Singing in a choir, visiting a museum or dancing in the kitchen usually counts as leisure. Daisy Fancourt, a researcher at University College London, sets out the evidence for counting it as health.
Readical Key Points
- Shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, according to the publisher
- Reviewed in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal
- Chapters on well-being, mental health, brain health, movement, stress and pain, health behaviors and longevity, each closing with practical suggestions
- Content note: discusses depression, dementia, stroke and suicide prevention; popular science, not medical advice or a substitute for treatment
- Hardcover, 320 pages, Celadon Books, 2026
Fancourt's case is that making and taking in art deserves a place beside diet, sleep, exercise and time outdoors as a foundation of good health. She draws on clinical trials, lab studies and decades of population data, much of it from her own research group. She is also plain about where the evidence stops, taking apart popular claims that music cures cancer or raises a baby's IQ, and ends with chapters on why people drift away from the arts and how to return.
Readers of health and brain science, people who once sang, painted or danced and let it lapse, and those working in the arts, education or healthcare will find the research gathered in one book. The studies describe large groups of people, and no choir or sketchbook comes with a guaranteed result.
About the Author
Daisy Fancourt studied music at Oxford before earning a PhD in psychoneuroimmunology at University College London. She has served as professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at UCL, leading its Social Biobehavioural Research Group, and as director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Arts and Health. Her roughly 300 scientific papers sit alongside recognition as a World Economic Forum Global Shaper and a BBC New Generation Thinker.
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