Why Creativity Belongs in Your Health Routine with Dr. Daisy Fancourt
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What is the significance of creativity for women’s health?
If you are loving the conversations on my podcast and you want to go deeper with me, come join me over on Substack. It's where I share the conversations I'm having behind the scenes, the research that I'm obsessed on and paying close attention to, and really the thoughts I don't always get to unpack here on the podcast or any of my other social media. We're taking women's health, fasting, hormones, food systems, mindset, aging, and what it really means to live like a girl in today's world to a whole new level. You'll also get early podcast access. deeper essays on my thoughts around how we can all stay healthy in this modern world. You get community, you get conversations, and exclusive content that I only share there.
I'm not joking when I said this is my new favorite place. It is currently where I am at. So you can head on over to substack.drmindypels.com or just search Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pels directly in the Substack app. I'm super excited to have you over there. Please introduce yourself and let's dive in to some really good conversations. Hey, Dr. Mindy here, and welcome to the Live Like a Girl podcast, where I bring you icons, disruptors, educators, scientists, and doctors that show you what can be possible when you love and celebrate the female body you are blessed to live in. Let's dive in. When my daughter was little, she came home from school one day glowing with pride. She had colored a picture and she had stayed perfectly inside every single line.
She held it up to me like she had won an Olympic medal. And I remember standing there, really happy for her, but also feeling this quiet ache underneath. Because I realized that somewhere in that moment, a trade was being made. She was learning that the reward wasn't in what she created. It was in how well she followed the shape someone else had already drawn for her. Watch any small child before the lesson lands, and it's the opposite. They scribble outside every boundary. They mix colors that shouldn't go together. They make up songs with no rhyme, dances with no choreography, stories with no ending. Nobody has to teach a four-year-old to be creative. We have to actively un-teach it out of her. And I don't think that that's a small loss.
I think it's the beginning of a much bigger pattern, one that follows women straight into adulthood, where we learn early that being celebrated means staying inside the lines. It's a part of where we learn to just be agreeable, to be contained, and then we carry that philosophy into our bodies, into our nervous systems, our whole way of moving through the world long after we've outgrown our childhood coloring book. And here's what's wild to me is that there are now over 30,000 published scientific papers on what happens when we let ourselves get messy and creative again. And yet 95% of adults will tell you they didn't do a single artistic thing yesterday. Not a doodle, not a hum, nothing. We have made creativity into something optional, something that's elite for other people who have some kind of special talent.
When the research says it might be one of the most powerful regulators of our nervous system that we've completely stopped using in this modern world. Now I'm talking about actual physiology here. Looking at art, drawing art, thinking about art, you start to see cortisol dropping, heart rate slowing down. The autonomic nervous system shifts out of that scanning for threat state and into something calmer, safer, more like a body that trusts it's not under attack. In some studies, just listening to music has calmed pre-surgery anxiety better than the anti-anxiety medication itself. Art is so much more than decoration. It's medicine. And this is why I have brought you Dr. Daisy Fancourt. Daisy is a leading researcher on the science of arts, health, and well-being with hundreds of published studies behind her.
Her new book, which I highly recommend, The Art Cure, makes the case that creativity isn't a luxury for the artistic among us. It is actually a biological need for all of us and one most of us abandoned somewhere around the same time we learned
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the significance of creativity for women’s health?
0:00–8:23
2
How does early childhood creativity loss affect adult women?
8:23–19:23
3
What does research reveal about art’s impact on stress and the nervous system?
19:23–32:45
4
How can music be used to lower cortisol and regulate heart rate?
32:45–45:38
5
Why does reading fiction enhance empathy and mental health?
45:38–57:50
6
How do “grandmother hobbies” like knitting and crochet benefit the brain?
57:50–1:06:40
7
Does participating in arts online provide the same health benefits as in‑person?
1:06:40–1:07:46
8
What practical steps can listeners take to add creativity into their daily routine?
1:07:46–1:09:52
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz
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