The Benefits of Painting for Brain & Mental Health

Updated on: 03/30/2022

Regular exercise and healthy eating are known ways to age successfully, but also having a creative hobby, like painting, keeps your mind strong and may improve your overall quality of life. Here are six great benefits of painting that may improve your mental and physical health:

1. Promotes Stress Relief

Mental-health issues and stress or high anxiety often go together. Finding an emotional release like painting allows a person’s mind to relax and let go of all the problems that contribute to a high stress level.

When people create something beautiful through painting, they stimulate the creative mind while relieving mental strain. A low stress level leads to a happier, healthier lifestyle and helps improve overall mental health.

2. Expands Creative Growth

Painting comes more naturally to artistic, right-brain people, but more analytical left-brainers can stimulate and nurture their creative growth by practicing painting as well. Practicing and learning creative skills at your own pace fosters creative growth.

3. Bolsters Memory

Painting sharpens the mind through conceptual visualization and implementation, plus, boosts memory skills. People using creative outlets such as writing, painting and drawing have less chance of developing memory loss illnesses when they get older.

4. Enhances Problem-Solving and Motor Skills

As an artist thinks conceptually to bring multiple solutions to life when painting, they are using critical thinking skills. During the process, what an artist imagines may evolve due to color limitations or unexpected outcomes that occur during artistic implementation. Finding the solution helps build important problem-solving skills. Thinking outside the box becomes second nature to a painter.

Motor skills like handling a paintbrush increases mobility in the hands and fingers. The fine motor skills that a painter develops helps create mental shortcuts that the brain implements in everyday life.

5. Cultivates Emotional Growth

Releasing emotions through artwork is a helpful experience for many painters. As an artist pours out their emotions through their artwork, they can also evaluate and understand factors that contribute to varying moods. Experimenting with different painting forms helps an artist understand what triggers feelings such as happiness, sadness, love or anger. Painting is often a type of healing through abstract emotional expression.

6. Stimulates an Optimistic Attitude

Painting provides a relaxing, open environment where artists feel safe to explore their own creativity and encourages a more optimistic approach to life. The reward of creating visually appealing artwork that others admire gives the painter a sense of pride and happiness in the work which helps boosts self-esteem and inspires people to reach new levels of skill.

Painting helps build strong mental health at every age and it is never too late to start a new hobby. Painting can help generate a happy mood not only in the artist, but also in people around them.

At Tessera of Brandon, we believe that a healthy mind and body are essential to living life to the fullest. That’s why we focus on whole-person wellness, through engaging programs, innovative design and numerous amenities and services to choose from. To learn more about our assisted living and memory care community, contact us today.

Source: https://www.tesserabrandon.com/health/benefits-painting-brain-mental-health/