How A Simple Painting Class Accidentally Uncovered Something Much Bigger
Written by Rebecca Tillman-YoungPortrait artist & founder, RTY Art Academy
First, a disclaimer.
I'm not a doctor, and I've never claimed to be. I'm an art instructor. I've spent almost 20 years teaching thousands of students how to draw and paint portraits.
What I'm about to share isn't medical advice. It's what I've seen, and what my students have shared with me about their own experiences. Names and some details have been changed to protect their privacy. Everyone's journey is different, and your experience may be different, too.
It was the week before Thanksgiving. I remember it clearly, because nothing went according to plan that day.
I was in the middle of a multi-day virtual workshop, teaching people to paint portraits from the comfort of their homes. I was behind on my live painting demo, and I was anxious. I had a lot of ground to make up.
But first, it was Student Day.
Student Day is when past and present students of the RTY Art Academy gather on Zoom to show the community what they've been working on. We had 30 minutes for an informal Q&A.
My plan was to get through it quickly and get back to my demo.
That's not what happened.
About ten minutes in, a woman named Denise unmuted her mic.
"Can I say something?" she asked, glancing nervously at the other faces on the screen.
"I've never told anyone this…"
Denise's eyes started welling up, and through her tears, she finished her story.
"About two years ago, I was diagnosed with severe arthritis, and I started losing function in my hands. I was in a bad place because of the pain… But when I paint, I feel like myself again. It's the only thing that does that."
The call went quiet.
And then it was like a dam burst.
I didn't realize it until that moment, but my students hadn't known whether it was okay to share things like this.
Personal things.
Things that had nothing to do with skin tones or brushstrokes.
When Denise went first, you could feel the energy change. Hands shot up. Mics started unmuting, one after another.
There was Karen, recently diagnosed with a rare nerve disease, who told us that painting was the one part of her day she didn't feel trapped in her own body.
There was Pat, caring full-time for a husband with dementia, who said her easel was the only place that was still hers.
There was Sue, recovering from a traumatic brain injury, who said painting was the one thing that helped her feel like her old self again.
And there was Linda, who'd lost her husband of 40 years, and said painting was the reason she got out of bed some mornings.
Our 30-minute Q&A turned into two and a half hours.
By the end, it felt like an old-time church revival with people rushing up to the podium to give their testimonial.
I woke up that morning planning to teach people how to draw faces and mix skin colors. I did not expect to have 20 faces staring back at me on my laptop, most of them in tears.
Here's what I have to admit.
I'd seen hints of this before. Over the years, a student would mention in passing that painting helped with her pain, or her grief, or her anxiety. I'd nod, feel good about it, and move on to the next question.
I thought they were random, lovely coincidences.
But when 20 women look you in the eye and tell you the same thing, it stops being a coincidence.
I knew I had to find out why.
And what I discovered changed everything I thought I knew about what happens when a person picks up a brush.
Subtext
Many people have experienced real changes in how they feel through a simple creative practice, and most have never told anyone.
There's a reason it works, and it has to do with what happens in your brain.
Many people have experienced real changes in how they feel through a simple creative practice, and most have never told anyone.
There's a reason it works, and it has to do with what happens in your brain.
After Student Day, I couldn't sleep.
I lay awake replaying every story. The woman losing the use of her hands. The woman recovering from a brain injury. The caregiver. The widow. Twenty women, twenty different struggles.
At first I thought the stories had nothing in common.
A nerve disease has nothing to do with grief. A brain injury has nothing to do with arthritis.
So the next morning, I did something I'd never done in 20 years of teaching. I went back through the recording of the call, and I wrote down every word they used to describe what happened when they painted.
And that's when I saw it.
They weren't describing their conditions. They were all describing the same experience.
"I lose track of time."
"Hours go by and I don't notice."
"It's the only time I forget."
I forget.
Almost every one of them said some version of it.
Denise forgot about her hands. Karen forgot about her nerves. Pat forgot, for an hour, that she was a caregiver. Linda forgot the empty chair across the room.
I had heard this for years and never paid attention. Now I couldn't stop hearing it.
So I started digging. And what I found blew my mind.
It has a name.
Psychologists call it a flow state. It's that feeling of being so completely absorbed in something that time disappears, the world goes quiet, and for a while you're not thinking about yourself at all.
You've felt it. Maybe with a good book, a jigsaw puzzle, or an afternoon in the garden when you looked up and three hours were gone.
My students were finding it at their easels. And what scientists are learning about what flow does to the brain explained everything I heard that day.
Your brain has an alarm system.
Now remember, I'm not a doctor. So I'm going to explain this the way I finally understood it myself.
There's a network in your brain that scientists call the default mode network. It's the part of you that turns inward. It monitors how your body feels, replays worries, and keeps asking, "How am I doing? Is something wrong?"
Everyone has it. It's normal.
But here's what stopped me in my tracks.
Researchers have found that in people living with chronic pain, this network works differently.
One study compared the brain scans of people with:
chronic back pain,
arthritis in the knee,
and a chronic nerve pain condition.
Three very different conditions.
Yet the network that stood out in all three was the same one: the default mode network.
Put simply, in chronic pain, part of your brain gets stuck listening to the pain. Like a smoke detector that won't stop beeping, even when you're sitting still, some part of you is always on alert.
No wonder my students were so exhausted. They weren't just living with pain. Their brains were monitoring it every waking hour.
And here's the part that gave me chills.
When you're in a flow state, brain imaging shows that this same inward-looking network quiets down.
Instead, your brain switches on its attention and reward systems. And those overlap with the systems your brain uses to turn pain down.
In late 2025, a review published in the Journal of Pain Research went a step further. The researchers proposed that flow may act as a natural pain reliever, working through attention, motivation, and reward, not just distraction.
They're careful to call it a working hypothesis that still needs clinical trials. But it put into words what my students had been describing for years.
So when Karen said painting was the one part of her day she didn't feel trapped in her own body, she wasn't just being poetic.
She was describing what the research suggests. For those hours at the easel, her brain's alarm finally got a break.
It's not just me saying this.
I found a study of older women living with arthritis, all of whom made art regularly. When researchers asked them about it, most described art-making as a powerful way to manage their pain. They said the deep concentration, the colors, and the imagery took them somewhere their pain couldn't follow.
That's exactly what my students told me on Student Day. They'd just never had words for it.
Now let me be honest with you.
This research is new. Scientists are still learning how it all works, and flow isn't a cure for anything. It doesn't replace your doctor or your medication.
But it reaches a part of pain that pills were never designed to touch: the part of your brain that won't stop listening.
And for the first time, I understood what I'd been witnessing all those years in my classes.
My students weren't just learning to paint. They were learning to give their brains a break.
Which raised a question I couldn't shake.
If flow is this powerful, why doesn't everyone who picks up a brush find it?
Because here's the uncomfortable truth: most people never get there. I've watched thousands of beginners quit before they ever feel it. And the reason has nothing to do with talent.
Subtext
Chronic pain isn't only in your body. It changes how your brain works, keeping part of it stuck on alert.
Flow is the state where that alarm quiets down, and creative activity is one of the most reliable ways to reach it.
Next up: Why Most People Never Reach Flow (And What My Students Did Differently)
Sources
Gromakovskis & Gūtmanis, "Flow-Induced Analgesia: A Conceptual Review of Biopsychosocial and Neurobiological Mechanisms of Pain Modulation," Journal of Pain Research, December 2025. doi:10.2147/JPR.S564395
Baliki MN, Mansour AR, Baria AT, Apkarian AV. "Functional Reorganization of the Default Mode Network across Chronic Pain Conditions." PLoS ONE, 2014; 9(9): e106133. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106133
Reynolds F, et al. "Visual art-making as a resource for living positively with arthritis: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of older women's accounts." Journal of Aging Studies, 2011; 25(3): 328–337. doi:10.1016/j.jaging.2010.12.001
Part 3 of 5
Why Most People Never Reach Flow (And What My Students Did Differently)
Written by Rebecca Tillman-YoungPortrait artist & founder, RTY Art Academy
Chronic pain isn't only in your body. It changes how your brain works, keeping part of it stuck on alert.
Flow is the state where that alarm quiets down, and creative activity is one of the most reliable ways to reach it.
A few years ago, at a gallery opening, a woman named Susan showed me a drawing she'd been working on for six months.
It was a portrait of her grandson with his teddy bear. She'd spent over a hundred hours on it. I could see where the paper had worn thin from erasing the same eye over and over, the ghost lines of features drawn and redrawn until the page was a mess.
Months later, I ran into her again and asked how the portrait turned out.
"Oh... I never finished it," she said.
At the time, I thought Susan's problem was technique. Now I understand it was something much bigger.
Susan spent a hundred hours at her drawing table, and I'd bet she never spent one minute in flow.
Think about what those hours were like. Draw an eye. Stare at it. That's not right. Erase. Draw it again. Still wrong. What's wrong with me?
Every line was a test. And every test, she failed.
The flow sweet spot
Remember from Part 2: flow is that state where you're so absorbed that time disappears and your brain's alarm finally quiets down.
But here's what I learned when I dug into the research. Psychologists have studied flow for decades, and they found it only happens under certain conditions.
The most important one is simple: the challenge has to match your skill.
If a task is too easy, you get bored, and your mind wanders right back to your pain.
If a task is too hard, you get anxious.
You start judging yourself.
And that inner critic, the voice asking "What's wrong with me?", is powered by the very same inward-looking part of your brain we talked about in Part 2.
The one that's supposed to go quiet.
That's what happened to Susan.
And that's what happens to almost every beginner in a traditional art class.
How traditional art training blocks flow
Most art lessons ask you to make a finished drawing from day one. A whole portrait. A still life. Something that's supposed to look "right."
For a beginner, that's like being asked to run a marathon on your first day of walking. The challenge is miles beyond your skill. So instead of flow, you get frustration. Instead of your brain's alarm quieting down, it gets louder.
And if you live with chronic pain, it's even harder. Your body might ache after twenty minutes. Your energy runs out. You sit down hoping for relief, and you walk away feeling like one more thing in your life you can't do.
No wonder so many people quit. They were never shown the way in.
What my students did differently
Years before Student Day, long before I knew anything about flow, I'd developed an exercise to help my students improve faster. I call them Rapid Learning Reps.
Here's how they work:
Instead of spending hours on one drawing, you do very quick sketches. Just 3 to 5 minutes each. You draw the same thing a few times in a row, and you're not trying to make it good.
In fact, I tell my students: your reps can be terrible. Truly terrible. That's the point.
When I first created them, I thought I was just teaching people to learn faster. Thousands of students have used them.
But after Student Day, I looked at Rapid Learning Reps with new eyes. And I realized they check nearly every box for flow:
They're short. Three minutes is small enough to start on your worst day, and gentle enough for sore hands.
The stakes are low. When "terrible" is allowed, the inner critic has nothing to grab onto.
The goal is clear. One simple thing to do, right now.
You see progress immediately. By your third sketch, you can often see the difference on the page, and that little spark of "hey, I did that" pulls you deeper in.
The challenge grows with you. As your skill improves, the reps get more interesting, so you stay in that sweet spot instead of drifting into boredom or frustration.
There's a reason those little wins matter. Neuroscientists have found that dopamine, one of the brain's key chemical messengers, helps us learn what's worth doing and gives us the drive to keep doing it. Every rep where you see yourself improve is a small win.
Without meaning to, I'd built a doorway into flow.
Denise's story
When I asked Denise about the first time she tried Rapid Learning Reps, a twinkle appeared in her eye. She smiled, laughed, and told me what happened that night.
She sat down after dinner planning to do three quick sketches, just like I'd asked.
The next time she looked at the clock, the sun was coming up.
"I stayed up all night," she said. "And the crazy thing is, it didn't feel like work. I was having fun. I can't remember the last time something was fun."
Think about that for a moment.
For someone living with chronic pain, where every day feels like managing something, where almost everything takes effort, here was something that didn't feel like work at all. She didn't have to push herself to do it. She couldn't stop.
That's what flow feels like from the inside.
Time disappears.
Effort disappears.
And for a while, so does the constant background hum of everything you're carrying.
Now, I'm not telling you to stay up all night. Your body needs its rest, and a few minutes a day is all it takes to start.
But I love Denise's story because it shows what happens when you find the doorway: creating stops being something you have to do and becomes something you want to do.
Here's what I want you to understand.
If you've ever tried something creative and walked away frustrated, feeling like you just don't have it in you…
It wasn't you. You were handed a challenge far beyond where you were, and nobody showed you the doorway.
Flow isn't reserved for talented people. It's what happens when the challenge fits. And with the right starting point, it can fit almost anyone. Even with sore hands, low energy, and no art experience at all.
But there was one problem I couldn't solve on my own.
As word spread about what my students were experiencing, more and more people started reaching out, asking questions that an art teacher has no business answering.
That's when I realized this was bigger than my classroom.
So I had no choice but to get help from an unlikely source…
Subtext
Flow isn't about talent. It happens when the challenge matches your skill, and most people have simply never been given the right starting point.
Short, low-pressure creative exercises, like Rapid Learning Reps, are a doorway into flow, even for people with pain, low energy, or no art experience.
Flow isn't about talent. It happens when the challenge matches your skill, and most people have simply never been given the right starting point.
Short, low-pressure creative exercises, like Rapid Learning Reps, are a doorway into flow, even for people with pain, low energy, or no art experience.
After Student Day, my inbox exploded.
Students who'd been on the call told friends.
Friends told their support groups.
Within a few days, I was getting messages from people I'd never met, people living with fibromyalgia, arthritis, neuropathy, migraines, and conditions I'd never heard of.
Most of them said some version of the same thing: "I heard about how you are helping people. Can you help me too?"
It was the most beautiful thing that had ever happened in my career.
It was also the most frightening.
The questions I couldn't answer
Because mixed in with the kind messages were questions like these:
"If I paint every day, can I cut back on my pain medication?"
"My hands flare up after ten minutes. Should I push through it?"
"I had a brain injury last year. Is this safe for me?"
I read those messages and felt sick to my stomach.
I'm an art teacher. I can help you draw a nose that actually looks like a nose. I can show you how to mix a skin tone. But I don't know your medical history. I don't know your medications. I don't know what your body can and can't handle.
And the thought that kept me up at night was this: what if someone read one of my emails, got excited, and stopped taking something they needed?
I couldn't let that happen.
The doorway isn't the same for everyone
There was something else, too.
Remember from Part 3: flow happens when the challenge matches your skill. But for someone living with chronic pain, it's not just about skill. It's about your body.
You see, everyone is on their own journey.
The right starting point for someone with rheumatoid arthritis in her hands is different from the right starting point for someone recovering from a brain injury, or someone with fatigue so heavy that three minutes feels like a mountain.
Finding that sweet spot for a person in pain isn't only an art question. It's a medical question too.
And I wanted to know if it was really working.
The stories moved me to tears. But stories aren't the same as knowing. If this was going to help people, I wanted it done properly: carefully, safely, and with a way to actually track whether people were getting better.
The gap nobody was filling. Or so I thought.
On one side, there are doctors. They're essential. They have the medications, the treatments, and the medical knowledge. But most of them don't have the time or the tools to help you find something that makes you forget your pain for an hour.
On the other side, there are art teachers like me. We know how to get people into flow. But we have no business managing anyone's health.
And in the middle, where people living with chronic pain actually live their lives, there was nobody.
At least, that's what I thought.
So I started searching for someone, anyone, who understood both sides. Someone who took chronic pain seriously as a medical condition, and understood what I'd seen on Student Day.
And that's when I discovered CoachFlow.
A Medicare-enrolled provider that fits perfectly into that gap!
CoachFlow exists for one reason: to bring creativity into the care of people living with chronic pain.
And their philosophy fits in four words:
Creativity as a Prescription.
The more I learned, the more I realized this idea is far bigger than my classroom.
At first I thought CoachFlow was too good to be true, but after doing some research I learned that other countries have been prescribing creative exercises for quite some time.
In the United Kingdom, doctors can refer patients to activities like art classes, gardening, and community groups as part of their care. It's called social prescribing.
In 2018, doctors in Montreal began writing prescriptions for visits to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Real prescriptions, on a real prescription pad. One of the doctors behind it said that it's rare in medicine to prescribe something without having to worry about side effects or drug interactions.
And in 2019, the World Health Organization published the largest review ever done on the arts and health, bringing together more than 3,000 studies. It found the arts play a real role not only in preventing illness, but in managing and treating it. One of its recommendations? More referrals from health care to the arts.
The world already knew. Creativity belongs in health care.
CoachFlow is bringing that to people living with chronic pain here at home.
Here's how it works.
CoachFlow's medical team does what doctors do best. They get to know you: your health, your medications, and what your body can handle. Then they prescribe something most people in pain have never been given: creativity.
They don't replace your doctors. They work alongside them to help you manage your chronic pain.
That's the medical side, and it's the part I stay out of.
CoachFlow partners with art teachers who know how to guide beginners into flow, and I'm honored that RTY Art is their first creative partner. I teach the classes. CoachFlow's medical team handles everything else.
They take care of the medicine. Artists like me bring the creative engagement.
So what does it actually look like? What happens on your first day? How much time does it take? And what if you've never held a paintbrush in your life?
That's what I'll walk you through next.
Subtext
Using creativity for chronic pain works best with medical guidance. The right starting point depends on your body, and safety matters.
CoachFlow is a medical practice built on a proven, growing idea: Creativity as a Prescription. RTY Art is its first creative partner.
NHS England, The NHS Long Term Plan (2019): goal of at least 900,000 people referred to social prescribing by 2023/24.
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Médecins francophones du Canada, museum prescription program beginning November 1, 2018 (reported by CBC News).
Fancourt D, Finn S. What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2019.
Part 5 of 5
What CoachFlow Actually Looks Like
Written by Rebecca Tillman-YoungPortrait artist & founder, RTY Art Academy
Using creativity for chronic pain works best with medical guidance. The right starting point depends on your body, and safety matters.
CoachFlow is a medical practice built on a proven, growing idea: Creativity as a Prescription. RTY Art is its first creative partner.
Whenever I tell someone about CoachFlow, I can almost see the worries forming on their face.
"I can't even draw a stick figure."
"My hands won't cooperate."
"I'm not good with computers."
"How much time will this take? I barely have enough energy for the day as it is."
I understand. So before I tell you more about CoachFlow, I'd like you to see it for yourself.
CoachFlow includes live classes with several art instructors who teach several times a week. It also includes a library of over 100 on-demand courses from the RTY Art library, and really fun creative brain games.
Everything about CoachFlow is geared towards engaging your creative brain, teaching you fun skills, and keeping your brain focused on something other than pain.
Here's a quick video of me playing Mix to Match, one of the CoachFlow games I helped develop. You'll see how it works just like mixing paint on my real palette, and then I'll give you a quick tour of the app.
I'm so happy that I was able to work with a provider like CoachFlow that really understands how creativity can help so many people, and that games this absorbing can actually be good for you.
But like I said before — I'm not a doctor, and I've never played one on TV.
I can't tell you whether or not you'll be approved for CoachFlow. I can't tell you whether or not it will be a good fit for you.
That's between CoachFlow and you.
But what I can tell you is that if you are on Medicare, it may be covered by your existing benefits, and finding out is easy.
Written by Rebecca Tillman-YoungPortrait artist & founder, RTY Art Academy