Anxiety and Creative Arts Therapies

Anxiety is a prevalent condition that does not discriminate by age, gender, ethnicity, or culture. Anxiety, while common, develops from the uniqueness of an individual’s brain chemistry, thoughts, and experiences. It’s often associated with higher levels of stress, fear, or worry and is considered a highly treatable condition. Creative Arts Therapy offers a potent approach to anxiety management and symptom reduction.

When an individual is facing anxiety, they often experience quick and intense changes in their thoughts and body that are associated with increased stress in the environment or task obligation. These feeling can inhibit an individual’s ability to concentrate at work, focus on tasks at school, attend social functions or regularly eat and sleep. The impact of anxiety can create social, cognitive, emotional, and educational ripples in an individual’s life.

Creative Arts Therapy for Anxiety at ITA

Each of the Creative Arts Therapies offered at ITA can work on goals related to anxiety. Using art therapy for anxiety engages the range of experience of feelings of anxiety and stressful events that goes beyond verbal description. Art therapy is about tapping into the personal experience with each medium, the experience with different art making processes, and the goals and content of psychotherapy.

Music therapy for anxiety can entail playing instruments, singing a song, composing music, and creating of improvisational music for therapeutic change. For individuals become anxious, the feeling of anxiety increases cortisol and adrenaline chemicals in the brain. Music therapy is used to counteract these chemicals by increasing glucocorticoid in addition to providing an socio-emotional learning process and cognitive restructuring.

As anxiety frequently stems from a physiological response to stress or fear that continues to manifest beyond the first stress encounter, dance/movement therapy engages directly the physical body’s response patterns. At ITA, a movement therapist could work to help a client recognize how anxiety is affecting his or her body and change movement patterns to compensate. For example, a person can carry anxiety as tension in his or her shoulders could learn to move in a different manner that would reduce this tension.

In Drama Therapy, the cognitive and physiological manifestations of anxiety can be drawn into a story where the individual represents their fears or worries in a less threatening manner. It provides distance from the issue, as if the anxiety is about another person—like asking a personal question for a friend, but it’s really about you. This distance allows the individual to examine and change their anxiety and its triggers from a more distanced perspective.

For our full article on Creative Arts Therapy for Anxiety, please see our piece on Anxiety.org.