Adult coloring is an excellent way to improve mental health and mind clarity. Learn why and how to get started with this beneficial therapy.

Coloring offers many benefits for your midlife mental health. It’s not just for kids anymore.

It takes time and effort to color a page in an adult coloring book. The precision and carefulness can bring about mindfulness. It can also take your mind off things you worry about, allowing you to feel much more calm and less stressed.

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Adult coloring is a hot trend right now. Sure, it’s fun to do, but do you know it actually offers many benefits to your health and well being? It’s much more than a fun, childish pastime.

7 Reasons To Color As An Adult

1.  Coloring is Therapy

Coloring helps to reduce anxiety and depression by providing mental clarity and focus, plus it suspends negative thoughts and behaviors.

2. Promotes Happiness

Coloring can boost your mood. Choosing bright colors and uplifting themes will stimulate the emotional center of your brain. When you color, you are creating something individual to you. You may use a pre-designed image, but you chose the colors, intensity, and style. This increases positivity within and brings happiness along with a feeling of accomplishment.

3. Reduces Stress and Anxiety

Mental stress is detrimental to your health and can lead to physical problems. An incredible feature of coloring is the ability to extremely decrease stress and anxiety.

Adult coloring removes direct fixation on the part of the brain responsible for fear, by allowing for focus, which helps with stress-related concerns, such as post traumatic stress disorder. It helps lessen other stress-causing thoughts by being relaxing.

Shades of blue and pale pink are soothing colors, known to reduce anxiety and calm you. In addition, choosing to color before bedtime can even help with insomnia. 

4. Fights Memory Loss

The less we use our brains, the more at risk we are for developing dementia. That old saying, “use it or lose it”, holds true for the brain. As we age, keeping our mind focused and engaged with coloring can help delay memory loss issues.

5. Healing Effect

Coloring as an adult can bring back happy emotions and ease the tensions of daily responsibilities. Our current problems can many times be traced back to childhood, so by connecting with our inner child, we can begin to heal.

6. Form of Meditation

Adult coloring takes the focus off troubling thoughts and provides mindfulness, much the same way meditation does, by allowing the brain to take a much needed break.

7. Improves Productivity 

Coloring utilizes the frontal lobe, the part of the brain responsible for focus, concentration, creativity, and logic. Therefore, you will strengthen organizational and problem-solving skills and become more productive, especially in writing and math.

How To Begin Coloring

Even though you’ve just learned about the benefits of adult coloring, you may feel a bit silly or embarrassed to begin. Rest assured, it’s simple, fun and beneficial to your mind and overall health. Here’s how to get started.

Supplies

Very few supplies are needed. You may just want to begin with some crayons you already have laying around the house. Many adults prefer using colored pencils over crayons, for more precision.

Free Printable Coloring Pages

Zenful Color – Offers a once-a-month freebie coloring page that can be downloaded. 

Coloring Bliss – Lots of free coloring pages to be downloaded here.

Just Color – Over 1500 free coloring pages to download.

Adult Coloring Books

Secret Garden – This is the wildly popular adult coloring book that started the coloring phenomenon.

Adult Coloring Planner – I have created this 2021-2022 daily planner to help you be productive and also get in some color therapy.

Stress Relieving Animal Designs – This is a New York Times Bestseller that features over 60 different animals for coloring on heavy-stock paper.

Amazing Swirls – This adult coloring book contains swirls style illustrations representing animals and floral compositions.

All you need to do is sit down and color. No one needs to see your art work unless you want them to, so don’t be self-conscious about it. It doesn’t need to be perfect!

Adult coloring is an inexpensive therapy that’s easy, and a great way to unwind and de-stress. 

Try it and see how it works for you. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think of adult coloring for therapy.