Heart Handmade UK: Art Therapy & Craft Ideas To Improve Your Mental Health

If you’re on social media, there are a lot of posts about coloring books as relaxation tools. I agree with this wholeheartedly. I’ll go so far as to say that coloring in a coloring book is good for your mental health. The thing is, it’s more about the coloring than the book. Why does it work? One reason may be that it forces you to focus your attention, and gives your mind something to do other than running in circles of anxiety or rumination. I have fibromyalgia, so repetitive stress triggers pain, and coloring in a small space can aggravate my hand pain. I avoid it when I’m in pain, and also when I don’t need the color therapy because I know I can go draw or paint, and those tasks focus the mind too. The coloring thing is less woo-woo than actual science (that word again).

Speaking of clay, honestly, clay work is therapeutic in so many ways. There’s just something satisfying about squishing the soft, wet stuff with your fingers. Smash it, roll it, poke it, whatever. There’s no right or wrong in clay work. Knead the clay like you’re angry and it won’t tell you off for it. Roll coils or smooth surfaces to work through anxiety. We often underestimate the power of physical movement on our mental state…but body and brain are connected, duh. Working with your hands literally roots you in the physical world instead of floating about in the clouds of abstract stressors. Plus at the end of the day you have a tangible THING to show for it, however misshapen or chipped it might be.

If working with clay or paint isn’t your thing, collage is also an easy one to dip your toes into. The cool thing about collage is you can do it without any “artistic talent” (eye-roll). You just need some sort of printed images or magazines and some glue. Cut out shapes or phrases that catch your eye. Move them around, play with the composition until you like it. What’s also so interesting about collage is that, since you’re working with existing images, there’s not the same pressure of ‘creating from scratch’…but you’re still making choices as to what goes where and what it means when you put certain images next to others. Sometimes, in collaging, people make a visual representation of how they’re feeling without even realizing it until they step back and examine it. Our subconscious minds have a sneaky way of slipping little messages and hints into our creative work. Themes or symbols we didn’t consciously include, but they pop up and appear there because they’re actually on our minds, whether we realize it or not.

Repetitive motion crafts, like knitting, crocheting, and embroidery have the same effect as deep breathing exercises and guided imagery. The monotonous movements lower your heart rate, actually putting you in a relaxed state. Many people who are very good at arts and crafts find making them to be as calming as the end product. (Knitting and crocheting are growing in popularity with the younger generation, probably because they are portable. Because I have the pain issues with repetitive stress, I tend to stick with simple knitting and embroidery when I need to do something with my hands. I find doing these while listening to a podcast, or talk radio or audio books, allows me to focus on the information coming in without the need for an entire book or article at once. Cutting and pasting and collage work is good for trauma and life changes. Piecing together or deconstructing and reconstructing new forms from old or found images takes the pressure off the old artist’s fear, because you are working with someone else’s pictures. It’s a good way to manage PTSD or major life changes, even if it is just cutting out magazine images or photos.

Painting feels intimidating to some people because they think they have to paint something ‘recognizable’ but painting (especially abstract painting) is literally just manipulating colors and shapes. Buy some cheap acrylic paints and some paper (or even cardboard, who cares) and just pick colors that reflect how you’re feeling. Want to get angry? Paint in reds and blacks. Feeling calm? Blues and greens, perhaps. Move the brush around on the paper. Layer colors. Scrape things off. Cover up your ‘mistakes’. The point of painting isn’t to make a literal painting of a landscape or still life. It’s to PLAY with color and texture and whatever happens, happens. In fact, sometimes the process of creating is more important than the finished piece. Painting can be meditative in the same way clay is.

Knitting or crochet, believe it or not, also fit into the category of art therapy. The motion of stitch after stitch after stitch is soothing for many people and you have the added bonus of making something functional with which to wrap yourself, literally. The brain likes having a task to work on with clear progress. You can literally see the scarf or blanket growing longer, row by row, which is satisfying. It’s tangible progress when everything else in your life feels mired in complication and inertia. Plus it’s something you can do while watching a movie or podcast, so it doesn’t feel like ‘set-aside therapy time’ which some people shy away from.

Hell, even just arranging a bouquet of flowers or putting together a mood board on Pinterest qualifies. Pretty much any activity where you’re making aesthetic choices and bringing something into the world that didn’t exist before, I say counts. It’s not so much the end product being worthy of hanging in the Louvre that’s therapeutic… it’s the PROCESS of making choices, expressing yourself non-verbally, and engaging your creative centers instead of your anxious centers. It’s different neural pathways and sometimes you need to give the anxious brain a rest.

Kids do it all the time without thinking about it. They draw and build and make things without a care for whether or not it’s “good”. Then we grow up and everything we make has to be perfect, or we don’t make it at all. Such a bullshit way to live, honestly. Art therapy is about reclaiming that childlike playfulness of just trying things and experimenting and not caring if it looks weird. Weaving together a basket of leaves and sticks is crafty and therapeutic as hell, but it’s also just like what you would expect a child to make for fun, and no one would ever look down on a kid for that. The beauty of art therapy is that the weirdness of it, the lack of filter or artifice is the very point. It’s rare in adult life, where we’re constantly on show and filtered for public consumption, to be so authentically, unapologetically ourselves.

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