How Creative Expression Improves Emotional Regulation
Plus your weekly dose of creative upliftment
Creative expression helps to improve emotional regulation in a couple of different ways. One is to consciously pick a situation, memory, environment or upcoming event that is causing stress, concern, worry or regret, and deliberately reframe it.
One way that I’ve done this in the past is to look at two or three situations from when I was very young to perhaps teenage years which had a significant impact on me. The way I interpreted them at the time was proportionate to the age that I was at the time, and with the knowledge I’ve gained and the understanding I’ve learned in the meantime, I can revisit those situations and the emotions that come with them using art.
By drawing those scenes firstly as I remember them and secondly with a more positive outcome, I was able to disperse some of the emotional pain that I had held onto and was associating with those events. Using this version of emotional regulation with creative expression softens the edges that the nervous system has attached to the feelings that came with those situations at the time. How it felt, with the emotional resources that were available at that age, and the level to which they’ve stuck around with those feelings, reframing with art can be a useful way to settle them into a different place in the memory.
The other way that creative expression can improve emotional regulation is when emotion is dysregulated and this can happen in many ways. Different things affect different people; what makes one person have a meltdown may not affect another one at all, and vice versa. If emotional regulation is challenged either in a long-term blanket kind of way or in a more rollercoaster peak and trough way it can certainly make a big difference.
One of the main times I find that I get dysregulated emotionally is when I’m tired; physically and mentally exhausted. This can happen very easily - I’m prone to fatigue as it is with neurodivergence, hypermobility and CMT. But the demands of family life - work, home, domestic responsibilities - things which affect every single person, they have to be done. When you reach a point of running on non existent energy with no opportunity to step out of that, it can become overwhelming. If it’s late and I’ve had a really full on day or a week. If I try to go straight to sleep, the sleep and rest I get maybe limited, interrupted and disjointed. If I give myself an extra half an hour and spend that time drawing, painting, expressing myself creatively, writing, whatever the thing is - then the sleep and rest that I get is generally better.
I also find that if I really feel like I’m emotionally off on one, I’ve learned over the years to recognise this before it really blows up and to take myself away to another part of the house, usually my studio, and find some way to express creatively the energy that I am consumed by at that point. When I start painting I can feel it dissolving. I can feel it relaxing. I can feel the benefit without really being aware of it until afterwards but I know that the action of the creative things that I’m doing is the tonic, the balm, that is soothing the suffering. Because being emotionally dysregulated or needing to improve emotional regulation isn’t a good place to be in.
There’s also the fact that much of this work is creating for the sake of it; for example my painting on top of paintings with only photographs to evidence the fact of their existence. It shows me things when I look back at it especially when I look at the photos I’ve taken. When you do this, not only are you improving your emotional regulation, but you’re learning about yourself and understanding who you are and why you feel the way you do. You have a better connection with yourself as a result. The very important point about this is it is about expression, it’s not about making anything look like anything. It’s often about scribbling, writing, going through three sheets of paper, going off the edge of the page, throwing the paint at the canvas, whatever you need to do.
In this way, a regular practice can be preventative, because if you only save that creative activity for when it’s a necessity and on the verge of meltdown, then it is, in my opinion, the best thing to help with that. A bit of time and space to do this, whenever you get the opportunity is great, but a regular practice will be more likely to reduce situations where it becomes a necessity, when your brain feels full and there’s no energy left and demands keep coming and it all feels like a big heavy weight - a creative practice and regular creative practice or experimentation will perhaps engineer an environment where the exhaustion doesn’t pile up, the demands seem fewer, everything feels more manageable and then necessity isn’t there for the emergency creativity because the everyday creativity acts as the preventative medicine.
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