Colouring as a Relaxation Technique: What the Studies Show

Can colouring in a picture calm you down the way meditation does? The short answer from the research: colouring a detailed pattern for ten to twenty minutes often lowers how anxious people say they feel, at least for a while. What the studies do not show is that it does the same job as meditation. Colouring is a pleasant, low-effort way to step out of a busy head; meditation is a trained skill with a much larger body of evidence behind it. Both can have a place in an ordinary week.

Below we look at where the adult colouring craze came from, what experiments have actually measured, why a page of mandalas might settle the mind, and how to get the most out of it without expecting miracles.

Where the adult colouring boom came from

Colouring books for grown-ups are not new. In the early 1960s, satirical titles such as the 1962 John F. Kennedy Coloring Book sold in huge numbers, though they were jokes rather than relaxation aids. The calm, intricate style we know today took off commercially in 2012 and 2013, led by illustrators like Johanna Basford.

By spring 2015 Basford's Secret Garden and Enchanted Forest were among Amazon's top sellers, and for a while several colouring titles sat in the overall best-seller charts at once. Crayola launched an adult range, pencil makers reported trouble keeping up with demand, and publishers began bundling books with pencils. In the United States the wave began to ease by late 2016, but the hobby never vanished, and it has returned in new forms online. You can see what is selling today on Amazon's current book best-seller list.

Much of the marketing promised that colouring was "the new meditation". That slogan is where the science needs a closer look.

What the experiments actually found

Most of the research is small and was done with university students, so treat it as a promising start rather than a final word.

Curry and Kasser (2005). Students were first made a little anxious, then asked to colour a mandala, colour a plaid pattern, or draw freely. Both structured colouring tasks reduced anxiety; free drawing did not.
Van der Vennet and Serice (2012). A follow-up found that mandala colouring lowered anxiety more than plaid patterns or free drawing.
Mantzios and Giannou (2018). In two randomised experiments with UK students, ten minutes of unguided mandala colouring did not raise mindfulness scores. Anxiety fell over time, but no more than with free drawing. When a meditation teacher gave breathing-style instructions while people coloured, anxiety dropped further than with plain colouring, yet mindfulness scores still did not rise overall.

Put together, the picture is reasonably consistent. A structured, repetitive pattern seems to help people settle, and some guidance on how to pay attention may add to the effect. But colouring on its own does not appear to build the attentional skills that regular meditation practice trains. The 2018 authors themselves concluded that more work is needed before colouring is used in health settings.

Why a page of patterns can quiet a busy mind

Nobody has a complete explanation, but several plausible reasons fit the evidence.

It gives your attention a simple job

Anxious thinking loves an idle mind. Choosing a colour, staying inside a line and filling a small shape keeps attention busy with something concrete and low-stakes. While your eyes and hands are occupied, there is less room for replaying an awkward conversation or rehearsing tomorrow's problems.

Structure removes the fear of the blank page

Free drawing can feel like a test: what if it looks bad? A ready-made design removes that pressure. You still make creative choices about colour and shading, but the outcome is almost guaranteed to look pleasing. That may be why mandalas and plaids beat free drawing in the early studies.

Repetition and rhythm

Mandalas repeat the same shapes around a centre. Working through them in a steady rhythm resembles other calming, repetitive activities such as knitting or gardening, where people often describe losing track of time.

A screen-free pause

Colouring is one of the few hobbies that asks nothing of a phone. Simply stepping away from notifications for a quarter of an hour may be part of the benefit, whatever you do with your hands.

Carl Jung and the mandala

The link between circles and the psyche goes back to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Around the end of the First World War he began sketching a small circular drawing in his notebook each morning and noticed that the designs seemed to mirror his inner state. He and his patients went on to make such drawings, and he borrowed the Sanskrit word mandala for them. For Jung the mandala stood for the Self, the wholeness of the personality, and he saw the urge to draw one as a sign of the mind rebalancing itself.

New York psychologist Ben Michaelis, quoted widely during the 2015 boom, put the history like this: "there is a long history of people coloring for mental health reasons." Jung's ideas are symbolic rather than experimental, so they do not prove that colouring heals anything. They do help explain why mandala designs dominate adult colouring books, and why researchers chose them for their experiments.

Spanish psychologist Antoni Martínez described colouring as a relaxation technique and suggested doing it somewhere quiet, perhaps with gentle music, and letting "the color and the lines flow". That advice matches what the guided-colouring study hints at: the way you colour may matter as much as the picture.

Colouring versus meditation: myths and facts

Myth: psychologists say colouring can replace meditation. Some psychologists said colouring has relaxing effects; the studies do not show that it is equivalent. Meditation has been studied in thousands of trials, including long programmes such as mindfulness-based stress reduction. Colouring research consists of a handful of short sessions.

Myth: any drawing will do. In the early experiments, free drawing did not reduce anxiety while structured patterns did. If your aim is to calm down rather than to make art, a repeating design may be the better choice.

Fact: it is cheap, safe and easy to start. You need paper and a few pencils. There is no technique to learn and almost no way to do it wrong.

Fact: it is not treatment. Colouring is a pleasant habit, not therapy. If anxiety, low mood or poor sleep last for weeks or get in the way of daily life, talk to a doctor.

How to make colouring genuinely relaxing

Pick a structured design. Mandalas, tiles or geometric patterns give your mind a clear, repetitive task.
Set a short window. The studies used about ten to twenty minutes. A small, regular session is easier to keep than a marathon.
Colour on purpose. Borrow from the guided version: notice your breathing, the feel of the pencil and the colour spreading across the paper. When your thoughts drift, bring them back to the next shape.
Keep the phone in another room. A real break from screens is part of the point.
Let go of perfection. Going over a line is fine. The page is a tool for winding down, not an exam.
Combine, don't replace. If you want the benefits that meditation research describes, try a few minutes of breathing practice before or after you colour.

Colouring will not transform your brain, but after a long day it can be a gentle, satisfying way to give your thoughts somewhere quieter to go.

Sources: Mantzios and Giannou, Frontiers in Psychology (2018), with summaries of Curry and Kasser (2005) and van der Vennet and Serice (2012); Wikipedia: Coloring book (adult colouring boom); Wikipedia: Mandala (Carl Jung); quotes from Ben Michaelis and Antoni Martínez as reported by HuffPost; header photo by Wendy Piersall.

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