The word creativity gets reserved for a talented few, which is a shame, because the research that matters most here is about ordinary people doing ordinary creative things — cooking something new, writing, sketching, playing music badly in a bedroom.
Tamlin Conner, Colin DeYoung, and Paul Silvia ran a daily diary study with 658 young adults over 13 days, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2018. Each day, participants logged what they did and how they felt. The pattern: on days people spent time on everyday creative activity, they reported higher positive emotion and a stronger sense of flourishing the next day.
The order is the point. Because they tracked days in sequence, the researchers could see that creating came first and the good feeling followed — not simply that happy people happen to make things. Making appears to be an input to wellbeing, not only a symptom of it.
None of this required talent or an audience. The creativity was casual and private. What mattered was the doing.
The honest limits: this was a young, mostly student sample over a short window, and self-reported. It shows a reliable daily pattern, not a lifelong guarantee.
For anyone running creative programming, it lowers the bar in the best way. You do not need to produce artists. You need to get people making something, regularly, at whatever level they are at. The benefit is in the habit, not the outcome.
Sources
Conner, T. S., DeYoung, C. G., & Silvia, P. J. (2018). "Everyday creative activity as a path to flourishing." The Journal of Positive Psychology, 13(2), 181–189.