Colour me calm

By Annie Stevens

Colour me calm

With stress levels on the rise, adults are turning to more simple, child-like pursuits to wind down from the frenetic pace of their daily lives.

Colouring books, and there are many (including a Benedict Cumberbatch-themed colouring-in book), have sparked something of a trend, with a growing number of mortgage-paying, dog-owning, job-having adults picking up their pencil tins and trying to stay inside the lines.

It’s why we now include multiple pages of colouring-in in MiNDFOOD magazine each month.

Indeed in France, colouring-in books for adults are said to be selling faster than cookbooks.

So why are so many adults taking up an activity that they probably haven’t done since kindergarten?

Getting in touch with your inner child has been pegged as a way of tapping into the creativity, freedom of expression and a certain contentment that you might have had in your kindy days.

Preschool for adults

Taking this a step further, earlier this year two women in New York started a pre-school programme for adults – Preschool Mastermind – allowing adults to indulge in finger painting, nap time and show-and-tell.

The point of it, said co-founder Michelle Joni Lapidos, is to nourish the “play” part of the brain, which usually gets jettisoned in the stressful business of being an adult. So the trend for colouring-in books makes sense, really.

It takes us back to a simpler time, one before we had to pay bills and look at our smartphones dozens of times a day. But it’s also a cheaper-than-therapy way of finding calm, meditation and, yes, maybe even the creativity you had as a child.

Besides all this, as psychologists have pointed out, a repetitive, mindful activity such as colouring-in is awfully good for stress relief. Something that adults are more likely to appreciate than their kindy counterparts.

Pick up MiNDFOOD magazine for your own colouring in pages at home. 

Or click here to download and print a free colouring in page.

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