The Science of Creativity: Why Art Is Good for Your Brain, Body and Mental Health
- Maja Kerin
- Jul 14
- 5 min read
New research suggests creativity may belong alongside exercise, sleep and nature as an essential ingredient for wellbeing.
For years we have heard about the importance of sleep, exercise and time in nature. We know they matter. We are reminded of them constantly — by doctors, by research, by the quiet guilt of a week when we have not moved enough or rested well.
Creativity rarely appears on that list.
It is treated as a luxury. Something extra. Something we return to when life slows down enough to allow it — after the school runs, the deadlines, the endless logistics of keeping everything moving. And so most of us relegate it to the edges of our lives, if we reach it at all.
Yet a growing body of research is beginning to ask a different question entirely. What if creativity belongs on that list? What if art is not simply enriching, but essential?
Professor Daisy Fancourt, Professor of Psychobiology and Epidemiology at University College London and Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health, has spent years building the case for exactly that. She describes the arts as a potential fifth pillar of health — alongside exercise, sleep, nutrition and nature — and she has the clinical trials to back it up.
At first, that idea sounds almost radical. But the more you sit with it, the more it begins to feel like something you already knew.
The camera that quietly brought me back to myself
When I left London and moved abroad with two young children, I found myself in a season of life I had not expected. I had left behind the city where I could call friends without a reason, the coffee shops where people knew my name, the invisible support and joy of a life built over years.
There was beauty in the new home. But there was also silence.
There were days when I did not speak to another adult until my husband came home. Days when one of the children was ill and I had no one to call. Days when I stood at the window watching a world that felt entirely separate from me, wondering quietly how I had become so invisible inside my own life.
Without realising it, I started taking my camera for walks. Not to create work. Simply to take my daily pause.
Those walks never felt like productivity. They felt like breathing.
Looking back now, I realise I was not really taking photographs. I was slowly finding my way back to myself through creativity, playfulness and imagination.
What the science is finding
Researchers are increasingly discovering that arts engagement affects far more than our mood. Regular creative activity has been associated with lower stress, improved emotional wellbeing, stronger social connections and better physical health outcomes. Some studies are now exploring effects on biological markers associated with ageing, inflammation and stress response — suggesting that creativity may work on us more deeply than we ever imagined.
One finding stopped me in my tracks. Researchers found that only one in twenty Americans engage with the arts as the primary focus of their attention on a typical day. Not background music while answering emails. Not scrolling past beautiful images online. Art as the main event — intentional, focused, present.
One in twenty.
The question is no longer whether creativity is "nice to have." The question is whether it has been quietly essential all along, and we simply forgot to pay attention.
Your brain craves creativity
One of the ideas that has stayed with me most from recent research is that our brains seem to crave creativity and imagination in the same way they crave movement, rest and novelty. Creativity challenges us — it invites curiosity, asks us to look again, and encourages us to imagine alternatives, explore emotions and make meaning from our experiences. These are not frivolous activities. They are deeply human ones, and according to the emerging evidence, they may be ones our brains are actively hungry for.
The arts, Fancourt explains, offer something that brain training apps cannot — a whole-brain workout. When we engage creatively, we are not practising one isolated cognitive function. We are activating memory, emotion, imagination, sensory perception and meaning-making simultaneously. That combination, sustained regularly over time, appears to matter enormously.
You do not need to be an artist
This may be the most important thing the research tells us — and the thing most easily forgotten. The benefits of creative engagement do not belong only to painters, musicians, writers or professional artists. They belong to anyone who participates.
Children understand this instinctively. They draw, sing, dance and make things without stopping to ask whether they are good enough. Somewhere along the way, many adults lose that freedom. We begin to believe creativity belongs to other people — the talented ones, the trained ones, the ones with studios and time and a particular kind of confidence we do not feel we possess.
But participation matters more than talent. Showing up matters more than being good. The arts do not ask us to perform. They simply ask us to take part, be curious and playful.
Why photography may be one of the easiest places to begin
This is one of the reasons I believe so strongly in mindful photography as a daily creative practice. Not because photography is somehow superior to painting or music or writing, but because it is accessible in a way that removes almost every barrier.
Most of us already carry the tool in our pocket. The camera gives us a reason to look up, to step outside, to notice light and colour and texture and the small details of a world we so easily move through without seeing. It turns us from consumers of the world back into participants in it.
Perhaps photography is not the destination. Perhaps it is simply the doorway — a gentle, daily invitation to return to the creative self that was always there.
A small daily dose of art
The research points to something reassuringly simple — fifteen or twenty minutes of focused creative engagement each day, and one dedicated hour each week. Not as productivity. Not as performance. As nourishment.
That framing matters. A small daily dose of art. A photograph. A sketch. A poem. A song. A few minutes spent creating something that did not exist before you made it.
The art form, the research suggests, matters less than we might think. What matters is the regularity, the focus and the simple act of showing up for it.
Your Daily Pause
This is ultimately what Your Daily Pause exists to offer — not lessons in photography, not pressure to take perfect pictures, not another task to add to an already full life. Simply a small, consistent doorway back to attention, creativity and connection.
Maybe it looks like taking photographs on your lunch break. Maybe it is sketching while your children play, arranging flowers, writing a few lines in a notebook, baking something new, singing in the car or finally opening the watercolours that have been sitting in a drawer for years. The form is yours to choose. What the research now seems to confirm is that the choosing — and the doing, however imperfectly — may matter more than we ever gave it credit for.
Perhaps creativity was never a luxury after all. Perhaps it has always been part of how we stay well. And perhaps your next pause is only one small act of creation away.
Inspired by the research of Professor Daisy Fancourt, UCL, and her book Art Cure.
If this resonates, A Four-Week Creative Pause is a self-guided mindful photography workbook with twelve simple prompts to help your family slow down, notice and create —using the phone or camera you already carry. No deadlines, no pressure to create perfect photographs, and nothing that needs to be shared online.
"Creativity is not something you find. It is something you return to. It was always there, waiting." — Maja Kerin
