When you’re already feeling low, queuing up a sad album might seem like poor judgment. So might staying up past midnight reading a novel that’s breaking your heart.
Daisy Fancourt, PhD, a psychobiologist at University College London, has spent a decade demonstrating that our instinct to lean into sad, creative outlets is actually much smarter than it may appear. On a recent episode of Hidden Brain, Fancourt argued that the arts aren’t a pleasant break from emotional work. They’re actually a place where a shockingly large amount of our emotional work can happen.
The off hours that you spend listening to music, reading fiction, or sketching in your notebook train you to deal with tough emotions in a healthy way.
The Research: Why Your Sketchpad Does Something A Crossword Can’t
Fancourt built an instrument to measure the ways that creativity helps you regulate your emotions.
Her team’s Emotion Regulation Strategies for Artistic Creative Activities Scale found that creative activity regulates emotion along three distinct routes:
- Avoidance: Your creative outlet offers you distraction, suppression, and detachment. You give your mind a much-needed break.
- Approach: You work through acceptance, reappraisal, and problem-solving. You return to the thing weighing on you, but now you likely see it differently.
- Self-development: You develop a firmer sense of identity, higher self-esteem, and more agency. This is built by getting good at something.
Fancourt described the third route on the podcast through a woman she calls Shea, an attorney who signed up for a week-long music course. In just one week, Shea found that the course reset her sense of what she was capable of.
Crucially, the creativity is the active ingredient, not the busyness. In one experiment, participants viewed distressing images and then either drew their feelings or copied geometric shapes. The group who drew their feelings saw an improvement in mood. Those who just copied shapes didn’t. Neither did a third group working through a word puzzle. Occupying your attention isn’t enough. You need to activate your own creativity.
How Art Can Also Help Prepare You For Future Crises
The stranger finding that Fancourt shared when it comes to the intersection of art and emotions is that seeing other people experience a catastrophe—in a devastating film, a depressing album, or a horror novel—can help prepare you for future catastrophes you may face yourself.
Fancourt’s explanation is that art creates a gap between you and the emotion. You feel the fear or the grief, but you aren’t required to respond to it. Since the stakes don’t actually impact your life, you don’t have to fix anything, escape anything, or manage anyone’s reaction. As she put it on the podcast, “we experience those emotions, but we don’t have to respond to them.”
Because the stakes are nonexistent, these pieces of art become preparatory playgrounds. Your brain runs through how it might regulate that same tough emotion faced by the character in the show, and how you might respond, but you don’t experience any of the negative costs. Fancourt notes that you can think of our brains as prediction machines, and art is an unusually cheap way to expand the set of situations you’ve already rehearsed.
Why This Is A Matter Of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EI) is your ability to recognize and manage emotions in yourself and in your interactions with others. You can subdivide it into four core skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
What Fancourt is describing—using art to better regulate your emotions across a variety of situations—is a brilliant and pleasant self-management strategy. Self-management isn’t a trait you either have or don’t. It’s capacity, and one that responds well to repetition. By engaging your creativity, you vastly strengthen your emotion regulation in a zero stakes environment.
The evidence for this runs deep. Following 2,148 adults who were free of depression at baseline, Fancourt and her colleague found a clear dose-response pattern. Simply going to museums, theatre, or cinema every few months came with 32% lower odds of developing depression over the next decade, and monthly or more predicted 48% lower odds.
An EI Strategy You Can Apply Right Now: The Creative Habit
Treat creative engagement as a regular health habit, like eating well, sleeping, and exercising. These five steps can help you build the habit.
- Match the creative form to your need. Choose something absorbing when you need distance from your problem, something expressive when you need to process big emotions, and something skill-building when your confidence has taken a hit.
- Set a floor, not a ceiling. Fifteen minutes daily adds up to much more time than four hours per month. Anchor your habit to an existing slot, like your commute, lunch, or the first stretch after you finish work.
- Give the task your actual attention. Background music you’re familiar with can help. The deeper your attention, the better.
- Tap into the heavier stuff. Deliberately spend time with art that carries tough emotions. This is a powerful way to “rehearse” for future emotional challenges and build your resilience with zero stakes.
- Rotate what you’re engaging in every few months. Novelty can help you keep engaging with your creativity by keeping things interesting and fresh.
