3 Surprising Ways in Which Colouring Books Can Help Adults

While colouring books were once strictly for children, nowadays they are all the rage with adults, too. Grownup fans of colouring books admire them for their soothing quality and like the fact that they get them out from behind the computer screen, but, colouring books could also be doing a lot of good in other more surprising ways. Read on to find out some of the ways that a colouring book and a few fancy pens can enhance your life and even potentially reduce the suffering associated with anxiety and disease.

Colouring helps with memory

It's hard to believe that colouring in a few squiggly lines can help improve your memory, but a 2009 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology proved that it was possible. The study found that participants who listened to a phone conversation while doodling at the same time retained 29% more of the contents of the conversation than the control group managed. So, it may be worth doing a bit of colouring next time you sit down to watch an interesting documentary or try and learn a foreign language on a CD. Who knows what you could achieve?

 Colouring helps with anxiety

Each year, about 14% of Australian adults are affected by an anxiety disorder. If you think you have an anxiety disorder, it's worth speaking to your doctor about it, but something you can do at home to help relieve the symptoms is to use a colouring book. When you're colouring in a picture, you tend to forgot about any worries; it really forces you to live in the moment and have a meditative quality that can help reduce stress. It also encourages people to slow down and quiet their minds, and with a recent study revealing that a lot of people crave a slower pace of life, this can only be good news for colouring book fans.

Colouring helps reduce the emotional suffering of cancer

While colouring cannot in any way cure diseases like cancer, it's possible that it may help to relieve some of the emotional suffering. A study carried out in 2006 showed that mindfulness-based art therapy for women with cancer helped to significantly lower symptoms of distress during treatment.

Another study carried out in the same year found that when the cancer patient participants had one hour of art therapy, they felt comforted afterwards and wanted to continue with the therapy. Using a colouring book isn't as intensive as art therapy, where the patient has an instructor, but it is definitely worth trying if it can bring even a little bit of relief to a cancer patient.

These are just some of the ways that using colouring books can improve the quality of one's life, and with all these benefits it's no wonder that colouring books are so popular.

For more information or to get supplies, contact Deans Art or a similar company.