153. From Brain Fog to Clarity: How the Arts Restore Your Mind

The arts are not a luxury. They are a biological necessity.

In this episode of The Modern Creative Woman, Dr. Amy Backos explores the powerful connection between creativity and health—breaking down the neuroscience behind why engaging in the arts improves not only emotional well-being, but cognitive functioning and even physical health.

From brain fog and low mood to attention and memory challenges, the impact of stress on our thinking is real. But research shows that creative engagement—from listening to music to making art—can actually change how the brain communicates with itself, improving clarity, focus, and overall mental functioning.

This episode goes beyond inspiration and into evidence. Drawing from neuroimaging research and global studies, including work from the World Health Organization, you’ll learn how the arts reduce cognitive symptoms, expand your behavioral choices, and interrupt the negative cycles that keep you stuck.

You’ll also discover why how you engage matters. Passive consumption isn’t enough—true benefit comes from intentional, focused participation in the arts.

Dr. Backos also introduces the concept of thought–action repertoires—the patterns that shape how you respond to your emotions—and how creativity can expand those patterns, opening up new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

This is especially important during times of transition, stress, or reinvention. Whether you’re navigating a new phase of life or feeling disconnected from yourself, the arts offer a pathway back—to clarity, identity, and possibility.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How stress and depression impact cognitive functioning (attention, memory, planning)
• What brain scans reveal about the effects of music and art on neural connectivity
• Why focused, intentional engagement with art is key to its benefits
• How creativity expands your “thought–action repertoire” and disrupts negative cycles
• The role of the arts in identity development, self-compassion, and reinvention
• What research says about the dosage needed to experience real change
• Why long-term engagement—not one-off experiences—leads to lasting transformation

You’ll walk away with both the science and the strategy to begin integrating the arts into your life in a way that is sustainable, meaningful, and deeply supportive of your well-being.

Because the question isn’t whether art “works.”
The question is whether you are willing to engage with it in a way that can change you.

Transcript

The arts have a huge benefit on our health. And I'm not just talking about psychological and emotional health, I'm talking about our physical health as well. And the research is abundant that participating in the arts truly gives us a longer life, a more healthy life, in that we have wellness for longer, and it can reduce the presence of distress emotionally and physically. And one of the reasons that the arts are so incredibly beneficial, specifically for our mental health is that they can reduce the cognitive symptoms that plague us. And if you've ever experienced moments of anxiety or stress or feeling so low, if you've ever experienced a mental health diagnosis where the condition falls in line with the criteria for a specific category of emotional experience, then you understand the phenomenon of not being able to think so clearly. So this is not just about people who have a diagnosis. This is about everyone who experiences stress in a tangible way that perhaps they get a little brain fog. Perhaps they're forgetful about things. Arts can have a huge impact on these cognitive experiences. 

Welcome in to the Modern Creative Women podcast. I'm Doctor Amy Backos. I am a licensed psychologist. I'm a registered and board certified art therapist, and I've been doing this work for three decades. And my vision for you is to understand the art and the science of creativity and implement in your life the creative practices which most enrich you. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. Cognitive symptoms refers to the aspects of our experience that relate to thinking. Cognitive just means thinking, and cognitive symptoms means that we're experiencing a different kind of thinking than we're normally used to. And when we're under stress, we can experience a distortion of thoughts. If we are experiencing a particular mood, such as anger, our brain will try and be helpful and call up other scenarios that made us angry. There is cognitive symptoms of depression, and then there's the external symptoms of, you know, maybe lethargy, being unable to engage in their life, loss of interest in behaviors that used to be interesting. But the cognitive symptoms are like a slowness or a brain fog. Negative thinking and feeling that emerge from those thoughts are very uncomfortable. Depressive symptoms the behavior on the outside are correlated with these depressive thoughts or the cognitive challenges of depression, and people report that their attention and concentration are impacted. Sometimes people feel like they're thinking more slowly. Their memory is worse, and many people find it hard to plan for things properly, that it's hard to execute a particular plan in their mind and then put it into play in the real world. Now, neuropsychologist can physically see these effects show up on the brain as altered patterns of communication between the brain regions. So there's this essentially misfiring or unhelpful talk across the brain that leads to these kinds of symptoms. And the reason that the arts are so beneficial, beneficial for someone experiencing a depression is that it can really reduce these cognitive symptoms. And as I mentioned earlier, it's not just for people who are experiencing, um, a depression that is categorized with a diagnosis. It's for all of us who are struggling. And I think now in the world, we're experiencing so much unrest politically and socially that it makes sense that perhaps more of us are struggling with these kinds of symptoms where things feel confusing or it feels hard to motivate or engage. And the neuroimaging studies that scientists have reviewed provide this objective evidence of what's happening in our brain. We can have a look at it. It's not just measured in behavior, it's measured in brain scan. And I came across one study involving people who had major depressive disorder, and it showed that when they were listening to an hour of music that was relaxing to them every day, they experienced an increase in a certain part of the brain region. It's the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And the reason that area is so important is it's involved in this big range of cognitive skills, including attention and problem solving. So this is huge. One hour of relaxing music can have a huge impact on how your brain is communicating with itself. Now, other studies that have looked at people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia showed that listening to music every day, just for a month, improved the cognitive tasks that they were engaging with, such as evaluating information. And it was a really engaging brain regions that often are dysregulated in that particular diagnosis. And the music is such an interesting phenomenon. Everyone enjoys music, and I think most of the time we're focused on listening to music when we're perhaps in the car or cleaning. I always have the classical radio station on in my house. It's available to us all the time, and we love having it as part of our experience or our ambience at a restaurant. It's important for dancing. Of course, these studies are not just about having the music in the background or part of an ambience. The studies are looking at when people sit and listen to a piece of music, and you can start with 2 or 3 minutes a day. Maybe you want to work up to 20 minutes a few times a day, or in these studies, an hour. The benefit happens when we're focused exclusively on the music, not when we are engaged in trying to multitask, listening to the music while doing something else, folding laundry, whatever. The act of sitting mindfully and paying attention has a huge impact. But it's different than just a mindfulness meditation. It gives your brain something to attend to. The music is this ongoing experience. Your mind might drift, but you can bring it back to the music because the music keeps changing. And the good news here is these kinds of benefits to helping our brain communicate with itself in a better way, more efficient way. It's not just helpful for reducing these cognitive challenges we might have, or the thinking challenges like mental fog. It's also music in this way, right? It's music only is positively influencing our behaviors as well. And this is incredibly exciting. Now, on an average day, our brains are provided with lots of thoughts that they're giving us and possible bits of action that we could take. We're given many ideas of what we might do, and these are called thought action repertoires. It's kind of built up over time where we have a thought and then a particular action follows it immediately. If we think about food, we might go get food. If we are feeling happy, we might want to, um, go eat cake. If we're feeling sad, we might want to go shopping online. It's just thought than action. And we create our own series of repertoires that we can kind of get stuck with. You've probably noticed when you're happy, you have emotions that inspire you to take action in a different way. If you're happy, you might be more likely to say yes to go out with friends, or you might feel motivated to cook a new recipe. The contrast, though, is when we are experiencing negative emotions or depression. It kind of narrows the options, or the narrows are repertoires that we can come up with. So what's happening in our brain is we just don't have access to think clearly about all of the possible ideas, and our brain only comes up with in that moment a limited number of thoughts or actions that are available to us. And these are things that usually are about self-protection or self-soothing. But generally they're they're choices that we can come up with that can make things worse. So thinking about scrolling on social media or staying home and binge watching shows, going on AI to have a conversation with drawing from friends, perhaps these are all things that are self-protective, like imagine cocooning yourself, but they lead to kind of worse behavior in the future. The impaired cognitions that we have when we're feeling so down can really create a vicious cycle. For feeling down. We take action in in alignment with that or self-protection around that. And then those actions themselves can make us feel increasingly worse and worse. Art making has been shown to increase positive experiences, so when we're able to engage in something like making art, listening to music, going to a museum, it can really shift that vicious cycle and start us on to new repertoires, new thought action repertoires that can help us feel better over time. And when I'm working with women, I always ask them to make a list of things that they can do to feel good, because when they're feeling bad, it's very difficult to generate that information out of our brain. And that's why taking some notes is so important. If you've struggled with reinventing yourself after a long period of time where your thought action repertoires maybe served you well and are no longer serving you, or if you're at a different phase of life, you have a new job or a new child, or your child is leaving, or you're taking care of people in a different way. All of these things do require a thought action repertoire shift. We can't just keep doing the same things over and over again. And so art can really help us with reinvention. And there's a plethora of studies of diverse art activities, and I'm referring to the 2019 meta analysis from the World Health Organization on arts in health care and the work of Daisy Fancourt, and her work has been looking at how art improves our health. And she's looked at short term studies and long term studies. But in the meta analysis, there's studies about all kinds of diverse art activities, and they can play this huge role in helping us find or create a more positive identity. It also helps us feel a little bit better about ourselves, self-acceptance, self-compassion. And this has been shown true for people with and without any kind of mental illness. And so the process of reinventing ourselves through art is really essential, especially during sensitive points of our development. Think about adolescence. I was making vision boards and huge collages a couple times a year to explore who I wanted to be, and I think collage is such a great way to do that, because it allows you to work with kind of what's limited, just the magazine pictures that you have, and then you have to craft something out of it. Now, sociologists who look at how we use art in our day to day life discovered that what we're doing is trying on alternative versions of ourselves, and we're showing different faces to the world, just to the art. But it also emerges in what we wear, the music. We listen to, the pictures on our wall, and also where we put our money to particular concerts or going out dancing. All of this is helping us try on, solidify and take on a new identity. And there's two ways that this happens in art in particular. So exploring your own self-development. First is focusing on yourself. And the art allows us to focus on ourselves in a really a much more mindful way than we would on a average day. So when we're making art, we can focus on present moment awareness, mindfulness. We learn cognitive practices of not letting our mind wander. We stay focused on the art that's in front of us. And that average amount of time that our mind is wandering. This is so outrageous. When I think of it, 47% of our waking hours is spent with our mind wandering or rumination. And so I'm not talking about intentional daydreaming or having a vision about ourselves that we'd like to implement something new in our lives or in our work. Talking about 47% of our time is just our mind wandering all by itself. So art can really encourage us to practice that focus and also to accept ourselves instead of criticizing ourselves. There's been a series of fMRI studies. That's the functional magnetic resonance imaging, and it looks at brain activity related to how blood is flowing through different areas. And it the studies are showing that mindfulness practice achieves these effects through functional connectivity between various brain networks. In other words, things are more connected. Our brain is communicating with itself in a better way. Now, activation in our brain also happens when we look at art. So this ability to connect our brains a little more happens just viewing the art. Going to an art museum. Now, the second way that art helps us with our self-image and evolving into a new kind of experience is from the opposite side of the coin. It's really helping us focus away from ourselves. And so the first part was looking at ourselves. But art also helps us not have to look at ourselves. Here's why this matters the ability to shift our attention from kind of navel gazing, looking within ourselves to looking around has a huge impact on our mood and our theory of mind, which is how we understand other people. And we hold so many different social roles and the ones that are important to us, you know, kind of stick out in how we might describe ourselves. You might identify as a woman or a artist or whatever career you're in. You might identify as a parent or an aunt or a sister or a daughter. These are all roles that we play. And socially identifying with groups is actually linked to a lower level of depression and really better mental well-being. And so being able to identify but hold that identity loosely gives us a sense of belonging. It helps us connect to others in our community, and it gives us social support that all of these roles are so important to us. And belonging is a fundamental human experience. The drawback being that people will thrust a social identity upon us, and there's narratives about groups of people based on gender, ethnicity, health. And it can cause stigma, it can be oppressive, it can be incredibly isolating. And the arts can also help in these situations. And there is a report from the United Nations High Commissioner for refugees. And in that report, they identified dozens of examples of art programs operating in refugee camps all across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East to support mental health and help people who've been displaced by helping them reaffirm their own personal and social connections and their social and personal identities. Now, as you can imagine, art is not like a one treatment option. It takes time to build our identities and understand who we are as people, and it evolves over time. Of course. But the arts allow us to explore our identities in a really powerful way. I want to remind you about what it takes to engage with the arts for help, because it's not a one time pill like penicillin that can fix something, or a week's worth of pills that can fix something. A daily dose is really important, and just a little bit every day can really help you with balancing emotions or regulating self-regulating emotions. However, these short term goals and short term bursts of art are just kind of the tip of the iceberg. If you want to experience these longer term improvements that I've mentioned, such as reduction in depressive symptoms or anxiety, or you want to increase your positive mood, it requires some kind of regular engagement with the arts. What all of these studies are concluding and what the World Health Organization study concluded is that an hour, at least once a week for several weeks is important, and many of the research trials are reporting these clear benefits within six weeks. However, results continue to improve when engagement continues. So the longer you stay within our practice, the more you're benefiting and you may be tempted to think that the arts is just like this short term psychological intervention. You might sign up for like a ten week pottery class and then stop. And it can help you in those ten weeks. And for a little bit afterwards. However, it's this long term engagement that gives us the opportunity to improve our health and our cognitive experiences, reduce our experience of pain, and even increase our longevity. To. While there's not a particularly hard and fast rule about what type of activity is best, there are a lot of recommendations from these studies. Choice is essential, so you want to find an activity that you really resonate with that will help you kind of stay connected to it. And it doesn't have to be something special that, you know, is the latest bit of art making. It could be anything that appeals to you. So if you want to take a pottery class, do it. If you want to take up knitting, do it. All of these things can have a huge impact on our health, and it's important that you make your choice with sustainability in mind. So many women I work with struggle with all or nothing, thinking they'll sign up or commit to making art every day and they'll miss a day, and then they'll give up. They'll abandon the project and thinking that they can't succeed. And that's not at all how change happens. A little bit of failure or relapse is always part of the process. I made a 75 day commitment to a particular thing and I failed five days in. I just started over. It's okay. This is how it happens. There's no problem in missing, but the idea of committing to something on a regular basis is what allows you to improve symptoms of anxiety and depression, and also increase our happiness. Do you want to think about what might be most beneficial for you? Choosing music that you really enjoy to listen to for a few minutes every day, and then maybe an hour a couple times a week. If you want to think about engaging and understanding your emotions better, then choosing some kind of art that feels expressive would be ideal for you. I've been working on my art therapy book that will go to my publisher in August, so it'll probably be out towards the end of the year. And it's all kinds of art directives to give you a chance to experiment with lots of different materials and lots of different creative processes. In the meantime, I would love for you to think about how you could engage with the arts. Or you can think of it this way. Participate with the arts. Going to a concert or listening to music in your home has a huge benefit on your health, and I hope you heard my reminder several times about dosage. It's not a 1 to 1 ratio. It really does depend on are you engaged in a long term relationship with the arts? And since we already are engaging with the arts in so many ways, in advertising, in film, etc., why not choose art that can give you these health benefits? In the studies that Fancourt mentioned in her book and in the World Health Organization study, they did not find watching movies to have a benefit. Now, the benefits of watching something educational is you learn something, but the health benefits of watching movies has not been documented. What they recommend instead is can you go to a theater? I know in San Francisco we have so many free concerts in the park, and being able to engage with live music is such a delight. And if you can find a place where you can go see like music for the sake of listening to the music, then you're going to get some health benefits. Studies found that people who are socializing perhaps more or through a lot of the concerts, are not getting the health benefit. So if you go to a museum with a friend and you're socializing as you're walking around, it's not the same thing as having a dose of the arts. So now that you know all of this about how the arts can truly improve your emotional and physical health, what will you create? You can leave me a message here in the show notes, or you can find me on Instagram at Doctor Amy Bakos and I would love to hear from you. It's always so exciting to hear from listeners. And I heard recently from Karen in Cleveland, who sent me some material about poetry and what's happening with public poetry, and I recently went to a film festival, and engaging in that way was more of a social experience than an art experience. However, when I got home, I was really inspired to make some art in response to that experience, so it facilitated and supported my experience. I really hope that you will be out and about in your community and you will support the arts. Funding is always kind of on the downturn in the UK. In the US and especially in schools, the arts are not as well funded as other subjects. So if you could donate to your favourite radio station, if you could buy a piece of art when you see an artist on the street, if you could participate in some way in funding, I highly recommend that experience because it feels really good to give. I do a monthly donation and it it it's about me noticing what matters to me and putting $11 a month to something that feels important to me in the arts. And showing your commitment in that way, I think, has a huge benefit. Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.