I have written some version of this sentence on this site more times than I could count. It is in my bio. It sits under my name on the About page. I have said it in half a dozen different posts, usually in passing, usually as a kind of full stop at the end of a paragraph about something else entirely.
Creativity is essential care for the mind.
I have never actually sat down and explained what I mean by it. I have talked around it constantly — through knots, through seams, through the mistakes I have made and the funks I have climbed out of — but never straight at it. So this is me doing that, properly, once.
I want to say up front that this is not a piece about art therapy, and I am not going to tell you that macrame will fix your mental health. I am a registered counsellor, and I take that distinction seriously. What I am going to tell you is what I actually believe, as both a counsellor and someone who has been making things with her hands for forty years, about why creativity matters to a mind far more than we generally give it credit for.
Two careers, one belief
For a long time I thought of my creative life and my working life as two separate things happening to run alongside each other. I sewed and printed and painted. Separately, I studied psychology, worked in community services, trained as a teacher, and eventually became a registered counsellor.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice they were the same belief wearing two different coats.
Everything I do in a counselling room is, at its core, about helping someone find a way to sit with themselves that is a little kinder and a little steadier than the way they arrived. And everything I have ever loved about making things — the sewing, the screen printing, and now the macrame — has done exactly that for me, long before I had the language to explain why.
So when I say creativity is essential care for the mind, I am not speaking as a hobbyist offering an opinion. I am speaking as someone who has spent a career studying what steadies a mind, and a lifetime discovering that making things does it for me as reliably as almost anything else I know.
What “essential care” actually means
I chose those words carefully, and I want to unpack them rather than let them sit as a nice-sounding phrase.
Essential, not optional. Not a luxury for people with spare time, not a “treat yourself” indulgence squeezed in after the real work is done. I mean essential the way sleep is essential, or moving your body is essential — something your mind actually needs on a fairly regular basis, not something it would merely enjoy.
Care, not cure. This is the distinction I am most protective of. Creativity is not a treatment. It does not diagnose anything, and it will not fix a genuine mental health condition on its own. But care is a real category of its own — the daily, unglamorous maintenance that keeps a mind in reasonable working order, the way brushing your teeth is care rather than dentistry. Most of us need both. Creativity sits firmly in the care category, and I think we underrate how much that category matters.
For the mind, specifically, rather than for a career or a house or an Instagram feed. This is the part people miss most often. The value is not in what you end up with. It is in what happens to you while you are making it.
It is not about the object
If there is one thing I would want you to take from everything I have ever written here, it is this: it is the process, not the product, that does the work.
I have said versions of this constantly — in The Importance of Sustaining Creativity, in almost everything I have written about comparison, in every single post where I have shown you something wonky and told you I do not mind. It is the load-bearing belief under this entire site, and I do not think I have ever said it as plainly as this: the plant hanger is not the point. What happens in you while you tie the knots is the point.
This is genuinely hard to believe in a culture that measures almost everything by outcome. We are trained from very early on to ask whether a thing is good, whether it is worth the time, whether anyone will want it. None of those questions matter to the part of you that creativity is actually caring for.
A lopsided owl that nobody else will ever buy did exactly as much for my mind as a piece I might sell for good money. More, probably, because nobody was watching and nothing was riding on it.
The particular thing repetitive craft does
I want to get specific here, because I think vague talk of “the healing power of craft” does a disservice to something that is actually quite precise.
The kind of making I love most — sewing a long seam, tying the same knot forty times down a macrame arm, screen printing the same design across a length of fabric — shares one quality: it is repetitive, physical, and just engaging enough to hold your attention without demanding all of it.
That is a very particular state to be in. Psychologists call it flow, and I have written about it before in relation to macrame specifically — the odd, lovely thing that happens once a knot becomes automatic in your hands and your mind is left free but occupied. Not blank. Occupied, gently, by something that asks just enough of you to keep the noisier, more anxious parts of your thinking quiet for a while.
I do not think this is a coincidence, and I do not think it is really about macrame, or sewing, or any specific craft. I think any sufficiently repetitive, physical, hands-on task can do this. Gardening does it for some people. Cooking does it for others. Running, for people whose bodies work that way. What they share is rhythm, repetition, and something real happening in your hands while your mind gets a rest from itself.
For me, for reasons I only partly understand, it has always been textiles. Cloth and cord and thread, going back to being a small child watching my mother knot a plant hanger on the end of a chair leg. I suspect everyone has their own version of it, and a great deal of what I write on this site is really just me trying to help people find theirs.
Where the evidence sits, honestly
I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of claim that gets overstated everywhere online, and I have written elsewhere about how wary I am of that.
The research on creative activity and mental wellbeing is real but genuinely mixed. Reviews of art-based interventions generally find modest, short-term improvements in mood and anxiety, alongside acknowledgment that study quality varies a great deal and long-term effects are not well established. This is a familiar shape to me — it is very similar to what the evidence says about massage for muscle tension, or exercise for mild anxiety: real, worth doing, not a cure, and not something that replaces proper treatment when proper treatment is what is needed.
So here is where I actually land, and I think it is a fair place to stand. Creativity is not a treatment for mental illness, and I would never suggest it as a substitute for therapy, medication, or professional support when those are genuinely needed. But as a piece of everyday self-care — alongside sleep, movement, connection with other people, and the rest of the ordinary maintenance a mind needs — I believe it belongs on the list. Not because I can point you to a single definitive study, but because the mechanism makes sense, the modest evidence supports it, and thirty years of my own experience backs it up.
If you are struggling in a way that feels bigger than everyday tension, please do speak to a GP or a mental health professional. Creativity can sit alongside that kind of support. It is not a replacement for it.
Why courage keeps coming into it
I have written before that creativity takes courage, and I want to connect that idea back to this one, because I think they are more related than they first appear.
The reason so many of us stopped making things somewhere around adulthood is not that we ran out of time, although that is the excuse we usually reach for. It is that we became afraid of being bad at something in public, even an audience of nobody. Losing the Fear of Being Wrong was, underneath everything, about exactly this.
That fear is worth naming honestly, because it is the actual barrier between most adults and the kind of care this article is describing. Not lack of time. Lack of permission to be bad at something for a while, in a world that mostly only rewards being good at things.
Every tutorial I write, every wonky owl I photograph and post anyway, is a small argument against that fear. Not because the wonkiness does not matter, but because insisting on skill before you are allowed to begin is one of the more effective ways I know to talk yourself out of something that would genuinely do you good.
This is not a prescription
I want to end this section clearly, because I think it matters as much as anything else in this piece.
I am not telling you that if you are struggling, you should go and take up macrame and you will feel better. Minds and circumstances are far too varied and complicated for advice that tidy, and I would not trust anyone, myself included, who offered it with that much confidence.
What I am telling you is narrower and, I think, more honest. A regular, repetitive, hands-on creative practice is a genuinely reasonable thing to build into an ordinary life, the way you might build in a daily walk or a proper night’s sleep. It will not fix everything. It is not meant to. But as a small, steady piece of care for your own mind, alongside everything else that mind might need, I believe in it as much as anything I know.
What I would actually suggest
If any of this has landed, here is where I would start — genuinely small, genuinely unambitious.
Pick something repetitive rather than something impressive. A row of straight stitching. A length of square knots. The specific craft matters far less than whether your hands can find a rhythm in it.
Give it fifteen minutes, not an evening. Making time for creativity is its own small battle, and fifteen minutes is a battle almost anyone can win.
Let the first attempt be bad. Genuinely, properly bad, with nobody watching and nothing riding on it. That permission is doing more of the work than any technique I could teach you.
Do it again tomorrow, even for five minutes. The care is in the rhythm of returning to it, not in any single session.
I have no way of knowing whether it will do for you what it does for me. But I have spent a career studying what steadies a mind, and a life discovering that this steadies mine — and I think that is worth more than a passing line at the end of a paragraph. So there it is, finally, in full.
What steadies you? I would love to know, whatever form it takes — tell me in the comments below.
If anything in this post has raised something more than everyday stress for you, please reach out to a GP, a counsellor, or a helpline such as Lifeline on 13 11 14. You do not have to carry it alone, and creativity is a companion to that support, never a substitute for it.
