An Overlooked Prescription for Happiness
“My colleagues and I are meeting just for fun, but crafting is also good for our health, said Daisy Fancourt, a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London. She has been studying the effect of the arts on people’s health for 15 years.
That includes, she said, crafting but also performing arts such as dance and ballet, visual arts such as painting, and the literary arts, like reading novels or poems. Culinary arts such as baking bread count too, she added, and so does going to cultural spaces like museums” (Dunn, 2026).
“Dr. Fancourt calls engaging in the arts ‘the forgotten fifth pillar of health,’ alongside diet, sleep, exercise and nature. Yet, we have reduced it to a form of entertainment, she writes in her new book, Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives.
And you don’t have to be good at any of these things to reap the health benefits, she added. All you have to do is take part” (Dunn, 2026).
“Dr. Fancourt said that the more engaged in the arts you are, the more health benefits you will have, but you don’t have to go to a concert hall or a museum” (Dunn, 2026).
This article feels like a great contrast to the other more technical articles I have also read. It argues that engaging in the arts is a cornerstone to a healthy life, and discusses the different ways it can be incorporated. My biggest takeaway from the article is how light and relaxed it comes across as. It encourages many different activities, and shows how people can implement it in their daily and social lives.
In reference to my capstone project, I love how this article encourages people to set goals to participate in the arts in their daily lives. One example is reading three pages of a book before scrolling on your phone. I wonder if this could be applied more directly to healthcare, locking a phone or giving a reward when participating in a medical activity daily. The article pushes gamifying healthy tasks in a fun and easy going way, and I would like to translate that over to my medical solution.
References
Dunn, J. (2026, February 6). An overlooked prescription for happiness. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/well/art-craft-physical-mental-health.html
No generative AI was used in writing this article.
