me think differently about the role creative activities can play in ordinary life.

Not as therapy.

Not as another wellness prescription we're supposed to add to an already impossible list of things we're supposed to be doing.

Sometimes it can simply be two hours spent doing something completely different.

That's one of the reasons my husband and I started offering small cyanotype workshops in Sacramento alongside our regular work as a psychologist and family medicine physician.

Cyanotype is a centuries-old photographic printing process that uses light and water to create distinctive blue prints. We work primarily with leaves, flowers, and other botanical materials. You arrange them on treated paper, expose the composition to light, rinse the paper in water . . . and watch the image appear.

I love it partly because you don't need to know what you're doing when you walk in.

Actually, that's rather the point.

For a couple of hours, you're learning something new. You're working with your hands. You're experimenting with plants, light, water, and composition. Some prints turn out exactly as you'd hoped. Others do something completely unexpected.

And then you try another one.

No artistic experience required.

If you're local to Sacramento and would like to try it, you can learn more about our cyanotype workshops in Sacramento here: https://www.clarytepperphd.com/cyanotype-workshops

If cyanotype isn't your thing, find something else you've never done before and try that.

Your brain doesn't particularly care whether the result is frame-worthy. It is the making of it that matters.

References

Barnett, K. S., & Vasiu, F. (2024). How the arts heal: A review of the neural mechanisms behind the therapeutic effects of creative arts on mental and physical health. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 18, 1422361. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2024.1422361

Bone, J. K., Fancourt, D., Sonke, J. K., & Bu, F. (2024). Participatory and receptive arts engagement in older adults: Associations with cognition over a seven-year period. Creativity Research Journal, 36(3), 436–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2023.2247241

Gallo, L. M. H., Giampietro, V., & Choi, M. (2025). The impact of digital art-making on anxiety: A feasibility study. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1620583. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1620583

Hansdottir, H., Jonsdottir, M. K., Fisher, D. E., et al. (2022). Creativity, leisure activities, social engagement and cognitive impairment: The AGES-Reykjavík study. Aging Clinical and Experimental Research, 34(5), 1027–1035. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-021-02036-1

He, J., & Zhang, Z. (2025). Healing potential of art therapy: A narrative review of neuro-psycho-cultural mechanisms in mental health. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1662772. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1662772

Iizuka, A., Suzuki, H., Ogawa, S., et al. (2019). Can cognitive leisure activity prevent cognitive decline in older adults? A systematic review of intervention studies. Geriatrics & Gerontology International, 19(6), 469–482. https://doi.org/10.1111/ggi.13671

Joschko, R., Klatte, C., Grabowska, W. A., et al. (2024). Active visual art therapy and health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Network Open, 7(9), e2428709. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.28709

Odeh, R., Diehl, E. R. M., Nixon, S. J., et al. (2022). A pilot randomized controlled trial of group-based indoor gardening and art activities demonstrates therapeutic benefits to healthy women. PLOS ONE, 17(7), e0269248. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269248

Phillips, C. (2017). Lifestyle modulators of neuroplasticity: How physical activity, mental engagement, and diet promote cognitive health during aging. Neural Plasticity, 2017, 3589271. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/3589271