Using Coloring To Optimize Your Brain Health
Why Coloring Should Be Your New Hobby
You may have jokingly said, “I’ll be in my fort coloring if you need me,” but there’s an underlying truth to this joke: Sometimes you need to shut out the world to focus on you.
You’re a limited resource and unless you take time to renew yourself, you will quickly get burned out.
Let’s explore the fun world that awaits you in coloring.
“Coloring Therapy”
Coloring is a type of therapy. As such, it often gets confused with “art therapy”, which is a more involved process that depends on the relationship between a client and therapist.
However, coloring helps to reduce anxiety, provide focus, mental clarity, a break from negative thoughts and behaviors, provides an alternative method to meditation, improves reality orientation, foster self-awareness, explore feelings and a host of other benefits.
Stress and Anxiety
One of the most amazing aspects of coloring is that it drastically decreases stress and anxiety.
For this reason, it can help with insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder.
PTSD occurs when a person experiences triggers that can bring them back into reliving a traumatic event. Coloring takes the focus off the amygdala, which is a part of the brain that’s responsible for fear.
Because coloring allows for focus, it thereby gets rid of other free-floating thoughts that tend to cause stress. In addition, coloring is relaxing, which produces the opposite effect of stress.
For this reason, coloring can help with insomnia if done a few minutes before bedtime.
Alternative to Meditation
For people who can’t seem to get into meditation, coloring provides the same benefits.
This is because coloring takes the focus off thoughts and provides mindfulness.
This allows the brain a way to take a break, which is what meditation accomplishes.
Happiness
Coloring helps to increase positivity by creating something truly individualistic.
Despite coloring pages that are already designed with patterns, people get to choose the colors, color intensity and style of blending they want to use for their creations.
Precise lines made from color pencils, markers and pens helps to create order. All of this, together, promotes happiness and a sense of accomplishment.
Healing
Coloring brings back happy emotions from a simpler time.
Being a kid again helps to ease the tensions of daily responsibilities, and it helps people connect with their inner child.
Often, current problems can be traced to the past. By including the inner child in coloring, people can reconnect with that child to begin healing.
Memory Loss
The old adage, “Use it or lose it,” is true for the brain.
The less we use our brains, the more at-risk we are for Alzheimer’s and dementia.
Coloring can help to prevent or delay the onset of dementia and other memory-loss issues.
Productivity
Coloring helps to strengthen organizational and problem-solving skills because it utilizes the frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain that’s responsible for focus, concentration, creativity and logic.
This helps people to be more productive.
It has been shown that use of color gets the creative juices flowing. This can help with writing and math.
It might just be true that all you really need to know you learned in kindergarten.
You certainly weren’t that stressed in kindergarten.
It’s important to note that you must allow yourself to be in the moment when coloring to enjoy its benefits. It won’t do you much good to color while secretly thinking about other things or feeling guilty that you’re not working.
It is important to balance your schedule between work and play or you will quickly find your inner child sabotaging your efforts.
Even if you didn’t particularly enjoy coloring as a child, give it a go. You might be surprised.
What is Mindful Coloring?
Mindful coloring is a very simple concept.
It is the art of coloring while practicing mindfulness.
Being mindful is all about being in the moment and being engaged and involved in what’s going on around you.
The art of mindfulness is lost on so many these days. The presence of cell phones and instant access to the lives of millions of people across the world is so tempting.
Many people miss out on the basic pleasures and the simple little things in life because they are so focused on doing more than one thing at a time they have no idea how to be mindful. Adult coloring is here to change that.
How is Coloring Mindful?
Mindful coloring is simple.
You are busy coloring, which means you’re busy doing one thing.
You can’t color and carry on a conversation with the kids.
You can’t color and watch a television show or cook dinner.
You can focus on one thing, and you then clear your mind of everything as you choose colors, work to stay within the lines, and you focus on what you’re doing.
Mindful Coloring is A Teaching Tool
This is the type of teaching tool you use to help you create better habits.
Mindful coloring allows you to learn to clear your mind and focus on the task at hand.
The task here is the page you are coloring, but it transcends into other areas of your life as well.
When you learn to be mindful while coloring, you’re learning the tools to practice mindfulness in other areas of your life.
Mindful Coloring is Relaxing
One of the biggest benefits of mindful coloring is the way it relaxes you.
You’re no longer focused on all the things that overwhelm you and make you feel down or stressed.
You’re focused on something so simple and so easy, and you are really focused on it.
You don’t have to sit back and think about it further.
You are now engaged in something that doesn’t bring you stress or anxiety, and it relaxes you.
Many people use this tool when they feel angry or upset as a way of calming down and focusing.
Coloring is beneficial to anyone, even if you are a little worried you seem childish.
This thought process is not uncommon, but it’s one that’s quickly changed once you realize just how beneficial it is and how it’s not childish at all.
If you begin to practice mindful coloring, it won’t take you long at all to realize it’s beneficial to you in more ways than one.
It can help you change your life for the better over time.
Coloring in Your Journal
Adult coloring is not a new concept, but it’s one many people aren’t sure they understand.
Sure, coloring is fun.
It reminds you of a simpler time in your life when you were a child and coloring was a fun pastime.
Now it’s an escape, and it reminds you of the joy found in simplicity.
What you might not know is coloring in an adult coloring book is more than a fun pastime. It’s a mental break filled with benefits designed to help you ease stress.
Adult Coloring Calms You
Have you heard of amygdala?
If not, you’ve certainly heard of a fight or flight response.
This is what happens when you’re overwhelmed, overworked, and anxious.
It gets worked up and leaves you feeling panicked.
Coloring helps calm the amygdala, which can help you focus on a more positive life experience.
Adult Coloring Encourages Mindfulness
It takes a great deal of time and effort to color a page in a book made for adults.
It takes precision and careful thought, which can help you manifest mindfulness.
It’s a great way to help you focus.
When you learn to focus and be genuinely present in the moment, you learn to be more mindful. Mindfulness helps you in other areas of your life, such as finding enjoyment in the simple things.
What you might not know you can focus on your mindfulness while you color, and you can sharpen the tools you use to practice being more present in life.
Adult Coloring Relieves Stress
Stress isn’t always negative.
Many forms of stress are actually quite helpful in that they help you focus on things that need your attention.
This is called positive stress that motivates you to work harder and more efficiently. When stress is overwhelming, however, it’s negative.
This kind of negative stress occurs when you focus on things you can’t change in life no matter how hard you think about them or focus on them. It stems from worry, which is a wasted emotion.
Adult coloring books take your mind off the things you fear or worry about, and it helps you focus on the here and now.
It’s much like mindfulness only it allows you to feel calmer and less stressed.
You might even walk away from your coloring pages with a renewed sense of energy and a newfound sense of peace thanks to the stress relief.
Adult coloring books are an excellent way to improve mental health.
You needn’t suffer from health issues to use these books to help you improve your life, either.
Even if you aren’t anxious or too stressed, you can benefit from adult coloring. It’s designed to remind you of the simple pleasures life has to offer.