Creating art is a powerful way to regulate your emotions and support your resilience. The arts and your creativity can help support your mental health and give you a practical way to manage your emotional responses to challenges in healthy, culturally relevant ways. Artistry can also communicate how much we understand new concepts or skills. 

Here are eight creative ideas to support your emotional well-being and explore the science of hope. Use paper or any medium you like, including the Shuffles app from Pinterest, which can help you create, publish, and share your art. Download Shuffles.  

  1. Create a Visual Summary: Draw or digitally create a summary of key ideas connecting the science of hope <link to main hope blog> to your emotional well-being and mental health. 
  2. Journal Reflection: Write a journal entry about what you learned from the blog or about how the information can apply to your home, work, or student life.
  3. Doodle Your Understanding: Create a doodle or collage that highlights a key idea you appreciated or that you want to learn more about.

  1. Design a Social Media Post: Design a Pinterest pin or Shuffles post that explains a key idea from the blog in a creative way.
  2. Create an Emotional Strategy Collage: Use materials or a digital application to find images to explain what emotional strategy works best for you when you are in a low mood or highly stressed. 
  3. Draw or Paint Your Emotions: Take a few minutes to tune into the emotions and physical sensations you are experiencing right now. Then draw, doodle, or create a Shuffles post that explains what you noticed. 
  4. Affirmation Board: Collect affirmations and quotations that affirm your freedom dreams, or your desire for more emotional balance and greater well-being. Write or draw them, or use Shuffles to create a collage that can become a touchpoint for daily soul care. 
  5. Soul Care Collage: How do you take care of your well-being? Create a collage or piece of art that captures the ways you practice soul care and support your mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. Try Shuffles for a creative tool to help.

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    My Digital Sanctuary

    Cultivate hope in your life in ways that help you:

    • LiberateFree your mind, body and spirit
    • RelateConnect with yourself and others
    • MotivateFind stories that inspire taking action
    • CreateBring what’s inside outside

    About My Digital Sanctuary

    My Digital Sanctuary brings information and creativity together to support soul care, a holistic approach to emotional, physical and spiritual well-being from the Steve Fund. Created by mental health experts who specialize in serving young people of color and their families, My Digital Sanctuary shares the help, hope, and healing we need not just to survive but to thrive.