THE MAGIC OF MINDFULNESS COLOURING
Today’s world is so fast paced, noisy and filled with constant action of which we’re expected to commit to. This can be very intense for people with or without anxiety disorders. It’s no coincidence that in the past few decades there have been more diagnoses of clinical anxiety and depression than ever before.
Even if I donn’t have a severe anxiety disorder I’d find 21st century life challenging, because there’s no escaping the hustle and bustle each and every day. No matter what we do we can not avoid experiencing the pressure of it all for (at least) half of our waking life.
On my birthday of 2015 my sister gifted me a Harry Potter mindfulness colouring book. Me and my family were actually on a cruise at the time. Though whenever I had to take myself back to my cabin during moments of feeling overwhelmed I would do some more of my colouring. There I discovered something that I never expected would happen from a colouring book.
I realised that it was a perfect activity to ground my mind by concentrating on applying necessary colours to recreate the Harry Potter scenes. From grounding my mind I become distracted from negative thoughts and feelings which are unpleasant and not at all needed in my life. Thus I ended up having a birthday and holiday that was much more stress free than I ever thought possible beforehand.Rebe
After the success of that I began using mindfulness colouring books during all of the times when I felt anxiety at home too (and I quickly gathered a large collection of other books to colour). Another discovery that I made was that every moment I feel stress or anxiety it adds up to such a large wastage of time in a day. Though I’ve found that if I temporarily take myself away to colour in during those brief moments it helps so much. Whenever I do this I continue until I feel calm again, which in my own experience has been anywhere from a few minutes to just under an hour (depending upon my level of anxiety at the time).
It may seem ironic that adding another daily activity of colouring movie scenes enabled me to complete all of my work much quicker and easier than was the case previously.
Today’s world is so fast paced, noisy and filled with constant action of which we’re expected to commit to. This can be very intense for people with or without anxiety disorders. It’s no coincidence that in the past few decades there have been more diagnoses of clinical anxiety and depression than ever before.
Even if I didn’t have a severe anxiety disorder I’d find 21st century life challenging, because there’s no escaping the hustle and bustle each and every day. No matter what we do we can not avoid experiencing the pressure of it all for (at least) half of our waking life.
On my birthday of 2015 my sister gifted me a Harry Potter mindfulness colouring book. Me and my family were actually on a cruise at the time. Though whenever I had to take myself back to my cabin during moments of feeling overwhelmed I would do some more of my colouring. There I discovered something that I never expected would happen from a colouring book.
I realised that it was a perfect activity to ground my mind by concentrating on applying necessary colours to recreate the Harry Potter scenes. From grounding my mind I become distracted from negative thoughts and feelings which are unpleasant and not at all needed in my life. Thus I ended up having a birthday and holiday that was much more stress free than I ever thought possible beforehand.
After the success of that I began using mindfulness colouring books during all of the times when I felt anxiety at home too (and I quickly gathered a large collection of other books to colour). Another discovery that I made was that every moment I feel stress or anxiety it adds up to such a large wastage of time in a day. Though I’ve found that if I temporarily take myself away to colour in during those brief moments it helps so much. Whenever I do this I continue until I feel calm again, which in my own experience has been anywhere from a few minutes to just under an hour (depending upon my level of anxiety at the time).
It may seem ironic that adding another daily activity of colouring movie scenes enabled me to complete all of my work much quicker and easier than was the case previously.
So whenever I have to write (up to) thousands of words of material in a day, I make sure I have a colouring book next to me on my desk. Written material could be blogs, parts of a book I’m working on, emails or even Facebook messages or texts. Once I reach the end of a day I am truely surprised and delighted as to how much work I managed to get done in a mere few hours of my awake time.
As of 2020 I’ve gathered a large collection of mindfulness colouring books (mainly of Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts), and for those times when I’m somewhere out of the house I have downloaded an app called Colorscape onto my iPad which turns my own photos and screenshots into colouring pages. This makes it possible for me to do this mindfulness exercise in places where carrying a packet of pencils and a colouring book around is impossible. Now that I have discovered this very effective way of controlling my daily anxiety, I will continue doing this exercise for the rest of my life.
So whenever I have to write (up to) thousands of words of material in a day, I make sure I have a colouring book next to me on my desk. Written material could be blogs, parts of a book I’m working on, emails or even Facebook messages or texts. Once I reach the end of a day I am truely surprised and delighted as to how much work I managed to get done in a mere few hours of my awake time.
As of 2020 I’ve gathered a large collection of mindfulness colouring books (mainly of Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts), and for those times when I’m somewhere out of the house I have downloaded an app called Colorscape onto my iPad which turns my own photos and screenshots into colouring pages. This makes it possible for me to do this mindfulness exercise in places where carrying a packet of pencils and a colouring book around is impossible. Now that I have discovered this very effective way of controlling my daily anxiety, I will continue doing this exercise for the rest of my life.