149. Art as Medicine: The Science of Creativity and Well-Being

When was the last time you intentionally engaged with the arts—not just as background noise, but as a tool for your well-being?

In this episode, Dr. Amy Backos explores the powerful intersection of creativity, neuroscience, and health. Drawing from the landmark 2019 World Health Organization report analyzing over 3,000 studies, she unpacks why the arts are now being recognized as a critical component of whole-person care—supporting mental, physical, and social well-being.

You’ll learn how engaging with visual art, music, movement, and storytelling activates the brain, supports emotional processing, reduces loneliness, and even improves recovery outcomes from illness. This episode also explores how creativity functions as both prevention and intervention—enhancing resilience, supporting trauma recovery, and increasing overall life satisfaction.

From global policy shifts to practical, everyday access points, this conversation reframes creativity as essential—not optional.

This is your invitation to see the arts differently—and to begin using them more intentionally in your own life.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why the arts are being called the “fifth pillar of health”
• Key findings from the World Health Organization’s 2019 report on arts and health
• How creativity impacts the brain through sensory stimulation and emotional activation
• The role of the arts in preventing illness and supporting recovery
• How engaging with the arts can reduce loneliness and improve mental health
• Why access to the arts is a public health issue—and what’s changing globally
• Simple ways to begin incorporating the arts into your daily life

Resources Mentioned:

• WHO Report: What is the Evidence on the Role of the Arts in Improving Health and Well-being?
• The Modern Creative Woman

If You Loved This Episode:

Leave a 5-star review and share a few words about what resonated with you. This helps more women discover the power of creativity as a tool for transformation.

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Transcript

When was the last time you engaged with the arts? Made art. Went and saw art. Listened to music. It is all around us. I am guessing you engaged with the arts today. You maybe saw advertising. You heard your favorite music. It's available to you all the time, and you can be a little more strategic and use the arts for your help. You may have seen a lot more happening in the literature about the arts, and I want to explain why and the science behind it. In 2019, the World Health Organization released this overarching report, all about how art can have a direct impact on your health. It's now considered the fifth pillar of health. We'll get into that in a little bit. I'm Doctor Amy Backos. This is the Modern Creative Woman podcast, and I am obsessed with the art and science of creativity. I'm a licensed psychologist. I'm a board certified and registered art therapist, and I've been at it for over three decades, helping women discover how to use creativity in their thinking, in their self-expression, and to overcome challenges. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. As you probably already know, art has emerged as part of human experience. It shapes culture, society. Art shapes our individual experience because it's essential for communication. It's also informing how we learn, how we teach. And since the earliest of time, our ancestors were telling stories to make sense of the world. And our brains, of course, evolve to learn from narrative storytelling. And that can happen through visual media. Song. Theatre. The arts really are completely available for us to understand and communicate things like our emotions, and it draws on all of our senses, and that's what makes it such a powerful tool. Over the last few decades, however, we have come to understand the intrinsic health benefits of making art and engaging in creative leisure activities. Now, art can certainly help us navigate emotions through art therapy. It can also specifically allow us to heal quicker from injury or illness. It lets us process struggling events, natural disasters, challenging situations and creating art or enjoying the arts promotes holistic wellness. It's a huge factor in recovery from all kinds of illness. And what the World Health Organization found is that including arts in health care delivery supports positive clinical outcomes for patients. In other words, people get better faster when they're using the arts for part of their healing. The research was done by the World Health Organization's regional office, and this 2019 study looked at over 3000 evidence based, peer reviewed art journals, um science journals, health journals that used art, and the World Health Organization is a collection of all of the world's scientific discoveries for our health, for our mental and social and physical health. They have the best researchers, they have a full understanding of what is possible for optimal health, and they make recommendations. And we can really rely on their work as based in evidence. And also they're open to changing how we perceive health. Arts, of course, have been used to communicate messages across cultures and political divides. It's a powerful tool for connecting us to one another. I want to get into this, but first we have to take it way back to 1947. And what happened then was the constitution of the World Health Organization was created. And this is what's one of the lines. How is this state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being? It is not merely the absence of disease or infirmary. I'm going to repeat that health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. It is not just the absence of disease. So with this in mind, who has long used the arts to promote health and of course, to promote communication? So what we know from cultural anthropologists, from religious leaders, philosophers, museum curators, artists, art therapists, art has always been a part of human history, and it's evolved in our social space. So what happened in 2019 with this initial article is who began testing our interventions to advance very specific health goals. And what they found in their massive study with 3000 articles inspired them to engage in new, very specific research. And they're looking at things like universal health coverage, mental health, suicide prevention. They're also looking at maternal health. They've started research with blindness prevention. They're looking at quality of care, HIV and Aids prevention. And they're collaborating globally. So this is research that has moved across countries and across societies to understand why the arts are such a critical part of our human experience. I will put a link to the studies report in the show notes. The report is called what is the evidence on the Role of Arts in Improving Health and Wellbeing? And that's the study that looked at 3000 studies to really confirm how arts play such a major role in both preventing illness and promoting health. It's also been a major component in the study is looking at managing physical and mental conditions all across the lifespan. Daisy Fancourt is the lead author on this study and she has a new book out. There's a lot of ways that you can absorb this information, but I'm going to give you a little bit of a summary. The World Health Report looked at how art impacts health, and their finding has been really a strong finding that the arts are contributing to health promotion and illness prevention in a couple of different ways specifically social cohesion, helping child development, encouraging healthy behaviors, and in supporting caregiving. These were really relevant aspects of our health, our children developing fine and gross motor skills, imagination, creativity, frustration, tolerance all of that happens through art process. It's not a side note that this is how we develop socially. This is how we develop now. Encouraging healthy behaviours also happens when we make art together. Think art class in school or signing up for a pottery class. Another area that they found really important was preventative and also therapeutic roles. So visual arts, painting, design, performing arts, music, dance, theatre, literature and even going to museums really can as help us in managing mental illness. And by that I mean if can be preventative and it can be a tool for recovery. And it also has been shown to help with neurological disorders. These aspects of creativity have been found to be really helpful in supporting end of life care as well. The study also looked at mechanisms and so the art influences help through sensory stimulation. Moving your hand across the paper with your paints. It could also be the sensory experience of hearing, not just moving. Seeing there's a whole host of brain processes that are involved when you make art. The arts also include emotional activation, which is why it's so powerful for mental health problems like depression or anxiety. It can motivate us to explore positive emotions. The mechanisms of change also include the social interaction. So going to a concert, even if you go by yourself, can reduce loneliness and improve mental well-being. So if you need any excuse to go buy concert tickets, I will write you a prescription for it. You don't need an excuse to enjoy the arts. It is worth the investment. And then finally I want to talk about scope. So this really was a landmark report and it covered studies globally. And it's highlighting the potential for future art based interventions that are in clinical and community settings. And I think that that's relevant for a variety of reasons. We need the arts socially, collectively. We need to engage with our friends and our families and children to appreciate art, to gather the benefits that can happen in this collective way. It also serves as a preventative way of like holding back disease, preventing mental health problems. Now, clinically, the arts have been used for prevention in schools, of course, but also to solve people's mental health problems or to promote a improvement in their symptoms or to engage. And as I mentioned earlier, being able to engage emotionally to have emotional activation. And when I think of emotional activation, it's about feeling something. Feeling moved and excited by something. People with trauma suppress their negative emotions and try and push it down and forget about it. And the side effect of that is they ended up suppressing all of their emotions. And so some kind of emotional engagement that feels safe to allow them to enjoy and appreciate some aspect of their emotions through art. It's a safe way to begin. The same is true with depression, where people feel a volitional. They don't want to do anything. They don't have the motivation to get up and do something. The arts can be a really powerful tool there. And finally, thinking about it in a non-clinical setting. Imagining how arts can be used to improve study habits and skills. I recently spoke at San Francisco State University to a group of students, and I talked all about how the arts will help them feel better, of course, but also it will improve their ability to learn, to absorb information, to stay focused on their task, and to feel really good about moving towards what's important to them. Now that World Health Organization recommendation includes improving art access. This is really, really important. They stress specifically for disadvantaged groups who might not have access at all, not through school, not through museums. So making sure that everyone has access to being able to view and enjoy and appreciate arts. They also recommend that we support arts and health through policy. And this is really at a political, governmental, national and state level. And anything that shows up where we're having an Arts Day or an arts appreciation day, that's the kind of thing that can start to bring people together to appreciate arts. And so policy matters also includes funding for the arts, which is always been a huge topic of discussion that I can remember since I was a kid. My family's very interested in art, and so it was something we talked about. There was art in school. It was a teacher that went around to all the classes, and so we had classroom art classes, and that is a funded position. Unfortunately, you may have noticed that the arts are often cut when money seems insufficient for education. When federal resources are put somewhere else instead of to education, they will cut as much as they can. And the arts are an essential part of, as I mentioned, child development about motor skills, fine and gross motor skills, coordination and engaging socially as well as having imagination to improve their studies. There's so many reasons, so policy really matters. Funding for schools absolutely matters. And I've always voted yes for budgets, for schools, because art is such a pivotal part of the human experience. Who also recommends conducting more research on the economic and comparative impact of art interventions. And so they're looking at how can perhaps art therapists best formulate their work to be efficient? And many countries around the world have already started to include the arts in what is covered by the health programs and insurance programs it is being prescribed at universities, and there are ways that you can partake. The San Francisco Library has a wonderful program where you can check out passes, and you can get a free pass. You go in and ask if it's available. You can check out a pass to go to any of the art museums. Zoo. It's available at your local library in many places, and the idea of being able to view art can also just include a visit somewhere. So many libraries have art exhibits. The main campus at the library where I live has a art gallery and it's really incredible. It's quite beautiful space, and they bring in arts that are culturally relevant and important to the community, and so they're more easily, perhaps understandable and relatable than if I go to an art museum. So some of the exhibits have been about different neighborhoods, different cultures in the city. There is an exhibit there that was a traveling exhibit from New York University about kids art as it relates to diagnoses. And one of my clients had her artwork in this show. It was in a book and then in a show, and it was long before I was living here, but I was visiting here and I got to see the show. Being active at that very local level. To understand the arts in your community is, I think, the easiest way into art appreciation. It's sometimes daunting to look at a museum when you feel like you should know more about art history than you do. I often have felt that way. However, the local art you can start to appreciate because maybe you recognize the scenery in the photographs of neighborhoods around your home. There's an easy entry point for everybody. Whatever it is that you know about pop culture or history, there's an art that goes with that. Whatever your interest is, there is a creative process for that. One thing that I've always appreciated about textile arts is that it addresses where the artist is coming from, maybe spiritually or politically or regionally. There is a space to put oneself into the textile. I remember when I was very young, I went to a local quilt exhibit and it was so moving. It was all of these women creating quilts that they called crazy quilts because they used their own pattern, their own self-expression. They were not basing it on traditional quilting designs. And so there's been a long history of using crazy quilts. All throughout the United States and probably around the world, where it's a personal self-expression tool. So I'll end with the same question I started with about when was the last time you engaged with Arts? And as I look around my office, I have a lot of art hanging up. I have seen advertisements today. I listened to my favorite radio station in the car. There's many ways that we can kind of tune into. We don't have to, like, search so much. It's available for us. We can start to admire and appreciate it, and that can improve our health. So I'll drop the report into the show notes, and if you want to check it out, it's there. And I'll be talking more about this in future episodes for sure. So now that you know, what will you create? If you like what you're hearing and think that we need more arts in the world and more attention to how the arts can improve our health, I would love for you to create a moment and leave a review. You can leave a five star review. You can leave a few words describing what you like about the podcast, and that makes it more visible to other women who could certainly benefit from this kind of information. You can also become a sponsor of the show for as little as $3 a month. And what that does is help offset the operating costs of running my podcast. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.