Watercolor Painting to Destress Your Mind and Body

Have you ever noticed that social media always seems to find the perfect content for your For You page? Towards the end of last year, I began to see watercolor painting tutorials on Instagram. As I watched more and more of these videos, my algorithm kept showing me even more. It became a calming part of my day to watch these artists create. Around the same time, I was reading The Artist’s Way, a book that encourages tapping into your inner child and your creative self. Both the videos and the book inspired me to start painting myself. While I’m not a painter, I am creative, so I asked for a paint kit for Christmas, and since then, I have been painting every evening. What I didn’t expect was how much painting was going to help me destress my mind and body. It became a way to decompress at the end of each day.

Dr. Frank Clark, in an interview with the American Medical Association website, suggests that patients should engage in the arts as a means of promoting their mental health, much like physical exercise. Examples of such arts include dance, music, painting, and poetry. Engaging in these activities has several positive impacts on one’s mental well-being.

• Improves concentration
• Improves self-esteem
• Reduces stress
• Cortisol levels can decrease
• Dopamine can increase

It only takes a few minutes a day to experience the positive effects on the pleasure center of the brain. Every individual is born with the natural gift of creativity. The key is to gain the confidence to open up and harness that gift.

I have recently added an Art Gallery to my blog with the hope of inspiring and encouraging others to use art as a means to combat stress. I believe that I am a work in progress and my art is also a work in progress, but at the end of the day, my mental health has improved significantly because I have allowed myself to open up my creativity and paint.

Do you turn to the arts when you need to relax? Whether it’s dancing, music, painting, or writing poetry, creative outlets can be a great way to unwind. I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how you use the arts to decompress.

Click for the Art Gallery