How Creative Habits Cut Depression Risk by 48%

The Research: Creative Activities Boost Emotional Regulation

Daisy Fancourt, PhD, a psychobiologist at University College London, argues 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. Her team’s Emotion Regulation Strategies for Artistic Creative Activities Scale found that creative activity regulates emotion along three distinct routes: avoidance (distraction and detachment), approach (acceptance and reappraisal), and self-development (building identity and agency through mastery).

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 Prepares You for Future Crises

The stranger finding that Fancourt shared 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.

Five Steps to 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.