A new, surprising, movement is helping people to cope with stress. Huge spikes in sales of colouring books have been attributed to the fact that people are beginning to use them to help deal with stress.
Colouring books are strongly associated with childhood and whiling away the hours, but now adults are buying them in the UK, after a sudden demand for them surged through France. The movement has jumped the channel and is being taken up here in the UK.
Stress levels are high, with high demands put on people at work, long hours, and continued financial insecurity. There are many ways to deal with and to manage stress, and this one, although initially thought to have been kicked off by a publisher, has grown organically. A growth that has seen sales of colouring books jump by 300 percent year on year at Waterstones.
The slow, careful act of colouring could have therapeutic benefits as a result of similar processes to mindfulness. Mindfulness trains people to focus on the present moment, experience things as they are happening, forget about the past and stop fearing the future.
It gives the mind time to drop all of its burdens and stretch its legs. Colouring in is likely doing exactly the same. Instead of focusing on the breath, as mindfulness teaches, people colouring will be focusing on the tip of the pencil. The sensations of the colour keep the mind experiencing the present moment, and the amount of control needed to stay inside the lines (a goal all of us surely can remember trying to conquer as children) help to stop the mind turning to worries from the past or the future.
Interestingly, children are often seen as being naturally mindful, in the way that they have little worries and will often get fully absorbed in things that they are experiencing in the moment, such as looking at a flower. It is therefore, quite fitting that a ‘childish’ activity such as colouring would take us back to this natural, mindful state.
