Painting as Anxiety Management

"By the time I finished I could think again."

Painting as Anxiety Management

I have high functioning anxiety. It's rooted in PTSD from experiences I've written about elsewhere and won't repeat here. What matters for this post is what I've found that works.

Painting works.

Not in a vague wellness way. Specifically and mechanically. When my nervous system is dysregulated, when the anxiety is running and the thoughts are circular and nothing is resolving, picking up a brush forces a particular kind of focus that nothing else produces the same way.

The hand has to do something specific. The eye has to watch what the hand is doing. The mind, which was running in seventeen directions, has to narrow to the problem in front of it. What color goes here? How wet is this brush? Is this edge hard or soft? These are not small questions when you're inside them. They're the whole world.

What happens is that the anxiety doesn't disappear. It gets set aside. And while it's set aside, while the hand and eye are busy, the thoughts and feelings that were tangled start to sort themselves out in the background without being forced. I come out the other side of a painting session not fixed but clearer. Able to look at what was overwhelming and take it apart piece by piece.

The piece that showed me this most clearly was an ink drawing of il Duomo in Florence. I was in a difficult place when I started it. The cathedral is enormously complex — every surface has detail, every detail has to be placed correctly or the whole thing falls apart. I drew for hours. By the time I finished I could think again.

I'm not suggesting painting as a replacement for professional support. I have a cognitive based process I use for high anxiety moments and it works. Painting is what I reach for before things get that far. It's the first line.

The abstract becomes concrete when I put it on paper. Once it's concrete I can look at it. Once I can look at it I can work with it.

That's the whole mechanism. It's not magic. It's just having somewhere to put things.

Jackie