Imagination and ingenuity may play a similar role as a healthy diet or exercise.
It’s easy to dismiss just-because hobbies like painting or poetry as silly little things you do to busy your hands or find a brief escape from the drama or drudgery of life. But a new study including data from more than 1,400 people suggests these pursuits are far from trivial. Researchers found that diving into a creative activity may slow down the aging of your brain, a process influenced by factors ranging from genetics to lifestyle habits to health status.
First, the scientists compared brain scans of expert and non-expert creatives (including tango dancers, musicians, visual artists, and strategy gamers) using a “brain clock” model, which spits out a single “brain age” based on a variety of features. They discovered that all of these people had younger brains than would be expected for their chronological ages, with the pros sporting even more youthful brains than the novices (five to seven years younger, on average). Then, to investigate whether briefly engaging in a creative endeavor might spark some of these effects, the researchers analyzed the brains of people who learned to play a video game with 30 hours of lessons over the course of a couple months. The result? Their post-learning brains were roughly two to three years younger, on average, than their pre-learning ones.
That’s a significant dip when you consider that brain changes related to aging can start as early as your 30s, and many things can speed these along, like cardiometabolic disease, poor sleep, and exposure to environmental factors like pollution, Agustín Ibáñez, PhD, senior author of the study and professor at the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) at Trinity College Dublin, tells SELF. Creativity, it seems, can do the opposite, putting the brakes on brain aging. And it’s a scalable benefit, Carlos Coronel, PhD, first author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at GBHI, tells SELF: The more you get, the better your noggin may fare.
With some extra modeling, the researchers uncovered a few possible explanations for how creativity may delay brain aging. One has to do with brain communication: In the creative experts and learners, different brain regions appeared to chat with each other more readily, which improves your ability to process information, Dr. Coronel says. Creativity-doused brains also seemed to organize info more effectively and be less prone to what Dr. Coronel calls “hyperexcitability,” a type of overactivation that can get in the way of efficiency.
A bonus: In the models, all of these improvements also happened most apparently in brain regions that are extra-susceptible to breaking down with age, like the prefrontal cortex (which controls planning and decision-making) and the hippocampus (which oversees memory formation). This suggests creativity might help safeguard the very parts of the brain that tend to degrade first and that are also implicated in dementia. And the researchers suspect that the more you engage in a creative activity, the bigger these brain shifts will be, which helps explain why the expert creatives boasted even younger brain ages than the novices.
The brain perks in this study cropped up with all the activities included, from painting to gaming, which means “it’s less about choosing one specific hobby and more about the creativity itself,” Dr. Ibáñez says. It can be tough to define exactly what makes something creative, he notes, but there are a few common denominators: It tends to involve tapping into imagination, being mindful, and expressing yourself. Hence why creative hobbies have also been shown to deliver psychological benefits, like reducing stress and boosting emotion regulation, Dr. Ibáñez points out, which may be reflected in a lower brain age too.
Beyond having these qualities, make sure that whatever you choose—be it learning to play piano, bake, speak Japanese, or do any other creative act—is something you enjoy. This way, it won’t feel like a chore, and you’ll be more likely to do it with focus and gusto, and to keep it up long-term, all of which can maximize the brain-related benefits, Dr. Ibáñez says.
If the idea of fitting yet another item into your schedule feels daunting, also know that “you don’t have to practice every day for hours,” Dr. Coronel says. Even picking one day each week to pencil in 30 minutes of creativity time can make a difference. Think of it like an aspect of self care, the way you might view exercising, eating nutritious foods, or carving out time for sleep—all other factors that can keep your brain in good shape as well.
And don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t come naturally. As Dr. Ibáñez puts it, “you don’t have to be Da Vinci.” It’s less important to have a “gift,” he says, than it is to put your heart into it.
