Creativity – A Powerful Tool for Managing Anxiety
Creativity is not a cute little hobby. Sometimes it’s survival.
Writing, painting, drawing, dreaming, puzzling, colouring, dancing, crafting, gardening, sewing, playing music, knitting, cooking…
For some people, these are hobbies.
For me, they are tiny doors back into myself.
When you live with anxiety, and especially when your nervous system has been shaped by trauma or CPTSD (like me), your brain can feel like a badly managed group chat. Loud. Constant. Slightly unhinged. Everyone has an opinion. No one is helping.
And when you’re already exhausted, the idea of doing something creative can almost feel offensive.
Like, sorry, you want me to paint?
To garden?
To journal ?
To dance ?
To make a little object with my little hands?
With this brain?
Because creativity can feel like the opposite of productive. And for a long time, I think I only knew how to value things that had a clear outcome. Something useful. Something finished. Something that proved I was not falling apart.
But the more I’ve learned about trauma, and the more I’ve had to actually live inside my body instead of just drag it around like an anxious suitcase, the more I’ve realised that creativity is not extra.
It’s regulation.
It gives the mind somewhere to go that is not the spiral. It gives the body something gentle to do that is not bracing, scanning, predicting, controlling, explaining, fixing.
Sometimes my brain is too loud for meditation. Sometimes sitting still makes me feel worse. Sometimes “just breathe” makes me want to throw a cushion at a wall.
But sewing a wonky hem?
Watering plants?
Writing three messy pages in a journal?
Making something with clay that may or may not look like a depressed bowl?
That I can do.
(Btw, if you don't know where to start and trying to find a "creative activity" feels overwheling, i've prepared a ready made activity kit. Why not check it out for ideas?)
And somewhere in the repetition, something softens.
There is something very calming about doing something with your hands. Knitting, sketching, gardening, cooking, coloring, painting, journaling. These tiny repetitive movements can become almost meditative, without asking you to become a person who meditates perfectly on a linen cushion at sunrise.
It's the same for small rituals.
They help channel all that frantic mental energy into something physical. Something contained. Something that says: here, put it here.
Research often talks about creativity as a way to reduce stress, anxiety and depression. Writing can help us process difficult emotions. Drawing or painting can help express things that feel too overwhelming, too tangled, or too old to put into words.
And honestly, that makes sense to me.
Because some things do not come out neatly in sentences. Some things come out as colour. As movement. As a garden bed. As a song played badly on the ukulele. As a journal entry that starts with “I’m fine” and ends with “actually, no, what the fuck.”
Creativity also creates moments of flow, that strange little pocket of time where you forget to monitor yourself. You are not performing. You are not fixing. You are not becoming a better version of yourself for capitalism or Instagram or your own inner critic.
You are just there.
Focused. Present. Absorbed.
And for a nervous system that has spent years living in threat mode, that is not nothing.
It can feel almost radical to be absorbed in something that is not fear.
There is also the tiny dopamine of finishing something. Not a masterpiece. Not a life-changing work of art. Just something.
A meal. A drawing. A few lines in a notebook. A planted seed. A repaired button. A little handmade object that exists because you made it exist.
When you have CPTSD, so much of life can feel like surviving things you never chose. Creativity is one of the few places where I feel a little bit of agency again.
I chose this colour.
I planted this here.
I made this badly, and it still counts.
I took up space.
I played.
I made a mess.
I laughed.
I stayed.
Personally, I do creative things every week, not because I am good at all of them, but because they help me come back to myself.
I garden. I sew. I paint with watercolors. I play the ukulele very imperfectly. I try new recipes. I make little handmade objects. I write in my journal. I dance in my living room. I sing (terribly and at the top of my lungs).
None of it has to become a business. None of it has to be shared. None of it has to be impressive.
That might actually be the point.
For people who grew up feeling watched, judged, unsafe, or responsible for everyone else’s emotions, doing something badly (it can also be well) and enjoying it anyway can be its own tiny rebellion.
Creativity reminds me that I am not only a person who copes.
I am also a person who makes things.
Who plays.
Who tries.
Who gets curious.
Who can still be surprised.
Who is allowed to take up space without turning it into an achievement.
And no, painting will not magically heal trauma. A coloring book is not a replacement for therapy. A pottery class will not fix your nervous system overnight.
But sometimes healing is not one huge breakthrough.
Sometimes it is five quiet minutes with your hands in the soil.
Sometimes it is writing the thing you were too scared to say out loud.
Sometimes it is making something small and ugly and loving it anyway.
Sometimes it is remembering that you are still here.
And that there is still something in you that wants to create.
If you don’t know where to begin, I really recommend The Artist’s Way. It’s gentle, reflective, and slightly annoying in the way useful things often are. It helped me think about creativity less as a talent and more as a relationship with myself.
And I think that’s what I keep coming back to.
Creativity is not about becoming an artist.
It’s about finding small, ordinary ways to feel alive again.
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