It was Pablo Picasso who said – with some painterly flamboyance – that, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” It’s good for you – is what I think he was getting at.
Some 50 years after Picasso’s death, it’s beginning to look like he was right. Researchers are learning that the health benefits of creating or consuming art are anything but abstract. It can have genuine physiological and psychosomatic effects.
Just looking at art can lower a person’s heart rate, blood pressure and cortisol levels, sometimes in real time.
Some artsy activities can even reduce markers of inflammation in the body or improve neuroplasticity in the brain. There are targeted creative therapies, too.
In 2020, the English National Opera and Imperial College London rolled out a trial of the Breathe programme, which taught people suffering from long Covid some of the techniques used by top tenors and sopranos.
The work added to a growing chorus of evidence that singing can improve breath control, lung function and general wellbeing for people with lung conditions, including asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Art therapy is also used in the rehabilitation of stroke patients.
It’s shown to reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety, plus post-traumatic stress disorder in military veterans. It can improve mood and cognition in people with dementia.
Certain types of art can even reduce a person’s perception of pain, including patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that social prescribing became a part of the UK’s national health policy in 2019.
The idea is that healthcare professionals prescribe activities – such as art classes, singing and dancing lessons or gallery tours – to improve a patient’s overall wellbeing.
“Around 33 per cent of people who visit doctors don’t need medical care, they need psychosocial support,” says Dr Claire Howlin, a researcher at Trinity College Dublin.
“We think art is good for general wellbeing, but we need to understand which parts are most important to deliver positive health outcomes.”
To do that, Howlin and a team in Vienna published a systematic analysis of the existing evidence in the Journal of Positive Psychology in 2025. They screened almost 4,000 papers – a measure of the growing interest in the field – but found mixed results.
Like many works of art, the research is open to a certain amount of interpretation, Howlin says. “There’s a huge variance in study design and also a huge range of physiological responses that people have.
"A very simplistic way of looking at it would be to say, for example, that if you look at a picture in a gallery, it’ll lower your blood pressure. But the reality is that the responses can be very different from one person to the next.”
Howlin says that, as with any behavioural intervention, we need to build a strong evidence base to truly understand the effects. What matters most isn’t the art itself, but the role it plays in supporting wellbeing.
Studies have shown that a wide variety of artistic styles can lead to positive health changes. One study found that life drawing and stained-glass painting had a positive effect on the heart rates of older people.
In one of Howlin’s papers, she found that, for people with chronic pain, therapeutic music doesn’t have to mean classical playlists – dance and thrash metal also work for some.
The research may be inconsistent, but Howlin believes that art is fundamentally good for our health. To reap the benefits, though, you have to engage with it. Passively looking at a Picasso won’t do anything on its own – you have to participate on some level.
“The first thing is, making that decision is really important: if you’re going to a class or a gallery, you’re putting yourself first, going out and doing something that you don’t normally do. There are probably pro-social benefits involved.
“But also, when you’re engaged, you enter something that’s almost a flow state. It’s something meaningful with a process of absorption. It’s a very active form of engagement.
"That’s where we think the emotional regulation and some of the physiological benefits are coming from.”
All of this is to say, you don’t have to paint to be a picture of health.
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