When you register for your wellbeing assessment, Texas Health Resources will donate $10 to the nonprofit AT&T Performing Arts Center’s Community Partners program. Community Partners is a collaboration with other local nonprofits to distribute tickets to those who can benefit from experiences in the arts.

Be sure to enter the code WINSPEAR when you register to qualify for the donation to Community Partners.

Health isn’t just about getting you to eat your fruits and veggies. It’s about the broader factors in our lives that play an important role in overall health. Our Community Partners tell us that when their constituents visit the Center for a show, it can have a range of benefits: helping families feel closer, giving people a feeling of “normalcy,” inspiring action or change, expanding horizons for young people and generally acting as an enrichment opportunity that aids those in challenging situations. This feedback aligns with science that increasingly places an importance on factors outside the body, including the arts. Here’s what we know.

1. The arts improve physical health.
It has long been anecdotally known that the arts relieve stress, but studies show that certain acts of creativity (such as writing) enhance the immune system, improve physical health and decrease medical visits.

2. The arts strengthen mental capacities.
The field of art therapy has helped treat a wide range of issues, from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to traumatic injury and chemical dependency. But everyone can benefit from the creativity that only the arts endow, which can help develop skills for life that contribute to professional and personal success.

3. The arts endow emotional skills.
The arts can help us express thoughts that are beyond words, helping people “reach into largely unconscious parts of the mind and experience dimensions of self otherwise buried and voiceless.” The arts are an incredibly useful tool for working through emotions and communicating them to others, a skill that’s useful in small-scale interpersonal interactions as well as cross-cultural understanding.

4. The arts create bonds that sustain us.
The arts are an important factor in strong communities, helping build what researchers call “social capital,” or the collective networks that bond us. The arts help build societies where people value honestly, openness, cooperation, tolerance and respect. The arts are also vital to the economic health of cities, a benefit that cannot be understated in the overall health of communities.