How Art Therapy Helps Us Process Overwhelming Anxiety

Layering the Chaos

If you’ve been following my journey, you’ll know how much my heart resides between two worlds. Living safely in the UK while my family lives through the ongoing conflict and unrest in Iran creates a strange, jarring duality. It’s a quiet sort of psychological pressure—one where your physical body is moving through a peaceful routine, but your mind is constantly digesting a heavy background noise of worry.

As a psychology and counselling student, I spend a lot of time thinking about how our brains handle complex, layered stress. When a crisis is ongoing, our emotions don't come at us one by one in a neat little queue. They arrive all at once: grief, fear, resilience, love, and exhaustion, all tangled together.

My latest canvas is a direct reflection of that mental landscape. It is another abstract piece deeply inspired by the textures and movements of the Persian language, born out of an art therapy session where I simply needed to lay out the "layers" of my mind.

A Psychological Perspective

When you look at this piece, you might notice it feels a bit busier and more structured than my previous work. In counselling, we often talk about how the mind tries to categorise and make sense of chaos. Here is how the visual elements of this painting map onto the therapeutic process of navigating a crisis:

1. The Background Noise (The Intricate Mono-printing)

The Therapeutic Parallel: This represents the "background noise" of crisis. When you are worried about loved ones in a conflict zone, the anxiety is always there, buzzing in the background of every conversation, every lecture, and every quiet moment. By filling the background first, I was able to acknowledge that the stress exists, giving it a physical space so it wouldn't crowd my internal thoughts.

2. Emotional Intrusion (The Vivid Magenta Slashes)

The Therapeutic Parallel: Trauma and anxiety rarely sit quietly. They interrupt. A sudden news update or a missed phone call from home can slice right through an ordinary day like a shockwave. I chose magenta because it’s loud, defiant, and full of life, a visual representation of the sharp bursts of adrenaline and intense emotion that cut through the numbness of a crisis.

3. Compartmentalisation (The Layered Grey Blocks)

The Therapeutic Parallel: Compartmentalisation gets a bad reputation in psychology, but during a crisis, it can actually be a vital coping mechanism. We stack our responsibilities, our routines, and our feelings into boxes just so we can function day-to-day. The grey blocks in the painting represent my attempt to find structure amidst the emotional noise, stacking my thoughts neatly so I can carry them without dropping everything.

The Power of 'Making' to Reclaim Your Focus

When we are in the middle of a mental storm, our attention span fractures. We scroll mindlessly through news feeds, we pace around the room, or we completely zone out.

What art therapy does so beautifully is that it demands focused presence. To press a stamp onto a canvas, to drag a palette knife loaded with heavy paint, or to carefully place the noghteh (the black calligraphic dots) across the composition requires you to be entirely in the here and now.

For a few hours, the uncontrollable macro-chaos of the world is shrunk down to a micro-world that you control. You decide where the boundaries are. You decide where the colour goes. You decide when the story on the canvas is finished.

Finding Your Layers

If you are currently carrying a heavy emotional load, try to visualise what your mind looks like right now. Is it a solid wall of colour? Is it a messy scribble? Or is it a series of layers, just like this painting?

You don't need to unravel everything all at once. Sometimes, simply acknowledging the different layers of your stress—and giving yourself permission to paint over them, box them up, or slash a bright colour right through them—is the first step toward catching your breath.

How do you tend to handle overlapping stress? Do you find yourself trying to compartmentalise, or do you need to let the emotions out in loud, bold bursts? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.