The Mental and Spiritual Benefits of Art

How many times have you caught yourself doomscrolling? You know the drill. It happens to most of us. It just happened to me last night, which inspired me to write this. I was completely caught up in doomscrolling at 3 am.  The blue light was searing my retinas, my posture was shaped like a cooked shrimp, and my brain felt like it had been run through a cheese grater. I wasn’t looking for anything specific. Just… numbing.

That’s the modern condition, isn’t it? We consume until we’re sick. We eat content. We swallow opinions. We drown in data.

I stood up, walked to the kitchen table, grabbed a cheap ballpoint pen and the back of an unpaid electric bill, and I drew a circle. It was a terrible circle. Lopsided. Wobbly. But for the ten seconds it took to scratch that ink into the paper, the noise in my head stopped.

That silence? That is the only thing that matters.

We need to talk about art. Not the stuff in the Louvre, and definitely not the stuff selling for millions as NFTs. I’m talking about the messy, desperate, visceral act of making something exist where nothing existed before. This isn’t a hobby. It’s a survival mechanism.

The Lie of “Talent”

Here is the biggest lie you have ever been told: You have to be good at art to enjoy it.

Who came up with that? Probably some bitter art teacher in 1994 who told you your horse looked like a dog. We treat creativity like it’s a VIP club. If you can’t draw a photorealistic eye, you’re not allowed to pick up a pencil.

That is absolute garbage.

When we gatekeep creativity, we cut ourselves off from one of the most potent forms of mental regulation available to our species. You don’t need talent. You need guts. You need the willingness to make something ugly.

I remember taking a pottery class a few years ago. I walked in expecting to have a Ghost moment—sensual music, perfect symmetry, clay gliding through my fingers. Instead, my clay flew off the wheel and hit the person next to me in the shoulder. It was humiliating. It was messy. I was covered in gray sludge.

And I was laughing. I was laughing harder than I had in months. My cortisol levels tanked. My ego dissolved. That’s the secret. The “bad” art was doing more for my soul than a masterpiece ever could because the masterpiece is about the product, but the disaster is about the process.

Understanding Healing Art (Without the Clinical Sterile Vibe)

There is a buzzword floating around lately: Healing art.

Usually, when people say this, they mean adult coloring books or polite watercolor classes in beige rooms. And sure, if coloring inside the lines lowers your blood pressure, go for it. But real healing art is often much grittier.

Healing isn’t always pretty. Sometimes, a wound needs to be cleaned out, and that stings.

The Exorcism of the Page

I have a notebook I call the “Burn Book.” Not like Mean Girls. It’s a book where I draw my rage. When I’m furious at the world, at politics, at my landlord, I don’t tweet about it. I get a thick black marker and I make sharp, jagged lines until the paper tears.

This is healing art in its rawest form. It is the externalization of internal rot.

Psychologists will tell you that trauma is stored in the body. It sits in your shoulders. It tightens your jaw. When you engage in expressive arts, you are physically moving that energy out. You are taking a feeling that is invisible and formless—anxiety, grief, rage—and you are giving it a physical avatar.

Once it’s on the paper, or in the clay, or in the song, it’s not in you anymore. It’s out there. You can look at it. You can burn it. You can frame it. But it doesn’t own you.

Why Your Brain Craves the Analog

We are analog creatures living in a digital cage. Our fingers have evolved to weave baskets, chip flint, and smooth mud. They did not evolve to tap glass screens.

When you engage in tactile art—getting charcoal under your fingernails, smelling the turpentine (safely, please), feeling the resistance of the canvas—you are waking up dormant parts of your brain. This sensory engagement grounds you in the “now.”

You can’t worry about next week’s meeting when you are trying to keep watercolor from running into the wrong section of the page. The stakes are low, but the focus is high. That is the flow state. That is the medicine.

The Search for Spiritual Art in a Secular World

I’m not a religious person. I don’t go to church much. But I’m a deeply spiritual person. I know there is a Force or Power that is GOD. I have felt God (or whatever you want to call the infinite) standing in front of a beautiful nature painting, or just being out in nature observing a magnificent landscape which is even more effecting than looking at a landscape painting.

Spiritual art isn’t necessarily about painting Jesus or Buddha. It’s about the Void. It’s about the Great Mystery, the feelings it evokes. The ties it has to the beauty in life.

There is a reason humans have been painting on cave walls for 40,000 years. Before we had written language, before we had agriculture, we had art. We had the urge to leave a handprint in red ochre that said, “I was here. I saw this. I felt this.”

The Bridge to the Subconscious

When you stop trying to control the outcome, art becomes a form of divination.

Have you ever started doodling and realized ten minutes later you drew something weirdly specific? Maybe a house you lived in as a kid, or a face that looks like your grandmother? That’s spiritual art working its way up from the basement of your subconscious.

It’s a way of talking to yourself without the filter of language. Language is tricky. Language lies. We have scripts for how we talk. But images? Images are primal.

I have a friend who started painting abstract circles after her divorce. She didn’t know why. She just painted hundreds of circles. Black circles, gold circles, broken circles. A year later, she told me she realized she was painting wholeness. She was trying to put herself back together, loop by loop. She bypassed her conscious brain, which was screaming in panic, and let her spirit handle the reconstruction.

Art as a Meditation Practice

Meditation is hard. Sitting still and “thinking of nothing” is torture for people with ADHD or high anxiety.

Making art is active meditation. It is mindfulness with props.

If you focus entirely on the shading of a sphere, watching how the light hits the curve, your breathing slows down. Your heart rate drops. You enter a trance. This is a spiritual practice. You are paying attention to the world, and attention is the highest form of prayer.

When you draw a flower, you are forced to actually see the flower. You see the asymmetry of the petals. You see the way the stem bends. You stop seeing the symbol of a “flower” and start seeing the living reality of that specific plant. That shift in perception? That’s enlightenment, baby. Even if just for a minute.

How to Start (When You Are Terrified of Failure)

Okay, so you’re convinced. You want the mental and spiritual benefits of art. But you’re staring at a blank page and the inner critic is already screaming, “This is going to suck.”

Good. Let it suck. Make it suck on purpose.

1. The 5-Minute Trash Challenge

Get a piece of paper. Set a timer for five minutes. Your goal is to fill the page with garbage. Scribbles. Stick figures. Words that don’t make sense. If you try to make it look nice, you lose.

The goal here is to break the paralysis of perfectionism. You are proving to your brain that the world will not end if you draw a bad picture.

2. Use “Junior” Materials

Do not go to the art store and buy a $50 canvas. You will be too scared to ruin it. Buy a box of crayons. Use cardboard from an Amazon box. Use finger paints.

When the materials are “cheap” or “childish,” the pressure vanishes. You can play. Remember play? That thing you used to do before you had a mortgage? Healing art thrives in the playground, not the gallery.

3. Collage Your Feelings

If you truly feel you cannot draw (you can, but I believe that you believe you can’t), try collage.

Get some old magazines. Rip them up. Don’t use scissors; tearing the paper is visceral and satisfying. Glue images together that don’t belong. Put a fish head on a politician. Put a galaxy inside a coffee cup.

Surrealism is a great way to bypass logic. It lets your brain make connections that aren’t linear. It’s dream logic.

The Dark Side: When Art Hurts

I want to be real with you. Sometimes, opening the door to creativity lets the monsters out.

I’ve had painting sessions that ended in tears. I’ve written stories that left me shaking. When you use spiritual art to dig deep, you might hit a nerve.

This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s something to be ready for. We live in a culture of toxic positivity where everything is supposed to be “uplifting.” Screw that. Art is a container for the shadow.

If you draw something scary, don’t throw it away immediately. Look at it. Ask it what it wants. Usually, the scary things in our heads just want to be acknowledged. They want to be seen. Once you put them on paper, they lose their power to haunt you from the shadows. They become just lines on a 2D surface. You become the master of your monsters.

A Note on Community (and Why You Should Hide Your Work)

This might sound contradictory, but for the love of everything holy, do not post your art on Instagram.

At least, not at first.

The second you post something, you start counting likes. You start wondering what the algorithm thinks. You start performing.

Healing art requires privacy. It requires a safe space where you can be weird, vulnerable, and mediocre. Keep a sketchbook that no one is allowed to open. That is your sanctuary.

However, making art with people is different. Sitting in a room with friends, drinking cheap wine, and painting bad portraits of each other? That is tribal. That is connection. We bond through shared creation. Just keep the phones in your pockets.

The Final Verdict on the “Waste of Time”

I hear this constantly: “I don’t have time for hobbies. I have work. I have kids. I have to hustle.”

Art is not a waste of time. It is a reclaiming of time, even an expression of time.

When you are scrolling TikTok, you are losing time. It slips through your fingers like sand. You snap too your senses an hour later and feel emptier.

When you spend an hour sketching a tree in your backyard, you have gained that hour. You remember the way the light hit the bark. You remember the smell of the grass. You were alive for that hour.

In a world that wants to turn you into a productivity robot, making useless, beautiful, ugly, weird art is an act of rebellion. It is a declaration that you are a human being with a soul, not just a consumer with a credit card.

So, go buy the crayons. Smell the wax. Draw the monster under your bed. Draw your hope. Draw a circle that looks like a potato.

It won’t make you rich. It won’t make you famous. But it might just save your life.

Or at least your Tuesday afternoon.

Would you like me to help you brainstorm a specific 7-day “bad art” challenge to kickstart this habit?

Drop me a few lines in response to my post and I will see what I can do.

Thanks for stopping by!

We’d love to know what you think. Drop a comment below with your feedback or suggestions—we can’t wait to hear from you.

– Best, Stable Grace Staff Writers & Editors