This time around we’re talking to Claire Fitzsimmons, co-founder of mental wellbeing company If Lost Start Here, emotions coach practitioner, and ICF associate certified coach and curator. Claire helps people find their way through everyday life by cultivating a wellbeing practice that includes areas such as creativity and culture. We asked her for her One Good Thing. 

If you could recommend One Good Thing everyone can do to improve their mental health, what would it be?

Get to a museum. Visiting museums and engaging with the arts can help you feel more connected, happier and even healthier. This might mean shifting what you expect from museums: rather than seeing them as just entertainment (which is good too), view them as destinations for better wellbeing, self-exploration, healing and acceptance.

Love a Museum trip. But why is this your One Good Thing? What makes museums so great for mental wellbeing?

Museums are one of the few public spaces that can allow us to explore on a personal level. They are sites of empathy-building, fostering curiosity about ourselves and the world around us, and offer a safe space in which to challenge ourselves and our ideas.

Over the winter months, when we sometimes struggle with our emotional wellbeing and leaving the house, we can seek out museums to bring us back to the world. They fuel our sense of wonder and get us moving again.

How can we turn a quick pop-in to a museum into something that’s good for us?

When you visit a museum for wellbeing, as a place of reflection and a space of enquiry, it’s as much about learning about yourself as the artworks. To do this:

• Get curious: shift your mindset from looking to engaging; bring in curiosity and an openness to explore. Arrive with a question about yourself or your life. Or choose one lens to view the museum: an emotion like joy or fear, or a situation such as a relationship or life stage. Then allow yourself to wander, stopping at works that resonate.
• Trust in yourself: go at your own pace and make your own choices about which artworks you want to spend time with. We’re not all the same in how we respond to something (there’s no right way). We bring our perceptual framing: you bring your mind, your daily life and your experience, and it’s different to mine.
• Pay attention to how you feel in relation to an artwork: connect with what’s happening in your body and your mind. Which thoughts or memories are emerging? Are any emotions surfacing? Bring a journal to log anything that arises. Go slowly, turn off your phone, stay in the present.
• Keep it low stakes: don’t feel the need to see all the galleries, all at once. Visit in small amounts of time, even if that means seeing just a handful of works. Try not to view it as the one visit that does everything. Visit as often as you can – you’ll see something different each time and avoid cultural overwhelm, which is when you’re left feeling numb about what you’re seeing.

When we do this, what benefits might we see?

Recent research in the field of neuroaesthetics (the study into the impact that art and aesthetics has on us) is proving again and again the benefits of the arts to our mental health and emotional wellbeing. The recent book Your Brain On Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross explains how our brains are hardwired for the arts, how they help us flourish, and how they even change us on a biological level, even helping us live longer.

The arts help us make meaning in our lives, enabling us to see the world, ourselves or a situation in new ways. Even consuming what’s sometimes called high art has been shown to lend life itself more meaning. The arts can slow us down, helping us be present, get quiet (and even meditative) and hear ourselves think again. They can connect us to the breadth of human life and experiences, increasing empathy and moving us to action. And they can offer us safe spaces to investigate our emotional lives, facilitating emotional release and allowing for complex feelings to come through.

Some museums have even started to embrace art therapy techniques for troubled times, and museum prescriptions are being tested in Belgium for people with anxiety and depression. 

Are there any ways we can get going to a museum ‘wrong’?

Sometimes when we visit museums, we bring self-judgement: we’re worried that we don’t get it, we know nothing about art or we’re doing it the wrong way. We can find arts institutions intimidating. Leave that at the door and centre your visit on you: what do you need (calm, inspiration, wonder) and what are your interests (fuelling curiosity, building awareness, becoming more grounded)?

If you feel overwhelmed, bring in a boundary: just this gallery today, just this artist, just this floor. You don’t have to choose the masterpiece that everyone visits: often the collection displays are less crowded and hold the most appeal. Pick a single work and spend your time with it. Build relationships with artworks the way you would with people. Make the museum your emotional playground.

If you still find museums unsettling, you can access the mental health benefits of the arts through other media like the theatre, live music or even the cinema. Seek out the cultural destination where you feel most comfortable, one that offers a sense of belonging to you. 

Tell us how you use museums for your wellbeing.

Museums have always had a place in my life since I worked as a curator and exhibition maker. I’ve turned to them again and again for emotional ailments. Where I’ve struggled to get to the gym, I can always make time for a museum or gallery. Usually, I avoid the works everyone seeks out, the busiest galleries, and just give myself however many moments I can spare to explore. I come away calmer, more engaged, and more connected with myself and the world. The state of my curiosity is an indicator of my emotional health, and when it’s sliding, a museum visit can help me feed this. I’ve made engaging with the arts an intentional part of my wellbeing practice, just like going for daily walks and eating well.

At If Lost Start Here, when I’m working with clients to create their own wellbeing practice, I’ve learned that for many, culture and creativity are key – they can be vital for feeling better in everyday life.

Love that. Final question, in case we needed more convincing: how has regular museum-going changed your life? 

When my mum died earlier this year, lost in grief I turned to the healing capacity of awe. Psychologist Dacher Keltner was similarly inspired to find awe when his brother died (he writes about this in the fascinating Awe: The Transformative Power Of Everyday Wonder). One morning I allowed myself to walk the collection galleries at Tate Britain, to be led by wonder, to feel a sense of connectedness beyond the isolation of grief and sorrow, to give myself a quiet space to feel and process my emotions. A morning at the museum offered some consolation for my grief.

I’ve taken these cultural pauses when I’ve needed them, and though they can’t take away my pain, they have soothed it for a while and given me hope in something beyond.

Museums are there for us in all of our emotional states. Making them a key part of our wellbeing practices can help us when we’re feeling lost, lonely or even just curious to know more about who we are and what we need. 

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

Images: Getty