Improve Mental Health with 7 Creative Hobbies

5/1/2017

Many friendships/relations begin with simple questions like what are your hobbies? or what you do in free time?. Staying busy with something to do is good but scientific research has found doing something creative increases emotional well-being and strengthens mental health.

A study done by a group of young adults found that daily creative activities direct towards an 'upward spiral' of increased wellbeing.

Researchers from the Department of Psychology at New Zealand's University of Otago asked above 650 university students to keep a daily journal about their experiences and emotional state over 13 days.

A leading author Dr. Tamlin Conner and her team hoped to find-out whether everyday creative activities makes people feel emotionally better.

“There is growing recognition in psychology research that creativity is associated with emotional functionality. However, almost all of this work focuses on how emotions benefit or hamper creativity, not whether creativity benefits or hampers emotional well-being,” Dr Conner spoke in her statement.

Researchers studied & collected informations informally in an earlier study instead of specifically asking participants to specify the nature of their creative activity. An Indirect approach.

Songwriting; creative writing (poetries, short-fictions); knitting & crochet; making new recipes; drawing, painting & sketching; graphics and digital design; and musical performances were among the most common examples for such acitivies.
They also found that “positive affect” (PA) - which includes feelings like happiness, pleasurable engagement, excitement, joy & enthusiasm - on a particular day did not predict creative activity for next-day.

“Our earlier research found that PA appears to increase creativity during the same day, yet our latest findings showcase that there is no cross-day effect. Rather, it is creative activity on the previous day that predicts wellbeing the next,” she spoke.
Even after controlling the next-day creative activity, the previous day’s creativity significantly predicted energised flourishing and PA.

Dr Conner & her co-authors added to above: “finding suggests a particular kind of upward spiral for well-being & creativity - engaging in creative behaviour leads to an increases in well-being the next-day, & this increased well-being is likely to facilitate creative activity on the same day."
They also concluded that “overall, these findings support the emerging emphasis on everyday creativity as a means of cultivating positive psychological functioning”.