Drawing to calm down: why doodling settles you, even if you cannot draw

A pen, the back of an envelope, a meeting that will not end. Your hand starts tracing spirals, boxes, cross-hatching, without asking your permission. And somewhere, quietly, something settles.

The gesture looks trivial, and it is not. Here is the one sentence answer: drawing keeps the hands busy and rests attention on a line, which many people find settling, and in one study, 45 minutes of art making was followed by lower cortisol in about three out of four people, with or without art experience.

World Mental Health Day falls on 10 October, and this is one of the easiest things you can do for your own: you need a pen, ten minutes and no talent at all.

What to do, step by step

A ten-minute exercise that links drawing to the breath. It asks for no skill, only a sheet of paper and something that makes a mark.

Why does drawing calm the body?

When your hands are occupied with a simple, repeated movement, attention can leave the circling thoughts and land on something concrete: the pressure of the pencil, the scratch of the paper, the shape moving forward. Many people feel the body loosen a little as it does.

A study in the journal Art Therapy (2016) gave 39 healthy adults aged 18 to 59 forty-five minutes of free art making, with markers, modelling clay or collage, and no instructions. Salivary cortisol fell significantly on average and dropped in about 75% of participants. Previous art experience made no significant difference to the results.

The authors name the main limitation themselves: there was no control group, so it is unclear whether the drop came from the art making itself, from the interaction with the researchers or from something else. Even so, the finding is good news for anyone convinced they cannot draw.

What does the wider research say?

The 2016 study does not stand alone. In 2019, the European office of the World Health Organization published a scoping review that drew on more than 3,000 studies of the arts and health. It concluded that the arts play a major role in preventing ill health, promoting health and supporting people living with illness, across the whole of life.

Making things is not a luxury reserved for artists. It is open to anyone, at any age, with whatever is to hand.

What if I cannot draw?

Drawing to calm down is not making art: nobody is watching, and nothing has to turn out well. It is usually the demand to make something beautiful that gets in the way, and it has no business here. There is a pleasing paradox in it: the less you try to draw well, the better the drawing works.

Start with shapes that ask nothing of you: parallel lines, circles, hatching that fills a box. Here, the rhythm of the movement is the point, not what it depicts. Sophrology works with mental images in the same spirit: visualisation is not after a perfect picture, only a sensation that settles you. And to find the breath's rhythm without a pencil, there is the breathing timer.

What this does not replace

Drawing at home is a way to relax, not a treatment. If anxiety or low mood lasts, fills your days or keeps you from sleeping, talk to a GP or a mental health professional. Art therapy, led by a trained therapist, is proper support in its own right and different from this exercise. Sophrology supports wellbeing; it does not replace care or treatment.

In Soa, the breath and attention to the body are guided by a calm voice, with nothing to remember and nothing to get right. The Less Anxiety, More You programme offers guided breathing and relaxation, with body awareness and imagery, at your own pace.