—Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: Kinga Krzeminska—Getty Images)
Girija Kaimal likes that you can turn your brain off when you color. The few minutes it takes to fill in a page is enough to break your brain’s cycle of stress, it turns out.
“Anyone can do it—it’s not asking you to make anything. It’s asking you to enter into a pre-made space,” says Kaimal, chair of the department of creative arts therapies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “You have assured success. There’s very little room for failure.”
That’s just one part of the appeal of coloring books, she adds. When you open a fresh page of designs, you get to lean into your own aesthetic. You decide what to highlight, what to ignore, and how to make an image come to life. “If you give the same coloring sheet to two people, no two people will color it the same way,” Kaimal says. “The end product will look different, the colors will be different, and the way they do it will also be different. Even in the most standardized of things, people will bring out their individuality, and that’s the beauty of it.”
All of that adds up to a surprisingly powerful stress reliever. When you’re focused on your pencil and paper, you’re less likely to be spinning out over whatever’s weighing on you; coloring breaks the cycle of rumination almost by default, Kaimal says. Here’s what to know.
Why coloring feels so calming
Part of what makes coloring so good at easing stress is how completely it occupies just enough of your attention. It’s absorbing without being demanding—which puts your brain in a flow state that’s hard to access through passive rest alone. That helps break the loop of worried thinking, Kaimal says, crowding out anxious thoughts in a way that zoning out in front of a screen often can’t.
Research suggests coloring can improve mental health even in high-pressure environments. In one study, for example, Kaimal and her colleagues found that when caregivers for loved ones with cancer spent 45 minutes coloring, they felt calmer, more relaxed, and fully absorbed in the activity. That meant they were able to take a mental break from the pressure of caregiving, even if only temporarily.
Additional research has found that coloring improves mood, reduces stress, and helps people feel more focused and present, and that adult coloring books serve as a low-barrier entry for those who are otherwise hesitant to explore their artistic side. You don’t need any special skills or training and can benefit from just a short session. “We’ve seen changes within 15 minutes,” Kaimal says.
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Nearly 15 years ago, when a publisher approached Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford about making a children’s coloring book, she told them she’d love to—but that she wanted to focus on the same kind of “elegant, refined artwork” she was already making for perfume companies and champagne brands. “I was like, ‘We could make a coloring book for grown-ups,’ which was a hard sell at the time,” she says. The publisher told her they didn’t know where such a book would go—there was no clear category for it among booksellers—or who would buy it. Yet they gave Basford the green light to proceed.
That first coloring book ended up becoming a best-seller credited with kickstarting the adult coloring book craze, and Basford has since published more than a dozen coloring and creativity books. She believes the trend took off in part because it extended an opportunity for the kind of playful creativity typically reserved for children. “Everyone has this creative side, so when you see a child coloring, they’re just going for it—they’ve got their crayon and they’re happy and they’re not consumed with the self-doubt that adults get,” she says. “As we get older, we get in our own way. And coloring allows you to be creative with a little bit of a safety buffer.”
Plus, holding an art utensil in your hand all but forces you to detach from your phone. It gives your fingers something to do other than scroll, type, and scroll some more. Basford, who pulls a coloring book out of her kitchen drawer whenever she has a few minutes of downtime, especially appreciates the analog nature of the activity. “I like the fact that you have to put your phone down and pick up a pencil, and you can smell the cedar wood of the pencil and feel the color going down,” she says. “Afterwards, you feel like you’ve decompressed, like you’ve let a big breath out and everything’s calmer. I feel reset—and it’s the exact opposite of how I feel when I come off my phone.”
How to make coloring work for you
Feeling drawn to the idea of coloring? Kaimal suggests getting started by choosing a coloring book that resonates with you: one featuring fantastic fairies or cute cats or intricate gardens, for example. If you’re not sure where to start, she recommends thinking back to what you loved as a kid—whatever subject matter delighted you then is a good place to look now. You don’t need much to get started; a modest set of colored pencils and a book you like are plenty.
From there, it helps to keep things as simple as possible. Basford recommends avoiding large sets of colored pencils, for example. “I think they’re a nightmare, because then you have to make 149 no’s to get to the pencil you’re going to use,” she says. For bigger, more detailed illustrations, she suggests picking just five pencils before you begin, which keeps the choices manageable and lets you focus on the coloring itself.
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Some books include bite-size illustrations in addition to full-page spreads. To make coloring a habit, Basford recommends spending a couple minutes coloring one of those every day for a week. Eventually, you may find you reach for a coloring book whenever you have a few minutes you’d otherwise spend scrolling: waiting for the pasta to boil, sitting in the car during school pickup, the few minutes between Zoom calls.
When you finish coloring—and get that “ta-da!” feeling of accomplishment, as Basford puts it—lean into fun ways to share your masterpiece with others. “You can put it on the fridge or show it off on social media, which is the world’s biggest show and tell,” she says. There are other options, too: You could frame your artwork and hang it on the wall or the refrigerator, send it to a friend, or turn it into unique wrapping paper.
Sometimes, people mail Basford coloring books they’ve completed from cover to cover. “They’re stunning—they’re so beautiful,” she says. Her favorite way to keep the creativity going, though, is an artsy spin on chain letters: “You color a page, and then you mail it to somebody else or pass it along to a friend, and then they color a bit before passing it on again,” she says. “Some of them have been sent back to me, and they’re just gorgeous. They’ve been all over the world. They’re just this wonderful mishmash of collaboration of so many people’s works.”
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