Resources & Tools for Creative Wellness
Welcome to your toolkit for understanding and nurturing the relationship between your creativity and mental health. These resources range from quick exercises you can try right now to comprehensive workbooks for deeper exploration. Some are downloadable PDFs, others are detailed guides and frameworks you can bookmark and return to.
I have developed these resources after decades of lived experience, interview-based insights, and deep research into the complex relationship between art and health. They are based on my unique 6-part framework.
If you are interested in assistance in applying these ideas to your own life:
ASSESSMENT & SELF-DISCOVERY
Start here if you want to understand your unique creative-health intersection
These tools help you map your personal landscape where art meets psychology. Perfect for gaining clarity about your creative patterns, triggers, and needs.
Core Self-Assessment Tools
10 Questions For Exploring How Your Art and Health Intersect - Free Downloadable Worksheet | Quick but profound questions that help you identify patterns you might not have noticed; guided reflection that can reveal insights about your creative life you might not have noticed before.
Listening to Your Creative Self and How It Intersects with Health: A Workbook - FREE Downloadable PDF | Comprehensive self-guided exploration with prompts, exercises, and reflection spaces to understand how your creative process is affected by your mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
The Healing Power and Hidden Complications of Art - Article + Free PDF Worksheet | Learn about five common ways in which health and art can be difficult, despite art’s therapeutic value. Access to 20 Question PDF to better understand this in your own life.
Before You Create Your Next Piece: A Creative Health Self-Check – FREE Downloadable PDF |
Quick, practical worksheet to pause before beginning creative work. Offers guiding questions to assess physical, emotional, and mental state, supporting sustainable practice by aligning artmaking with wellness rather than compulsion.
Reframing & Perspective Shifts
Creative Wellness Matters More Than Productivity - Downloadable PDF Sneak Peek | Challenge productivity culture and develop a wellness-centered approach to your creative practice. Intro to 40 page guide.
Why Your Art Practice Needs a Health-First Approach – FREE Downloadable Workbook |
Comprehensive guide linking wellbeing to creative sustainability. Includes reflection prompts and exercises for building a health-centered practice that prioritizes mind and body before output.How Mental Health Impacts Artistic Creativity: A Framework for Self-Awareness - Article | Gain deeper insight into the six areas in which health commonly impacts creativity.
Creativity Isn't Just a Spark. It's a Relationship. It's a Way of Being. - Article + PDF link | Explore creativity as an identity you carry even when not actively producing, plus link to 40 practical productivity mindset tips PDF.
11 Contemporary Quotes On The Critical Role of Creativity In The World Today - Inspiration Collection | Curated quotes from current thinkers, artists, and researchers about why creativity is essential, not optional.
What Creative Rest Can Look Like – Article + Reflection Guide | Explores diverse models of rest beyond simply “taking a break.” Suggests practical, creative ways to pause, reset, and re-enter making with renewed perspective
Creative Mapping & Pattern Recognition
10 Ways Health Impacts Creative Process – FREE Downloadable PDF | Concise guide breaking down ten key ways mental, emotional, and physical health directly shape the stages of creative practice. Includes reflection prompts to help you identify your own patterns and needs.
10 Ways Health Impacts Creative Medium – FREE Downloadable PDF | Companion guide to the above, showing how health affects the materials and methods you choose. Helps you interpret what your medium reveals about your state of mind and body, and encourages adaptive experimentation.
What Is Your Art Telling You About Your Mental Health? – FREE Downloadable PDF
Explores how creative choices — color palettes, mediums, motifs — can act as unconscious messages about our psychological state. Validates the role of art as both mirror and messenger, encouraging readers to interpret their own work with curiosity and care.Unlock Your Creative Potential: A 4-Week Pattern Recognition Journey – FREE Downloadable Workbook | Step-by-step guided journal drawing on NLP, psychology, and neuroscience to uncover unconscious creative patterns. Weekly exercises provide both insight and practice for reshaping habits in alignment with your unique style
Help with Common Challenges
Is This Creative Burnout or Something Else? - Article | Guide to distinguishing between creative burnout and depression, stress, freeze/fawn, neurodivergence.
Is it Burnout? Is it Creative Block? How Can You Tell? – Article + Linked Resources | Clarifies the difference between burnout and creative block, why they feel so similar, and how care strategies diverge. Links to a collection of related articles for deeper exploration.
Heightened Self-Awareness and The Creative Process: 9 Ways Artists Might Be Impacted - Self-Knowledge
Nine ways that mental health symptoms impact the creative process via heightened self-awareness, each with self-care tips and exercises.The Magic Hour: Finding Your Creative Prime Time – Article + PDF Guide
Exercises for mapping your natural energy cycles to creative practice. Includes daily tracking activities and a link to the Rhythmic Brain PDF for deeper explorationHow 16 Common Emotional States May Disrupt or Direct Creative Flow – Article + Reflection Prompts
Understand how emotions from anger to awe can both disrupt and direct creative work. Includes guided prompts to help you observe your emotional states and channel them into intentional creative choices
Grounding, Centering and In-the-Moment Techniques for Fiber Artists and Crafters
Applying the 5-4-3-2-1 Anxiety Technique to Hand Crafting - Exercise | Adapt this popular grounding technique specifically for when you're crafting through anxiety or overwhelm.
Letting Go Exercise for Fiber Artists and Crafters: Make an Intentional Mistake - Therapeutic Exercise | Powerful practice for perfectionists and those struggling with creative anxiety. Includes variations for different comfort levels.
Craft Emergency Kit: Quick Tips for Crafting Through Different Emotions - Quick-Glance Visual Reference | Practical strategies for when you're angry, sad, excited, or numb - how to use fiber arts to work with each emotional state rather than against.
Practicing Grounding Through Fiber Arts and Crafts - Article + Exercise | Gain understanding into using tactile creative work to regulate your nervous system and feel more present. Includes Five-Sense Stitching, a Fiber Artist’s Grounding Exercise.
Soothing the Nervous System with Stitches: Why Medium Matters - Article + Exercise | Understand the science behind why certain creative materials and techniques are particularly calming. Includes Exercise: Material Memory Map
Crafting as a Mirror: Exploring Awareness Through Fiber Arts - Sneak Peek | Chapter 1 of Craft to Heal, a comprehensive 139 page PDF all about using fiber arts to practice awareness
The Fiber Artist's Brain on Control and Attachment and Letting Go – Article | Deep dive into the psychology of control, perfectionism, and the difficulty of “letting go” in creative practice. Explores concepts like loss aversion, the sunk cost fallacy, and intolerance of uncertainty, while showing how fiber arts offer embodied strategies for release and self-compassion. Includes practical exercises from Craft to Heal and connections to mindfulness, neuroplasticity, and self-regulatio
If you crochet, you might like my book Hook to Heal: 100 Crochet Exercises For Health, Growth, Connection, Inspiration and Honoring Your Inner Artist
These resources are designed to meet you wherever you are in your creative journey. Some will resonate immediately, others might be perfect for you in six months. Bookmark this page and return as your needs evolve.
Want personalized guidance using these tools?
Book a 1:1 Healthy Creativity Session or Sign Up for a Personalized Creative Wellness Assessment
How to Know if My Approach to Creativity+Health Coaching Is Right for You - Honest assessment tool to help you determine if my approach to 1:1 creative wellness calls align with what you're seeking.
What Happens in a 1:1 Healthy Creativity Session? - Who I work with, what happens before a session, what happens in a session.
I regularly update the resources that I offer, often for free. Subscribe to get them: