The Science Behind Creative Expression and Wellbeing
A recent report in Nature Reviews Psychology identified multiple ways in which engagement in the arts can support mental health and wellness (see Fancourt et al., 2026).
An Examination of the Recent Research from the United Kingdom
When I tell people that Flourishing Space uses creative expression as a framework for therapist wellbeing, I sometimes notice a bit of scepticism. That's lovely. But is there evidence for it?
There is. Quite a lot of it.
Daisy Fancourt, Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at UCL argues in her book, Art Cure, that engagement with the arts is the forgotten fifth pillar of health, sitting alongside diet, sleep, exercise, and nature. While we are often provided with advice about what to eat and how to move, we are rarely advised to write a poem, go to a gallery, or sing with other people. The evidence suggests we should be.
Professor Fancourt’s longitudinal research has found that regular engagement in the arts could nearly halve the risk of developing depression over the following decade. This finding held even after accounting for socioeconomic factors, physical health, and social circumstances. For people already experiencing depression, adding arts therapies to standard treatment produced nearly twice the improvement in symptoms compared to medication and psychotherapy alone.
The mechanisms behind these effects have been mapped in detail by Fancourt and colleagues (2026). They identified 48 pathways through which arts engagement impacts mental health, spanning emotion regulation, cognitive restoration, stress physiology, immune function, social connection, and identity. Creative engagement measurably reduces cortisol. And it can activate flow states.
Creative engagement also works with emotions in ways that many other wellbeing practices do not. While common techniques focus on reducing distress or regulating our emotions, creative practice supports the processing of difficult feelings. Feelings like grief, anger, and moral distress can be held, experienced, and sometimes released through arts-based practices, like dancing, drawing, music or poetry. The arts offer a kind of container, spacious enough to hold complexity, structured enough to feel safe. Within that container, emotional expression can feel less overwhelming and more integrated, allowing people to move through what they feel rather than simply manage it.
Additional mechanisms were also identified. Arts engagement was found to address the psychological needs of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, that can be systematically eroded. In a relational sense, it produces faster emotional closeness between people than almost any other shared activity. And it offers something that individualised self-care practices cannot, relational connection and restoration.
And the World Health Organisation's scoping review (2019) goes further, with evidence specifically about helping professionals. Arts engagement has been linked with lower stress and burnout in healthcare staff, as well as higher resilience, and enhanced wellbeing and professional identity. For those working in end-of-life care, creative practice reduces exhaustion and death anxiety. For counsellors who develop secondary PTSD, poetry therapy is associated with symptom reduction. Across professions, arts engagement is also associated with stronger sense of professional identity, which in the context of role erosion and moral injury is particularly important.
There is also a larger social critique that Fancourt and colleagues explore. In her 2026 book, Art cure, Fancourt points out that modern colonial structures have taken creative practices, like storytelling, making, singing, and moving, and made them the reserve of the elite. She notes that access to the arts and cultural life is heavily skewed toward those who are already the wealthiest and healthiest people in society. And that arts funding is typically one of the first things cut in periods of austerity. Fancourt asks us to seriously consider the health consequences of these decisions.
In their recent paper, these researchers also introduce the concept of an "arts exposome." They explain that this is the cumulative, ongoing pattern of a person's creative engagement across a lifetime. Importantly, the health effects of the arts are not primarily produced by formal programs but by regular, daily exposure that accumulates over time.
For helping professionals, this point has a particular importance. The conditions that produce burnout, high workloads and emotional labour, along with a lack of structural support, are the same conditions that crowd out creative practice. The busyness that prevents a therapist from writing or drawing is structural. Which means that reconnecting with a creative practice not only helps with personal restoration. It is, in a small but real way, also a refusal of those conditions.
The Flourishing Way was built on that understanding. Creative expression is part of what makes sustained, ethical, humanising care possible. The evidence, increasingly, agrees.
Further reading
Fancourt, D. (2026). Art cure: The science of how the arts save lives. Celadon Books.
Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. WHO Regional Office for Europe.
Fancourt, D., Stringaris, A., & Sacco, P. L. (2026). Mechanisms underpinning the mental health impact of arts engagement. Nature Reviews Psychology, 5, 290–302.
Ready to explore more ways to flourish in work and life?
Waitlist for The Flourishing Way is currently open! This is our transformative program that brings together psychological and mindfulness-based approaches with hands-on creative exploration. It's designed to help you reconnect with the vibrant, playful parts of yourself and flourish in work and life. Learn more here.
Or if you’d like to explore further ways to nurture your creativity, experience more creative flow and build a flourishing life, you can learn more about my services here.
Is this post the kind of thing you love exploring? I'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on Instagram @the_flourishing_space or on LinkedIn.
