Working With Hands
Did you know … when your hands get activated by physical touch, endorphins and serotonin (pleasure chemicals) get released in your brain, and levels of cortisol (stress hormone) decrease. So, as you work with your hands, you provide activities to stimulate the brain by increasing pleasure while decreasing stress.
When I think of working with my hands, I tend to think of more artistic or glamorous ways of demonstrating expressions of creativity like painting or working with clay for example.
Painting allows for emotional release because it stimulates the creative side of your mind while focusing your attention in one place, which can lower anxiety. In this way, the creative outlet improves your mental health significantly. In previous blog, 4/17/22 Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, I wrote to you that my professor and author, Dr. Betty Edwards described this form of art teaching and art expression as: “an underlying method that the brain has two ways of perceiving and processing reality — one verbal and analytic, the other visual and perceptual. Edwards' method advocates suppressing the former in favor of the latter. It focuses on disregarding preconceived notions of what the drawn object should look like, and on individually "seeing.”
When we allow ourselves to focus on a stimulus by using our hands, we create much more than art; we explore what is occurring on the insides of our bodies.
Now, you’re gonna laugh, but since returning home from California and Michigan on June 22, my husband and I have been scraping, sanding, essentially prepping the house for an external paint job with a beautiful new gutter system.
Glamorous, eh?
But this next part may or may not surprise you; I’m still receiving the same stimuli and productive feeling results as if I was working on a glorious piece of art. (Granted, I would much rather be in an art studio than outside in 100 degree temperatures; and I would love to have my hands surrounded by clay on a wheel, creating ceramic bowls or teapots, rather than pushing around my RYOBI hand sander scraping flecks of blue and white paint into my hair each afternoon.
But the truth is, the motion of moving my hands is allowing me to calm my mind, focus my thoughts, and before I know it, hours have passed by!
10 Health Benefits of Painting You Won’t Want To
Miss Out On
-Painting to Gogh
We hope to be done by the end of July. (Just in time for another house project!) Yet, in the meantime, I’m rather enjoying the movement of working with my hands.
I hope to see you for our Yoga and Art day retreat August 26 (12-5)
This will be a perfect day!
