Inspire Your Heart With Art Day

What the day is

Inspire Your Heart With Art Day is observed on January 31. No origin is documented, and the effect it points at has become a serious area of research.

Origin and background

Over the past decade, health systems have begun treating engagement with art as a clinical intervention rather than a pleasant extra. Social prescribing, in which a doctor refers a patient to a non-medical activity such as a gallery, a choir or a craft group, now operates formally in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and in some places physicians can write a prescription for museum admission. A large review commissioned by the World Health Organization in 2019 assessed hundreds of studies and concluded that arts engagement carries measurable benefits for both mental and physical health.

The findings are strongest where the activity is participatory and repeated: singing, making, playing. Passive viewing shows smaller effects, and the research is generally weaker in design than clinical trials, which is worth saying plainly. The honest summary is a real effect of modest size, not a cure.

What makes art unusual as an intervention is that it does several things at once. It provides attention that is absorbing without being demanding, which is restorative in a way that entertainment often is not. It frequently involves other people. And it supplies something the research literature calls meaning-making, a way of handling experience that does not reduce to distraction.

There is also a good argument for the smaller version. The benefits attach to making things badly, not just to encountering masterpieces, and the barrier for most adults is the belief that they are not artistic.

How to take part

• Make something badly. This is the version with the better evidence behind it.
• Visit a gallery and look properly at one work rather than briskly at fifty.
• Ask whether social prescribing exists where you live. Many people have never heard of it.
• Take somebody who would not go alone.
• Put one thing on your wall that you chose rather than inherited.