The human relationship with art is older than language itself. Before we had words for grief, we painted it on cave walls.
Before we had names for joy, we danced it out. For most of human history, healing and art happened in the same room, and for most of modern history, medicine quietly forgot that.
Now, it’s remembering.
Apparently, in recent history, several scientific studies and research have actually quantifiably proven how creative engagement, with practically any art form, can help a person in both physical and psychological ways.
Whether you’re the person who dances through heartbreak, photographs sunsets to stay sane, or pours anxiety into a journal at 2 AM, here’s the science behind why what you’re doing actually works.
Visual Art: Your Brain On A Blank Canvas
Let’s start where art therapy began, with paint, pencil, and paper.
Research shows that just 45 minutes of art-making, with no artistic experience required, significantly lowers cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, in 75% of participants.
As Dr. Girija Kaimal, assistant professor of creative arts therapies at Drexel University, put it: “Everyone is creative and can be expressive in the visual arts when working in a supportive setting.”
You don’t need to be good at it. You just need to do it.
For people dealing with PTSD, visual art does something especially remarkable: it gives shape to things that words can’t hold. Studies show that drawing representations of emotions, like mandala exercises, can measurably reduce trauma symptoms in PTSD patients.
The act of externalising what’s inside, putting it on paper, giving it colour and form, can do what years of talking sometimes can’t.
Dance: The Therapy You Do With Your Whole Body
Here’s something your kathak teacher, your Zumba instructor, and your 3 AM kitchen-dancing self all have in common: they’re all practising an evidence-backed form of healing.
A comprehensive meta-analysis reviewing 23 clinical studies found that Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) produced significant improvements in quality of life, mood, body image, and most notably, depression and anxiety.
The populations it helped ranged from teenagers with depression to adults with dementia to people managing chronic heart failure.
Dance, it turns out, doesn’t discriminate. The science behind why it works is fascinating.
DMT is defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as “the psychotherapeutic use of movement to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual,” and is now a recognised clinical profession in psychiatric hospitals, rehabilitation centres, and private practices worldwide.
A systematic review of 10 randomised clinical trials spanning multiple dance styles, from tango to Biodanza to Nogma, found that adults who participated in dance interventions showed a consistent reduction in depression, anxiety, and stress compared to those who didn’t. The style didn’t matter. The movement did.
There’s also a particular magic in dancing with others.
Researchers have found that mirroring techniques in group DMT, moving in sync with another person, activate mirror neurons and build empathy, creating a feedback loop of emotional attunement that’s genuinely hard to replicate in a therapist’s office.
Music: The Oldest Prescription We Keep Forgetting
Long before playlists, before concerts, before even instruments, humans were using rhythm and sound to process pain. We just didn’t have clinical trials to prove it then.
Now we do.
Music therapy, when added to standard care, reduces depressive and anxiety symptoms more strongly than standard care alone, and also improves social and cognitive functioning, particularly in older adults.
It also does something particularly striking for people in the deepest distress: research shows that music therapy was more effective than several other interventions in reducing suicidal ideation and depression.
But you don’t need a music therapist for this to work on you. Music has been found to improve mood and reduce stress, alongside improving concentration, efficiency, and a sense of ordered calm.
And making music collectively, in a band, a choir, a drum circle, amplifies everything. Group music-making has been directly linked with lower stress, reduced burnout, and higher resilience among participants.
Your college band practice isn’t just jam time. It’s group therapy with better acoustics.
Theatre & Drama: Healing By Becoming Someone Else
There’s something uniquely powerful about embodying a character that isn’t you, about saying words that aren’t yours, in a voice you’re still discovering. Drama therapy has known this for decades. Science is catching up fast.
Research has backed up drama therapy’s effectiveness in alleviating psychosocial symptoms, facilitating coping and regulation, and improving social functioning across multiple populations. Positive effects have been found on overall psychosocial problems, internalising and externalising issues, social identity, and cognitive development.
Drama-based intervention is a creative form of psychotherapy that promotes psychological growth and transformation through the systematic and intentional use of theatre techniques, and is now increasingly being offered in healthcare settings as part of complementary mental health care.
Perhaps it’s most surprising application: prisons. Drama therapy programs in correctional institutions have produced remarkable outcomes, including significant improvements in relationships with peers and authority figures. When someone who has spent years unable to safely express themselves is given a stage, even a makeshift one, something fundamental shifts.
For college students specifically, a study applied drama therapy to groups of high-risk students and found that the biggest shifts were in self-perception, helping participants “materialise” hidden feelings through action, making their inherent emotions visible and discoverable for the first time.
Read More: In Pics: 5 Things You Should Do To Take Care Of Your Mental Health
Photography: Finding Your Frame, Finding Yourself
Point your phone at something. Notice how, for a moment, your whole world narrows to a single frame. That narrowing, that act of choosing what to focus on, is the mechanism behind one of the most accessible and underrated forms of therapy we have.
Researchers at Lancaster University found that taking a daily photograph improved wellbeing by encouraging mindfulness and the active search for something meaningful or unusual in each day.
In 2018, a study co-authored by LU’s Dr Liz Brewster and Dr Andrew Cox from the University of Sheffield observed participants taking photos.
Around 8 people were selected for the study and were observed online for 2 months (within the period of October 2016–February 2017), including what photographs were taken, any text added to them, and interactions on the photo-a-day site with others.
One of the results of this study was that “Participants identified walking and getting outside, mindfulness, seeking different experiences, reflecting on daily life and community interaction as linked practices.”
The photos were also noted to be a form of self-care, with one participant saying, “Photography has been quite good for me over the years because I think it forces me to look at the world again. And also there’s a postural thing. If you’re only looking down, when you’re depressed and hunched over, it encourages you to look up or at least squat down and look at something different and to stop and smell the flowers … So I find it to be a very versatile self-care technique.”
Another said, “My job was a very highly stressful role… There were some days when I’d almost not stopped to breathe, you know what I mean… And just the thought: oh wait a moment, no, I’ll stop and take a photograph of this insect sitting on my computer or something. Just taking a moment is very salutary I think.”
The study further noted that, “The task of conducting photo-a-day led people to take more exercise (e.g. going for a walk to get a photograph), engage with their environment (natural and urban) and gave a sense of purpose, competence and achievement.”
Photography has been shown to facilitate the individual’s ability to recognise and express emotions that are otherwise difficult to verbalise, particularly for people with mental illness or trauma.
The best part? Your phone camera is more than enough. The therapeutic benefits come entirely from the act of noticing, focusing attention, and creative expression — not from technical image quality.
Writing: The Therapy You Can Do At 2 AM
Before it was a TikTok trend, journaling was quietly one of the most well-evidenced self-healing tools in psychology. The act of converting chaos into narrative — of giving your pain a beginning, a middle, and maybe an end — does something measurably powerful to the brain.
By actively constructing, exploring and reflecting through writing, especially when paired with other creative practices, people gain greater self-understanding and insight into how they see the world. Research on expressive writing consistently shows reductions in anxiety, improvements in immune function, and better emotional processing — particularly after trauma.
There’s also something that writing does that talking can’t always achieve: art, including written art, can express forms of emotional intelligence that verbal communication alone cannot fully convey, and through the act of creating, many people discover a sense of accomplishment and rebuild self-esteem.
Whether it’s fiction, poetry, personal essays, or a messy diary entry that no one will ever read — the act of putting it in words is the act of making it real. And making it real is the first step to making it smaller.
The Bottom Line: Your Medium Doesn’t Matter. Your Making Does.
Across all of these art forms, visual art, dance, music, theatre, photography, writing, and content creation, the common thread isn’t the medium. It’s the act of making.
In 2023, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a report on research into the benefits of the arts in the treatment of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases.
Christopher Bailey, Arts and Health Lead at WHO at the 2022 Budapest conference, sharing his own experience of dabbling with the arts while he was fighting cancer and going through chemotherapy, actually helped him.
He said, “I’ve found that, when I was on stage working with actors, I had this profound sense of well-being. I could walk, I could hold things, I could speak eloquently. It was as if the chemotherapy had disappeared for that period of rehearsal and performance.
When I got back home and would take off my shoes and my socks, they would be soaked in blood. I couldn’t speak anymore, it was only temporary, but at that moment of performance, I was well.”
He further said, “The arts are not about curing – it doesn’t cure cancer. But arts can heal. That is different. They create this sense of deep personal meaning that make your life beautiful, no matter the circumstances.”
A September 2025 study titled ‘The arts for disease prevention and health promotion: a systematic review’ led by around 20 authors, took a “mixed-methods systematic review that included 95 studies of arts programs, practices and activities, addressing NCD risk factors across 27 countries.”
The study found that “arts may support NCDs prevention and health promotion by generating cultural relevance, providing opportunities for increased physical activity and social connectedness and by helping to identify and address systemic, structural and social forces contributing to health disparities and inequities.”
A 2024 study conducted by Frontier Economics as part of the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in partnership with University College London’s Social Biobehavioural Research Group, also took a look into this.
Not a hobby. Not a side interest. A fundamental health behaviour.
So the next time someone asks you to justify the time you spend dancing, or writing, or filming, or painting, you don’t have to justify anything. You’re doing what humans have always done when they hurt, when they’re lost, when they need to find their way back to themselves.
You’re making art. And art has always healed.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Psychology Today, World Health Organization (WHO), The Indian Express
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: Art, Art healing, Art healing properties, Art health, health, good health, how Art can heal, art healing therapy, WHO, art health benefits
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