Coloring To Improve Your Health
Coloring books for adults are a simple way to reduce stress and increase feelings of peace and calm. By focusing on coloring, you focus on the present.
IN THIS ARTICLE
- Quiet Your Brain
- Meditative States and Where to Find Them
- Fine Motor Skills
- Increase Hand-Eye Coordination
- Getting Some Sleep
- Coloring Mandalas Improves Focus
- Decrease Anxiety
- Coloring Reduces Stress
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1. Quiet Your Brain
Focusing on coloring a coloring book for adults decreases intrusive thoughts and negative chatter. Stress levels decrease even more when you are coloring complex mandalas. By focusing solely on coloring, your mind can relax and enter a meditative state.
Selecting colors and coloring different forms and patterns engages your creativity and logic. In the process, your focus is on coloring instead of the past or future. With coloring, you are focused on the present.
2. Meditative States and Where to Find Them
Everyone can benefit from meditation; the more you practice, the better you get at entering the meditative state.
Coloring increases your ability to enter the state of meditation because you must focus on choosing colors, coloring inside the lines, and staying with the patterns.
The meditative state gives you the freedom to take a vacation in the present by disconnecting from the stress of your daily life as well as your past and future.
3. Fine Motor Skills
After breaking four fingers in my dominant hand, I had to figure out how to use my other hand. The way I did that was to color in my book Large Print Adult Coloring Book with Thick Lines. I increased my fine motor skills in my left hand within a few coloring sessions. After the bones had healed and I had a go-ahead from my doctor, I started coloring with my right hand. At first, it was clumsy, but after a few sessions, I was back to almost normal and didn’t need as much PT to regain full mobility.
I’m not saying the coloring is a replacement for PT if you have a hand injury, but I found it very helpful.
Hand-eye coordination and motor skills are essential for us to maintain, and some health professionals believe that coloring can delay the onset of dementia.
4. Increase Hand-Eye Coordination
As we age, our hand-eye coordination starts to decline. Reduced hand-eye coordination can create a host of problems that will reduce the quality of life. You can improve your hand-eye coordination by playing games like ping-pong or creative activities such as sewing, knitting, drawing, painting, or coloring.
Hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills are essential for us to maintain, and some health professionals believe that coloring can delay the onset of dementia.
5. Getting Some Sleep
Increase your ability to go to sleep and get a good night’s sleep by turning off your phone and picking up a coloring book. The practice of coloring before bed will help you enter a meditative state which relaxes your body and mind.
Not exposing yourself to the blue light electronic devices produces will help your body create the melatonin needed for restful sleep. Coloring a mandala helps focus because you are coloring them from the center out, and you have to focus on the repeating patterns and your color choices.
6. Coloring Mandalas Improves Focus
Mandalas can be simple to complex repeating pattern designs. The patterns and color selections help improve your focus. Your brain needs to organize and problem-solve which colors are compatible and which color scheme will look best.
Adult coloring books with patterns require focus to keep the colors coordinated with the right areas of the design, so you need to focus solely on the act of coloring, which helps calm your mind.
7. Decrease Anxiety
If you get stressed out, coloring might help calm that stress response down. My stress response is sugar, but switching to coloring instead of destroying a shareable-sized bag of candies, I color in a coloring book. Coloring changes my mood and reduces my stress levels, putting me in a better state of mind to handle whatever chaos comes next.
Coloring for just 20 minutes has been shown to lower your heart rate and decrease feelings of Anxiety. Coloring mandalas is likely even more effective because of the focus needed to color the patterns.
Coloring is not a replacement for a mental health practitioner. If you need help, get it. You can find providers in your area by searching for mental health near me, or you can go to nami.org to find a provider.
Stress causes more problems than just with your mind. Ask your shoulders. Stress tends to accumulate in different areas of our bodies. When you help your mind relax, you start helping other areas of your body relax, which reduces body aches and fatigue.
8. Coloring Reduces Stress
The repetitive action of coloring in the patterns of a coloring book for adults is a form of meditation. The activity of coloring the mandala and the rhythmic sound of the colored pencil, alcohol marker, or gel pen on the page promotes a calm state.
Conclusion
Coloring an adult coloring book is a low-risk, high-reward activity. The costs of starting to color are typically under $20 depending on what coloring book you buy and if you get colored pencils, alcohol markers, or gel pens.
Coloring supplies are easy to store and transport. I like to use these mesh bags that I can slide the coloring book, a few alcohol markers, gel pens, and colored pencils into and take with me anywhere.
It is nice to have something so simple as a coloring book for adults that I can take a moment to relax my mind for a few moments. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’ll sit down and color a round of the mandala I am working on and almost instantly feel better. I think it is because, with practice, I’ve found shortcuts to the meditative state coloring provides.
Here are some of the coloring supplies I use:
Here is how you can create a coloring book.
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