End of Month at Stroud – Clay Creations

The last two months have seen the launch of our Health & Work Initiative, where we work together to build meaningful practices to boost our mental and physical health. From our end-of-quarter animal experience to our Stroudathon step challenge, we’ve been having a great time finding fun and engaging ways to protect and improve our health both inside and outside work.

This month, we arranged for a representative of York Mind - a local mental health support charity that does fantastic work with young people, in particular – to visit our office, and give an informative talk on the ways we can support one another’s mental health and some of the more common mental health problems people experience.

To follow up, our afternoon activity was a clay creating session with Stroud’s Digital Marketing Coordinator, Erin. Erin’s background in providing art therapy to young people in Liverpool means she had a great insight into the benefits of creative therapies.

Art and other creative therapies have been shown to encourage creative thinking and imagination in children and adults. Because there is no wrong answer in art, people are encouraged to imagine their own solutions. This type of flexible thinking stimulates our brain and prepares it for complicated functions in the same ways that learning a new language does.

Creative therapies can also enhance, problem-solving skills, by engaging our spatial reasoning to find new ways to look at problems or difficult situations. Creating something can help us express complicated feelings or difficult experiences, give us a chance to connect with other people, or help us make sense of our thoughts and understand ourselves better.

Our team found clay modelling a great way to relax, and we had a lot of fun coming up with strange creations as a team. Check out some of our models below: