Flex your creativity

To mark National Mental Health Month in October, MakeShift co-founder Caitlin Marshall shares the power of playful practices in challenging times.

Challenging times. We keep hearing that expression, don’t we? Times have always been challenging for humans, and the past couple of years have certainly brought many of us to our knees with unique and invisible moments of grief – in losing work, or loved ones, or connections to things that won’t be the same for a while, or loss of freedoms, or security.

All of these experiences most definitely impact our mental wellbeing, and we’ve heard that too. That the second ‘pandemic’ is a mental health one, as services are beyond capacity, waiting lists are long, access to psychologists beleaguered by this huge strain on the system.

If anything has come out of the pandemic experience, it’s the greater awareness that we all do indeed have mental health, just like physical health, and it moves up and down a spectrum, instead of being a static experience of either illness or health.

But what can we do if our mental health is being challenged? Or we just want to keep ourselves feeling okay, able to bob along despite the ongoing stressors of change in a pretty gloomy world right now?

We hear a lot about wellbeing, and the need to be ‘well’. While that might elicit images of people cruising along happy in their life day to day – it actually means something a little different.

Being skilled in transitioning out of states of fear, anxiety, distress, and into grounded calm, regulated presence - that is the marker of wellbeing. We all have a nervous system, so we all experience times when our stress response is GO – fight, flight, freeze, submit.

Noticing this happening, and then being able to do things to help us shift back into that calmer state is a skill we learn for LIFE!

Here is the fun part – the ways that we can transition back to our window of ‘tolerance’ or comfort are usually things that we do alone, they don’t cost money, and they can be fun! They are creative, playful, mindful practices that do this invisible job of regulating our nervous systems.

Drawing, painting, making, stitching, cooking, gardening, writing, singing, dancing - all of these practices can be so powerful in shifting these transitions. Our work here at MakeShift is all about creating the conditions for people to try out these practices. Because for lots of folks - we were told long ago that we weren’t creative, so downed tools and never tried again! The truth is - we all have that creative muscle within us. It is an innate human quality that we can actually rely on when we feel anxious, numb, depressed, scared, angry, despairing. We just have to give ourselves permission to give it a go! Just like going for a run to get the cardio benefit, we don’t have to be ‘good’ at drawing, or dancing, writing or making, to get the benefit from it.

So give yourself permission to try something creative and playful. Start with a walk around the block, noticing 10 things in 10 different colours: red, orange, peach, pink, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, purple, violet.

The more we lean into strengthening this muscle, the more skilled we become in having some hands on the controls of our mood, our nervous system, and how mindful, grounded and mentally well we feel day by day.

Caitlin Marshall is a social worker, mental health educator and co-founder of MakeShift, a support and education agency that connects creativity and mental health, for social change.

Find out about upcoming programs and training at www.makeshift.org.au

And check out Makeshift's podcast series exploring creativity as an antidote for challenging times. The podcasts feature interviews with makers and artists – including Illawarra locals such as artist Michele Elliot, musician Bec Sandridge and poet Kirli Saunders – who share their personal stories of how creative practices have helped them through tough times.