Everybody’s been raving about coloring books, lately—and the thing is, they’re not even kids.
These are full-blown adults who pay taxes, owe themselves massages, and probably leech off their parents’ pockets. At the same time, they’re the same ones who would willingly spend 30 minutes of their day doodling and laboring over patterned pages, coloring every inch of space left in that black-and-white figure.
So what explains this return to a kindergarten hobby? Blame stress for making these “colorists”—they even got a formal name—resort to a childhood tactic.
Psychologist Gloria Martínez Ayala believes that “the relaxation [coloring] provides lowers the activity of the amygdala, a basic part of our brain involved in controlling emotion that is affected by stress.”
Marketing plans like to ride on these facts, often exploiting these psychological claims for ultimate profit. You can just see it in how bestselling titles evoke calm and escapes: Secret Garden, The Mindfulness Coloring Book; Color Me Calm, Creative Therapy and so on.
The excessive praise these coloring books got rustled people’s jimmies, one of who is art therapist Cathy Malchiodi PhD, LPCC, LPAT. “There is some sketchy (pun intended) evidence that the repetitive nature of coloring may be a form of self-regulation [that’s] self-soothing… I do sigh out loud each time I read yet again another testimonial on what seem to be suddenly the ever-increasing benefits and personal epiphanies,” she writes in Psychology Today.
Get ready to get your mood killed: Cathy insists that no matter how much shading you do, you’re not meditating, coloring isn’t a form of artistic expression, and this is not the creative self-help you need.
But these are psychologists who are talking. What do adults really feel about all this shade (or shading)?
We gave out sheets from Jenn Ski’s Just Add Color: Mid-Century Mania and Zoé de las Casas Secret Japan (Colouring for Mindfulness) for 11 grown-ups to color in, and this was what they thought.
Click the slideshow above to see how it was like coloring these pages!
Photo by Patrick Segovia
Just Add Color: Mid-Century Mania (P525) is available in National Book Store. For a complete list of branches, visit their website.
