Instant Calmer! Investigating the craze of adult colouring books

A page from This Annoying Life, by Oslo Davis

Adult colouring books are swathing the market in their silent, black and white glory, and publishers are walking around with smiles and big dollar signs covering their eyes. But claims of mindfulness and stress reduction are overstated.

Have you seen them? Filling the shelves in every supermarket next to the discount Christmas gifts; splayed open at your coworker’s desk, haloed with red pencil shavings and a busted sharpener; taking up space next to bestsellers in your local bookstore. That’s not quite right: they are the bestsellers. They’re adult colouring books.

Amazon UK currently lists three colouring books in its Top 10 Bestsellers, with a fourth coming in at number 11. A quick search reveals almost a hundred different options.

As Richard Cooke writes in The Monthly, the adult colouring book craze began in France, 2012, with the reprint of the turgidly-selling Colouring for Grown-Ups. The publisher, Hachette, made the canny decision to change the title to 100 Coloriages Anti-Stress. 300,000 copies swiftly sold. As of April 2015, almost 2 million copies had been sold.

Marketing adult colouring books as stress-reduction seems to be a winning formula. So, too, does the buzzword “mindfulness”, such as The Mindfulness Colouring Book by Emma Farrons. But do colouring books really increase mindfulness and decreasing stress? Let’s jump on the bandwagon and investigate.

Long Nights and Open Eyes: A Short History of Insomnia (part 1)

I dread the night. I sit in the living room with my family, drinking camomile tea, until 10pm or so. Then I retreat to my room, and look at my bed with a kind of revulsed horror — a sense of oncoming battle. I lie in bed, and try to quieten my mind. I try relaxation strategies. I see myself walking into the Abbotsford Convent, into one of the workshop rooms, crawling under the table and lying there. Breathing in, breathing out. This is the “safe place” I chose from the Melbourne University counselling website’s “safe place exercise”. I become marginally calmer for a little while, and then an alien, familiar thought collapses into my skull: What if this doesn’t work? I tense up, and a torrent of frustration, hatred, and helplessness will swiftly follow the thought. I’m in for a long night.

Insomnia is prevalent. Chronic insomnia is present in around nine percent of the population, and around 30 percept of people have short periods of insomnia. It’s more common in older people, and more common in women. It’s incredibly common in people with other psychological disorders — over 75% of psychiatric patients have sleep difficulties during the acute phase of their illness (Sweetwood, Grant, Kripke, Gerst, & Yager, 1980; found in Morin, 1993). If insomnia affects so many people, why isn’t everyone aware of treatments they can use?

Music, neuroplasticity and echoes in the brain

Imagine the following. You have been paid an exorbitantly small fee to participate in an experiment at your local university. You are brought into the testing room, and the experimenters pull a stretchy cap of electrodes over your head. They show you a big needle full of green gel (“Now, this won’t hurt a bit!”) and start injecting the gel through the small holes in the cap, right on your hair. This goes on for quite a while. After this contraption called an electroencephalogram (EEG) is all set up, you are told to listen to a recording of words (minute, eon, moose, hammer). The electrical energy from the centre of your brain is recorded as you listen.

The EEG cap is pulled off your head and you are sent into an adjoining room to wash your hair. It takes a long while to get the gel out. Meanwhile, your friend Linda is brought into the room. The electrical energy that was recorded from your brain is played back to Linda, who never heard the original recording. Linda listens closely, hesitates, and then says, “Minute, eon, moose hammer.” She can identify the words that you were listening to, solely from the recordings of your brain.

This recording is called the frequency following response, and is produced by nuclei in the brainstem, an ancient part of the brain buried deep in the middle of your skull. The frequency following response imitates any sounds that you hear. Using different components of a sound, it can create the individual quality produced by any noise.