Dear fellow neurodivergent woman,
Can making art calm a neurodivergent nervous system? In the research, and in my own body, yes. This is what happened when I started, and what I found when I went looking for why.
Maybe this is just another embarrassing story of yet another middle-aged woman having yet another midlife crisis. I actually don’t think so.
In June I made a collage sitting on the cool tiled floor of a hotel room in Siem Reap. What’s unusual about this is that I was on holiday, supposedly exploring the sacred home of Angkor Wat. Instead I was indoors, bright sun shining through the curtains, ripping up scraps of paper and drawing over them with abandon, as happy as a burned out perimenopausal woman who’d just been told she never had to work again.
The gallery
It was a gallery visit that blew me away. I climbed to the top floor of SM Art Center on the outskirts of the city and found myself in the middle of a huge textile exhibition, Journey & Passion, by Cambodian artist Yim Maline. It was an abundant jungle waterfall scene, made from textiles and it took over the whole room. Piercing blues, emerald greens, trailing vines, all showcased by spotlights. I was alone. It was silent. A cushioned quiet, a full silence. The room smelled of the expensive cologne of a previous visitor, and fabric. I sat on a bench and drank it up in wonder. The genius of it all.
Maline’s work is how she remembers. Nature. Mother Earth. A childhood in a country at war. She often works with what most of us would bin. Burnt cardboard, second-hand fabric, ceramic, soil, and kapok, the soft, silky fibre from the seed pods of the kapok tree.
I was so deeply moved that a few tears pricked. But I also felt safe, like I was in a dark womb. My shoulders dropped, my bum was firmly on the seat, and I felt grounded. I stayed there for ages, just sitting, totally at peace.
I’ve always loved galleries. Not the big ones, but the small ones where you can spend a couple of hours alone, feeling emotional, sometimes confused, but knowing you’re touching something intimate from somebody else’s inner being. What a privilege that is.
I felt so inspired that after an espresso in the accompanying garden cafe and buying an exquisite padded textile shark keyring from the gift shop I took a tuktuk to the International Bookstore and spent $50 on random art supplies: sketchpads, glue, metallic pastels, felt tips, scissors. I knew vaguely what to buy because I completed an art foundation course at Calderdale College in Halifax thirty years ago. I knew creative people like to work in sketchbooks.
I had a burning desire to document my time in Siem Reap. Not in photos, but as a visual memory I’d made myself. As a neurodivergent woman this matters to me. Often I don’t know how I think or feel. But it seems I can communicate it through art.
So I made a collage. A collage is a safe thing to make, because you’re using other people’s images to create something new rather than starting from scratch. It doesn’t take the joy and flow away. Cutting, sticking, colouring: I was absolutely, completely, blissfully happy.
It turns out it takes a long time to finish a proper collage if you want it to look semi-decent. It stayed on my side table for the rest of the holiday and I added a little to it every day. Before I knew it, my hotel room was a mess. Scraps of paper on the floor, postcards on the bed, pens and pencils scattered across surfaces. With my autistic/ADHD tendencies I’d normally think, oh my God, this is getting out of control. Instead I was thrilled. I felt expansive, like something had been unlocked, and I was grinning. It added a richness to my day that I hadn’t felt in many, many years.
The fear
So why had it taken me so long to feel so creative and have the confidence to actually make something again?
Fear. A deep, all-consuming fear that lives inside all of us to some degree, but for various reasons had an intense hold over me, without me even realising. The fear of not being loved. The terror of rejection.
Then, during the pandemic years, I was severely disabled with CFS/ME. When you lose everything but come back to life, you’re changed forever. I no longer care about my flabby skin or my ever increasing wrinkles. I have a body that works and I’m ecstatic to be alive with the full use of my limbs. What it looks like is irrelevant and I won’t spend a second of my valuable day worrying about it.
The same applies to art. You no longer give a fuck what other people think about what you want to make or show. I will make it, and I will show it to people, and I have no fear about doing that. People may not like it. So what?
I’m not the only one who’s been artistically blocked for decades. As I talk to women about engaging in art, and encouraging us all to create more, I hear the same story every single time: my teacher/family member/friend told me my work was terrible, and I haven’t made anything since.
After that collage, and such a huge dopamine rush from creating, I started drawing leaves, one a day in graphite pencil, and they weren’t bad. Crazy, unusual, beautiful leaves that grow so abundantly in Cambodia: pink monstera, mango leaves, huge green star leaves with white veins. But I soon found the pencil wasn’t enough. I moved to pastels, which were more visceral. Sometimes I could get a lot of rage out, hammering down, ripping the paper, breaking the sticks. I’d be breathless, my hands covered in metallic green and slate black dust, but it felt good. What a release.
What were these images I was creating? Just intuitive stuff. Modern abstract art, you’d call it. Some were surprisingly beautiful, with perfect composition. Others were dark, the work of nightmares, blacks and purples and chaos forced onto the page. I didn’t throw them away, even the ones that were uncomfortable to look at, because they were a part of me and I felt tender towards them.
I kept going, every day.
What the research says
I knew I was changing. I was maturing as a woman who’d been somewhat lost since my daughter left home and I was growing in confidence, coming to terms with my past. I wanted to know why. Then I read Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, and went looking for the research behind it.
In a study from Drexel University, 39 adults made art for 45 minutes. Their cortisol, the stress hormone, was measured before and after, and in 75 percent of them it dropped. It made no difference whether they’d made art before.
Another study followed 28 retired adults for ten weeks. Half made art in a class, and half visited a museum to discuss and evaluate artwork. Brain scans showed the art-makers had a bigger improvement in how the parts of the brain involved in self-reflection and memory connect, and that was linked to psychological resilience. Making it seemed to do something extra.
And in 2019 the World Health Organization published a review of over 3,000 studies and found the arts have a role in preventing illness, promoting health and treating it, across the whole lifespan.
So it wasn’t just me, on a hotel floor, in a midlife wobble.
Why I think it works
I’m a health coach for ND perimenopausal women, and the framework I work from is the Cell Danger Response, described by Dr Robert Naviaux. Our mitochondria are the tiny engines inside every cell in our bodies, and they’re also sensory processors. They’re constantly reading our environment for threat or safety. When they decide the world is unsafe, they lock their doors and stop producing energy. To coax them back online, we have to send one very specific signal: safety. Absolute, unequivocal, the-bear-has-gone safety.
For highly sensitive, neurodivergent women, this matters hugely, because our mitochondria are battered just by existing. Noise, light, social demand, unpredictability. Safety is where I start, with my own body and with every woman I work with.
When I read how little art it takes to lower stress, it started to dawn on me why. When we engage in art, we feel safe.
That could have huge implications. We’re beginning to understand that dysfunctional mitochondria are implicated in some of the diseases none of us want, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, never mind the common perimenopause symptoms such as afternoon energy crashes, brain fog, feeling tired despite rest, and sensory overwhelm.
Yes, I’ve just given you three studies and a lecture on mitochondria. I’m aware. But overall my brain is tired. Maybe one is only able to process so much information in a lifetime and then you’re done? All the degrees. All the tech. All the textbooks. All of the needing to know why. I’ve had enough and I’m moving away from my brain and into my body.
Out of my head and into my body
So all these scientific studies are great in explaining the physical mechanics of what’s happening in our bodies when we engage in art and of course my logical neurodivergent mind loves this. But they fall short in explaining the mysterious, spiritual, transformation that also takes place. Then I started reading Art as Medicine, by Shaun McNiff, an art therapist who worked for decades in US state mental hospitals and it all started to make more sense. McNiff views art as ‘Soul Work’ and I wholeheartedly agree.
It is the artistic imagination, not the willful mind, that effortlessly transforms the torturing demon into an inspirational daimon.
Shaun McNiff (Art as Medicine)
One thing I know for sure: I feel happy when I’m making. Sometimes blissful. Not always like I’m on ecstasy at a rave, but extremely regulated. For someone with a highly sensitive nervous system, increasingly so since entering perimenopause, this is a huge gift.
When I’m making art now, usually painting but sometimes drawing, it feels like the dysregulation is moving out of my body, through my hand and onto the paper.
But also… Worries melt away. Drop from my shoulders and vanish. Fascinating insights about myself, others and the world in general are received and processed.
When I came back from Siem Reap, I moved into a two bedroom apartment. Instead of keeping a spare room for my daughter or guests, who might visit, I turned it into an art studio. There’s nothing on the walls. I’ve stripped them all and I’m waiting to create the right piece for each one. I challenged myself to an hour of making a day at first. But I don’t need to ‘challenge’ myself, it’s just something I do now every day, for two, three, four hours, sometimes all day if it’s my day off.
Sometimes I just grab oil pastels and smear my emotions into the paper like butter, so satisfying: not thinking, just acting, just moving, just trusting my intuition, and then often being surprised at what comes out. I’m always fascinated by which colours I choose, sometimes colours I hate, like red. I struggle to name and process my emotions, and I used to worry about that. Now I can see them all on the page.
Making art is also how I meet myself. Midlife strips a lot away, and sitting with paint and paper is one of the few places I come back to who I actually am. And I consider it a deeply spiritual practice.
Lately my art is going somewhere new. I’m making my own paint from earth pigments, clay and stones from the river and the beach, ground by hand, and bringing in botanicals. The second stage is glass on glass, and I have to wear earplugs because it sets my teeth on edge. But then you get this supersoft, rich powder, totally unique from any paint you could buy. The warm ochres are my favourites. Each piece is a little bit of Cambodia, and I couldn’t make it twice.
My aim for my art is that I feel such peace and flow when I’m creating that I hope this transfers onto the canvas and allows others to feel a sense of peace too.
And guess what happens when you put yourself out there in new ways? A reader got in touch after seeing one of my landscapes. It was an abstract watercolour in burnt sienna, inspired by a sunset I’d seen on the river beach a few nights before. She asked if I would design her new album cover. Yes please.
But showing my art was never the point. Making it is.
Could art save the world? I don’t know. But I do believe.
Could it give a neurodivergent nervous system an hour of feeling safe? In the research, and in my own body, yes. And for a nervous system that’s always on alert, an hour is a lot. That’s money in the bank for a rainy day.
If you want more on the mitochondria side, read why you crash after a good day or whether L-theanine could save the ND nervous system.
I hope you have a creative week,
Love Hannah xoxo
Sources
Magsamen, S. & Ross, I. (2023). Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.
Kaimal, G., Ray, K. & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making. Art Therapy, 33(2), 74-80.
Bolwerk, A. et al. (2014). How art changes your brain: differential effects of visual art production and cognitive art evaluation on functional brain connectivity. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e101035.
Fancourt, D. & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. WHO Regional Office for Europe.
Naviaux, R.K. (2014). Metabolic features of the cell danger response. Mitochondrion, 16, 7-17.
McNiff, S. (1992). Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination. Shambhala. (p. 56)
