How to extend and improve your life by getting more creative

Reduce your sugar, exercise, quit smoking, eat your vegetables, take supplements, don’t stress, sleep well. Every day we are bombarded with information about how to live longer, healthier and happier. But there’s one crucial health tip that I bet you’ve never been given. It’s probably the nicest health advice anyone can give you, but the data supporting it has – until now – remained a strangely well-kept secret: engage in the arts.

Over the past few decades, evidence has mounted suggesting that being more creative does wonders for our health. Programs developed around the world are beginning to integrate the arts into health care, with astonishing results, from music in surgery reducing the amount of sedatives, opioids and anti-anxiety medications needed, to dance programs helping people with Parkinson’s disease walk.

But the arts aren’t just there for us when we’re sick. Crafts, singing, drama, dancing, reading, writing and drawing are inherently good for us in our everyday lives, even if thoughts about our health are far from our minds. In my next book, Artistic healingI argue that it is a “health behavior” similar to exercise, diet, and sleep. Here’s why and how you should incorporate more art into your life in 2026.

As an epidemiologist, I spend my days poring over data from cohort studies — massive data sets containing thousands of people who filled out questionnaires, had interviews with nurses, gave blood samples, and underwent brain imaging every few years of their lives. Many of these studies from countries around the world contain buried questions about artistic engagement. Using complex statistical methods, we can examine the long-term relationship between daily arts engagement and dozens of health outcomes.

The results are remarkable. People who participate in the arts more frequently, watch artistic performances, and visit cultural venues are happier and feel more satisfied with their lives in the years and decades that follow. Children who become more engaged in the arts have a reduced risk of developing problems like depression in early adolescence. Among adults over 50, those who regularly go to concerts, the theater or museums and exhibitions are almost twice as likely to develop depression over the next few years.

You may be wondering if this isn’t about the arts at all. What if creatively engaged people were wealthier, healthier, or were also engaged in other health-related behaviors that might, in fact, be responsible for these effects? The statistics behind these analyzes are sophisticated: we can not only account for potential confounding factors like these, but also consider other factors like genetics, family environment, and childhood experiences, and the results still hold.

The benefits aren’t just psychological. Toddlers who participate in musical activities learn increased prosocial skills as they enter elementary school. Teenagers who participate in groups, dance or write school papers are less likely to be involved in antisocial behavior or crime. And older people who attend cultural events are 32% less likely to feel lonely 10 years later.

The results are particularly strong as we age. Looking at data from almost 100,000 people in 16 different countries, my team and I at University College London found that having hobbies – such as gardening, baking, needlework and journaling – is linked to better self-reported health as we age. Better balance, reduced pain levels, better sleep, longer preservation of cognitive function, reduced frailty, even reduced risk of certain diseases like diabetes – the benefits accrue the more we engage. Notably, many of these studies have compared the arts to better-known health behaviors like physical activity and found that the effect sizes are surprisingly similar. In fact, several studies have shown that people who spend more time reading books, making music, dancing, and attending arts events actually live longer than those who don’t engage in the arts.

How do all these incredible effects occur? Psychological, social and behavioral mechanisms are at play. But personally, the mechanisms that I find the most interesting are the biological mechanisms. More and more studies show that people who regularly engage in the arts have lower blood pressure and heart rate, lower cholesterol levels, reduced inflammatory markers, better regulation of immune function, and a lower body mass index.

In recent years, major developments in the calculation of biological clocks – which compare whether our bodies age faster or slower than our chronological age – have allowed scientists to examine how health behaviors influence our “rate” of aging. And various studies combining data on our cardiovascular, respiratory, circulatory and musculoskeletal systems, as well as our gene expression patterns, suggest that regular arts practice might even help you stay biologically younger. People who dance, make music, and paint have brains that appear younger.

I want to be clear: I am not saying that the arts are some sort of panacea. The arts can be inaccessible to people due to their cost, and there are a whole host of myths about supposed health benefits, ranging from the improbable to the downright ridiculous. But the fact remains that regularly engaging in creative activities you love is an investment in your health worth making this year. And it would also be an altruistic act: economists working with the UK government have estimated that the health benefits of arts engagement in the UK are worth more than £18.6 billion to society each year.

So how can we all increase our art consumption in 2026? This is a question to which I return in each chapter of Artistic healinggiving a “daily dose” of recommendations for how you can use the arts to achieve your health goals. Overall, my advice is to think of the arts like food. Avoid the temptation to go out and binge on art – just as crash diets don’t work, you won’t reap the long-term benefits of a short-term commitment that then fizzles out. Instead, try to figure out what your artistic equivalent of “five fruits and vegetables a day” is. Maybe it’s just 10 minutes of creative writing before you start work each day or setting aside 15 minutes for a craft activity each evening. Make easy creative substitutions – swap a romantic dinner for a concert, a gym session for a dance class, and reading the news on the train for a book of poetry.

Also mix your ingredients. The diversity of artistic experiences is actually just as important as the frequency of engagement. Each creative encounter brings different sensory pleasures to our brain and body that have their own health benefits. Experiment with new flavors of creative experience, moving toward “moderate novelty” – something that’s out of your comfort zone, but still something you think you enjoy. Make your engagement a reality, not a virtual reality: On-screen artistic pursuits tend to be the ultra-processed foodstuffs of the art world.

Above all, be an attentive leader. In our busy lives, it’s easy to want to boil down the arts to a pill that we can just pop and forget about. But the very beauty of the arts is that they are not a pill. It is one of the most diverse, complex and personal behaviors we can perform, one of the crowning achievements of our species’ evolution. We should therefore all give the arts the time they deserve in our lives. And we should rejoice in our engagement – ​​allowing art to make us feel uplifted, intoxicated, uplifted. Because it is fundamentally and measurably good for us.