Stop Telling Me to Color

Why coloring to relieve stress wasn’t right for me + what actually helped

Photo by Sara Torda on Unsplash

Coloring is stressful.

I tried to make it work, but like wearing someone else’s shoes, it never quite fit the way it was supposed to.

A few years ago, everyone I knew was getting on the adult color book bandwagon. They started popping up at craft shops and grocery stores almost overnight. I remember a group of women at my work that would get together during their lunch breaks to color, books and pencils in hand as they chatted and filled in gardens and mandalas.

Even though coloring has been around forever, it wasn’t until 2015 that the popularity of adult coloring books really exploded. In the last few years, coloring books have been hailed as being therapeutic without being therapy, and giving readers hours of “zen-like stress relief.” Coloring books are also now a booming business — sales went from 1 million books sold in 2014 to a whopping 12 million in 2015.

So I decided to finally get one of my own to see what all the fuss was about. I purchased my first coloring book, which promised to color my stress away, and a brand new set of markers. When I pulled them out for the first time, I fully expected a meditative relaxation to take hold of me while I lost myself in filling in the small segments of the pattern.

That is not at all what happened.

As I picked up my marker and began to color, I felt my jaw clench and shoulders tighten until they were near to my ears. I strained to keep my markers within the lines, my anxiety rising as I neared the edges and I found myself holding my breath for fear of crossing the line and ruining my work.

When I went to grab my next color, my anxiety went even higher as I started to overthink which color to pick next — what should the color palette be? would these colors go? what if the shade was off? I wish I’d have picked a different shade of green — and by the time I put the book down, my entire body was tight with stress and I was a giant ball of anxiety.

This cannot be what zen-like relaxation feels like.

What in the world just happened?

The internet is chock full of advice on how to relieve stress, and I’ve read a good chunk of it on my healing journey. Everything from essential oils and exercise to juice cleanses and Himalayan salt lamps, there are a thousand and one solutions that are guaranteed to loosen your shoulders and make your insides glow with the rays of a thousand shining suns.

Not to mention rainbows flying out of your…

Well, let's not get sidetracked.

Now, I’m not saying that these things don’t work for anyone. The problem with mass-marketed stress relievers is that their marketing plan often hinges on getting the largest audience possible — that is, throwing the biggest net to see who they can catch. And if they price their miracle solution just right, you can almost always talk yourself into giving it a try.

Unfortunately, trial and error is largely how you find what’s right for you. The key to trial and error though is figuring out why a certain solution didn’t work for you.

This is where we have a breakdown.

I’m guilty of it too, 1000%. I try a solution, it doesn’t work, and I dismiss it without stopping to consider why it didn’t work. A few weeks/months/years later, I have the same problem and I try a similar solution, with similarly disappointing results.

Case in point — coloring books. After I bought my first coloring book and was decidedly NOT relieved of my stress, I figured maybe it was the artistic medium…so I bought colored pencils. When that didn’t work, I got a few new coloring books thinking maybe it was the pattern that was causing me to tighten up. But nothing worked.

So why was that?

It was because my anxiety is based on control.

I’m a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser who had extremely critical parents growing up. I have a large amount of shame associated with not meeting my own and other people’s expectations of perfection, to the point where I have a hard time trying new things if I think I might not be great at them.

I know all of this because I’m eyeballs deep in inner work at the moment.

And yet — I bought myself coloring books and accidentally triggered a shame spiral.

It’s one of those connections I don’t think you can make in the moment, to be honest. It didn’t occur to me until years after I’d bought my first book that I’d accidentally pushed on something that was very raw inside me.

So while coloring books may be a good therapeutic tool to work on getting comfortable with imperfection, they were not the stress relief tool I was looking for.

What Actually Helped Me Lower My Stress

I’ve tried a lot of things on my healing journey to find the right combination of self-care tools for someone with my anxiety type. After some trial and error, I found these ones had the most long-term benefit.

1. Changing my diet: I had to make some drastic changes to my diet a few years ago due to an autoimmune disease, and one of the interesting things that came to light was how much certain foods raised the feeling of stress in my body. I’m talking specifically about gluten, caffeine, and sugar. In fact, if I eat processed carbs regularly, I start getting heart palpitations. You really are what you eat.
2. Walking Outside: I’m not here to tell you exercise is important because everyone knows that. But what I will say is that if I don’t go for my short morning walk (20 minutes) for a couple of days, I can feel it in my body and my temperament. After the pandemic started, I also took up hiking which has the added benefit of being surrounded by nature and is especially relaxing, when done solo.
3. Yin Yoga: This is not your normal yoga class. Yin yoga is putting your body into a beautiful shape and then relaxing to let your body gently stretch and release. It’s all about letting go while being present in your body and has helped me release a lot of stuck energy. It’s also taken the place of meditation, with which I’ve always had a love/hate relationship.
4. Comedy: I’m very mindful about the television I watch and the music I listen to, as these can have a big impact on my mood and mental health. I’ve always heard laughter is the best medicine, and I can confirm that putting on a comedian works wonders for distracting and turning around my mood. Extra points for Mike Birbiglia and Marc Maron — I’ve fallen asleep to their comedy shows more than a few times in the last year.
5. CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is a form of talk therapy that works on identifying and deconstructing damaging core beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world around us. By challenging how your mind thinks about things, you can change what stresses you out and how you hold it in your body. It’s more structured than regular talk therapy and for me, was an absolute game changer.

You can never eliminate stress entirely, you can only learn how to keep it at a manageable level so that it isn’t left unchecked. Even though coloring didn’t work for me, I learned something about myself when I finally figured out why. And I also found a pretty great set of tools that work for my body and mind.

So wherever you are in your healing journey, I hope you can find your own tools to fill your toolbox with. And who knows, maybe you’ll even have a couple of coloring books in there.