Published on: April 2, 2025
By Sarah Allen, Engagement & Participation Worker, Compass Go
How can art support our mental health and wellbeing? That’s a question we’ve been exploring through our Engagement & Participation work at Compass Go for a while. It is well documented that being creative can increase positive emotions, improve our mood and reduce anxiety. Creativity can put us in a flow state, sometimes called being ‘in the zone’, and when we are in the zone, we become more mindful, relaxed and positive.
We can get these benefits from any form of creativity, but at Compass Go we have been focusing on visual arts, since our first project, the one that that kick-started everything, was to support children & young people at Phoenix Park Academy and Humberston Academy to find alternative ways to express themselves when verbal communication was limited or difficult. Engagement, focus and communication was seen in abundance and so we decided to extend the concept to our mainstream primary schools, inviting children to ‘show us how you feel’, resulting in a Summer Exhibition at the Living Room in Cleethorpes with thousands of entries!
Alongside our work in schools, it was only right that Compass GO staff got involved too, spending a whole day exploring creative ways to engage with the children and young people we support. What wasn’t a planned outcome of the day (but really comes as no surprise) was the benefit to staff in terms of their own wellbeing. The day was an opportunity to step off the hamster wheel for a while, a chance for some self-care, self-reflection, and an opportunity to connect with each other through shared activities.
And then there was the chance to extend some of this creative practice to attendees of the Mental Health Festival this October for World Mental Health Day. Exploring a simple grounding and visualisation technique, participants spent time on a brief grounding exercise before being invited to visualise a word (we used ‘tree’ and ‘water’). From there participants were provided with a range of art materials to recreate what they had seen before deciding if they would like to share their image with the rest of the group. Providing a moment of calm amongst our busy lives, the practice can take as little as 10 minutes and is great way to ‘reset’ or ‘recharge’, before exploring our final images and what they say about us
To see a selection of work by children and young people and hear from some of our Peer Wellbeing Ambassadors about why creativity is important to them, click here or go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx3KugvOrdY to find a YouTube video created as part of the project.
compassgo , mental health , North East lincolnshire , Schools , wellbeing