We have absolutely no data to support this other than some rough anecdotal evidence, but we'd venture to guess that 79% of people who love math would say that one of their leading reasons for doing so has something to do with the austere and surprising beauty of the subject. And while we absolutely feel the same way about the field, we'd also like to put a spotlight on another reason we love the subject — a reason that doesn't get talked about much but is maybe shared by others too.
And that reason is: the therapeutic aspects of math.
Art Therapy
The event that got us thinking about this — and identifying it for what it is — was our very late discovery of something called "Art Therapy". This is a technique that shows particular promise for childhood therapies where people (often children too young to know how to properly express their emotions in words) can draw/paint/scribble how they feel about certain things and/or what they're thinking about.
We're no experts on Art Therapy but can immediately appreciate the exciting potential of therapeutic measures that don't rely on human language and/or awkward conversations.
Despite our love of designing t-shirts, none of us are really particularly good drawers or painters, so we shy away from ever participating in Art Therapy (maybe our lack of desire to do something we're not "good at" is itself something we need therapy for, but we'll leave that for another day). But it did dawn on us that we regularly partake in another kind of therapy — to us, this therapy is pretty powerful. That is, "Math Therapy", or "MaTherapy" for short.
MaTherapy
MaTherapy is different from Art Therapy in the sense that MaTherapy is less about expression and communication and more of a "therapeutic experience". Namely, no one here is trying to argue that we are "expressing ourselves" when we're slogging through a multi-page calculation or writing up some code to test some ideas numerically.
But we are doing something pretty fun and, well, therapeutic. Namely, we're doing: nothing else.
It's pretty well documented that a leading (or at least very plausible) cause of the rising rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, and other afflictions is the heavy use of smartphones. It's also pretty well known that it's not the phones themselves, but rather the essentially infinite source of extremely fast-paced, flittery entertainment that they connect us to. The type of entertainment where you can swipe along for 30 minutes, maybe even chuckle a few times, yet remember literally nothing of.
Don't get me wrong, we love a good TikTok swipe session as much as the next human, but it's hardly "therapeutic".
What is therapeutic, though, is putting your phone away and getting into a "flow state" doing math. Going hard on some pen and paper calculations, hearing and feeling the pen scratch across the paper as you move through the challenge one step at a time — you really do forget about the world for those minutes, because you have to.
And don't even get me started on how fun it is to crack open a textbook to a section that you've been excited to get to all day and giving yourself like a full hour to just sit there and get through as much as you can. (And if it's raining outside? Oo-wee).
Shooting Hoops In The Backyard
One very personal analogy comes to mind when I try to find an activity similar to MaTherapy, and that is shooting hoops in the backyard as a kid. Everyone else here at Coho has a similar analogy, but let's stick to this one.
I wasn't doing "Art Therapy" while shooting hoops, since I wasn't "expressing myself or my thoughts" in any way. I may have been "expressing" my love for Kobe when I'd repeatedly count down "3...2...1..." until I finally made a fake buzzer-beater, but I certainly wasn't expressing anything about any stresses or frustrations in my life.
What I was doing, though, was spending a good chunk of time doing nothing else but shooting hoops. I don't know the science behind it but I'd venture to guess that my brain was processing some kinds of things during that time. What I know for sure, though, is that it was fun and made me feel good (even if exhausted).
MaTherapy is no different. Whether it's following the strict rules of high school algebra and carefully and calmly working through 30 homework problems, or sitting down with a pen and a blank piece of paper to try to tackle the thorny part of your research problem that you've been stuck on for weeks, or cozying up with a textbook to learn a new sub-sub-sub-topic...as long as you've given yourself a chunk of time where all else takes second priority, this mathematical experience is giving you an almost Zen-like level of meditative focus.
That just has to count as therapy of some kind.
Not All Sunshine And Roses
Of course not all experiences with math are MaTherapeutic. There's the hair-pulling, nail-biting frustration that comes with being stuck, or confused, or whatever the word is for: "exhausted but the problem set is due in 5 hours". None of that is therapeutic, and that's fine. There were plenty of experiences with basketball as a child that weren't therapeutic too (running laps, losing at the buzzer, air-balling a free throw).
We do think, though, that whether we've ever admitted it to ourselves or not, it's likely the case that at least some of the reason we love math is because at least some of our experiences with it in the past have been therapeutic.
This realization is more than just philosophical. By realizing it, we can more easily course-correct when our love for the field starts to wane. Often, that's just a sign of us not having spent enough time in MaTherapy. We're not carving out enough time for ourselves to do the mathematical equivalent of "just shooting hoops".
This becomes a very real danger if/when math becomes your job and your source of income.
So, no matter where you're at in your mathematical journey, please take a moment to reflect on whether or not you're giving yourself enough time in MaTherapy. At the very least, if you ever feel like giving up or you feel like you're in over your head, consider the possibility that you might need a little more of the "just shooting hoops" and a little less of the "running laps".
Please don't hesitate to reach out and let us know what MaTherapy means to you! It'd be great if we could all develop a bank of MaTherapeutic tools to draw on.