Art For Reducing Stress

If you frequently feel stressed an art therapy can be the perfect approach for you in decreasing the level of your stress. To help understand what the benefits of art therapy are and how art therapy can help reduce stress go through this article.

Art therapy can help you express the inexpressible or access thoughts and feelings that might be hard to articulate. The expressive use of art gives a way for communication beyond verbal or to enhance understanding of what is expressed or said.

Draw the Line

In everyday life, art therapy has nothing to do with creating a masterpiece and everything to do with taking a mental vacation from stressful thoughts. The neat thing is simply picking up a pencil and drawing counts, because it puts you naturally into the present time. It has no difference whether you doodle in a proper book or on your newspaper’s margins. While being in the train and commuting to work let your imagination work.

See the point

One study published in the journal about pain management reports that creating as well as viewing art reduces anxiety and pain in cancer patients. If you do not feel like physically creating art at this very moment, take a cue from science and surround yourself with distraction worthy and stress reducing art. Walk in the park and look at the buds on a tree until you are completely immersed in the present time. Visit an art exhibit and try to see every brush stroke used to create a blossom in a picture’s vase. The trick is to be fully present in and captivated by that moment.

Go with the flow

When I become fully absorbed in bits of glass and tile to create a mosaic, I am experiencing what art experts call flow, a near meditative state, which produces many of the same benefits as traditional meditation like feeling less stressed. To find your flow, it is suggested starting with an art form, which involves no rules, software programs or mechanical equipment. That is why I chose mosaics. These cracked pieces of glass are joyful to work with and I do not fear such thing as a mistake. Similarly, you can begin by creating a clay pinch pot and easing yourself into the potter’s wheel, or sinking yourself into smudgy, dreamy oil pastel stuff before moving on to still life oil paintings.

Color yourself happy
Children have the natural inclination to be so engaged in the creative process without any cares about the finished product. Most adults flip their focus to the end result and unless they have worked on an award winning chef-d’oeuvre, all creative joy vanishes. The next time you bring home a new box of crayons, pull up a chair and color with your kids. Follow their lead. And when they hang their pictures on the fridge door, go ahead and hang yours, too.

Make it with love

If you are drawn to crafts, creating functional handmade items fits very nicely into the definition of art therapy. To most people it is a third feminism thing, with women taking back crafts that is given up because females do not want to be the homemaker knitting or embroidering or sewing. Now people are rediscovering how meaningful these crafts really are in life to create with their hands, connect to the visual world, and enjoy being in the moment as they create.fitnea