Art Therapy and Creativity During Perimenopause: Processing Change Through Making
Creative activities and art therapy can support emotional wellbeing during perimenopause. Discover how making things helps with anxiety, mood, and identity shifts.
Creativity as a tool for perimenopause wellbeing
Perimenopause is a phase of significant transition, not just physically but psychologically. Many women describe a sense of identity shift during this time, feelings of loss, uncertainty about who they are becoming, and difficulty processing the emotional weight of changing alongside daily demands. Creative activity, whether that means painting, drawing, writing, textile work, pottery, or any other form of making, offers a channel for those experiences that talking alone sometimes cannot reach. This is not about talent or producing something beautiful. It is about the process of making as a way of externalising internal states, building focus, and finding a form of expression that operates differently from language.
What art therapy actually involves
Art therapy is a professional discipline in which a qualified art therapist uses creative processes within a therapeutic relationship to support emotional and psychological wellbeing. It is different from simply doing art as a hobby, though both have value. A registered art therapist, credentialed through the Health and Care Professions Council in the UK, works with clients on specific psychological concerns such as anxiety, depression, grief, or identity change, using the creative work as a means of exploration rather than as an end in itself. Sessions typically last about an hour and involve making art in the therapist's presence, followed by reflection on what emerged. You do not need any artistic skill. The material of the work is your inner experience, not the quality of the output.
Evidence for creativity and emotional wellbeing
The evidence base for art therapy is growing, though it is strongest for conditions like trauma, depression, and dementia rather than for perimenopause specifically. What research does show clearly is that engagement in creative activity activates reward pathways in the brain, reduces cortisol, promotes flow states that temporarily interrupt rumination, and produces a sense of competence and agency. For women in perimenopause where anxiety, low mood, and feelings of losing control are common, these effects are directly relevant. A 2016 study published in the Journal of the American Art Therapy Association found that even forty-five minutes of creative art-making produced significant cortisol reduction in adults regardless of prior experience with art.
Flow states and the perimenopause brain
Flow is the psychological state of deep absorption in an activity that demands enough attention to quiet the default mode network, the part of the brain responsible for rumination, self-critical thought, and worry. Brain fog, anxiety, and cycling, intrusive thoughts are all particularly burdensome in perimenopause, and they operate partly through this default mode network. Creative activity, when it is engaging enough to demand focus, is one of the more reliable ways to access flow states. Knitting, sketching, painting, working with clay, and even colouring are all activities that many women report produce a noticeable quieting of anxious mental noise. This is not a trivial effect: regular access to flow states is associated with lower depression scores and higher life satisfaction.
Starting a creative practice without pressure
One of the barriers to creative activity in midlife is the feeling that it needs to be good, purposeful, or productive. Many women abandoned creative pursuits in their twenties or thirties when life got busy and have since told themselves they are not creative. Neither of these framings is useful. The most effective starting point is choosing an activity with a low barrier to entry and no audience. Buying a cheap sketchbook and some pencils and spending fifteen minutes drawing whatever comes is enough. Joining a local pottery or printmaking class removes the need for equipment and adds a social element. Writing, including journal-style writing that no one will read, is the lowest-barrier creative practice available. The point is engagement with the process, not the result.
Creativity and identity during the perimenopause transition
Many women describe perimenopause as a period of questioning who they are, particularly if their sense of identity has been heavily defined by roles, such as mother, professional, or carer, that are shifting at the same time as their physical experience. Creative practice offers a space to explore this without needing to arrive at answers. Making something, whether it is a drawing, a piece of writing, a garment, or a garden, is a form of self-expression that does not require other people's validation and does not depend on being in a particular hormonal state. Some women find that the creative work produced during perimenopause becomes the most personal and resonant of their lives, precisely because they have more to process and fewer inhibitions about expressing it.
Combining creativity with symptom awareness
Creative practice is most effective as part of a broader approach to perimenopause wellbeing rather than a standalone solution. Pairing it with consistent symptom tracking helps you understand which elements of your routine are genuinely making a difference to your mood, anxiety, or sleep. PeriPlan lets you log how you feel each day so you can look back and see whether weeks with more creative activity produce different symptom patterns than weeks without. Some women find this kind of evidence genuinely motivating, because it makes a case for protecting creative time that is based on their own data rather than general advice. When you can see that creative activity consistently improves your mood scores, it becomes easier to treat it as a priority rather than a luxury.
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