Sometimes the brain just need a break, and a colorful path to center is a fun way to destress and get your mind right. Have you ever had so much on your mind that it feels like you’re stuck in a perpetual prison of your own thoughts? If so, simply color your way out! As adults, we don’t spend a whole lot of time just playing. Stress, anxiety, depression, and many other reasons often lead your brain to a point of singular obsessive focus. These peaks of the brain lead your consciousness into a state of mental “stuckness” that can seem insurmountable. In order to “let go” or “release it”, we need to give it something else to do.
Understand How The Mind Works
When you tell yourself NOT to think about something specific, or to STOP thinking about that something, the ONLY thing that your brain recognizes is that something itself. Therefore, re-enforcing the very thing that you are trying to force your thoughts to overcome. Essentially, you get caught in a mental and energetic thought loop. So, we need strategies to escape these loops and move forward. This starts with diversion, and coloring is a great actionable task to use whenever you need to. Basically, in coloring, we are circumventing obsessive thoughts and stopping them dead in their tracks. This allows us to detach from troubling thoughts by completely diverting physical and mental functions that maintain stress.
Color Stressful Thought Loops Away!
It may not sound as technical a fix as you feel that your problem demands, but IT WORKS! So let’s take a look at HOW and WHY. For most of us, coloring was a fad that we abandoned as we aged out of childhood. As children, it was a creative, entertaining, and meditative hobby that filled quiet hours with contentment. As adults, it’s a simple coping skill that we can revive to target the more mature issues that boggle our minds. This non-confrontational outlet is something that is easily accessible, and capable of transporting our minds to the blissfully neutral place that we need it to go in order to think clearly. The benefits of this are psychologically worth it. Finding a colorful path to center starts here:
1. Cathartic Physical Release
The physical act of coloring is a cathartic activity that focuses your fine motor skills and requires movements that naturally decrease stress and tension. As your body and mind take ahold of the simple task, purging, processing, and refining your feelings starts to happen subconsciously while your focal point stays on the simply recreational task. Like sketching and painting, coloring provides you with an amazing ability to experience personal expression and restoration by literally letting your stressors transfer from your hand to the paper beneath.
2. Intentionally Benign Mental Focus
Withdrawing from your current state of mind and engaging in a focused activity allows your mind to essentially bargain with your subconscious and allow your stream of consciousness to find a way over your mental block, without focusing on it at all. Similar to meditation, coloring gives you a way to center your attention on something soothing, while the hard processing takes place effortlessly in the background. Making simple considerations like this to escape thought loops is widely effective in allowing you to acknowledge your underlying considerations through ‘tuning out’ the overwhelmingly repetitive thoughts and emotions that are keeping you stuck, thus giving your subconscious the ability to shift your body’s response to the issue and start actually letting it go.
3. Emotional Expression
People can easily comprehend the full impact of the feelings of others. Yet, we experience difficulty accurately comprehending our own. Especially when emotions are running high.”When we’re feeling, we are not thinking properly. Taking the time for artistic expression opens up areas of the brain that are often underused. This gives way to profound emotional expression and development, without stonewalling any unwanted emotions that may arise. This process gives you a way of letting out pent up emotions while providing a different head-space. Here you can more easily identify and organize thoughts and feelings without muddling it up with obsessive preoccupation.
4. Unencumbered Thought Flow
Quit trying the same thing over and over again if is ISN’T working: that’s insanity right?
Passionate expression is more adaptable than other concrete states of mind, and it is more open to objectively experiencing underlying emotion. Therefore, the pliability of your thought flow is much looser when the mind is focused on artistic expression. Since evaluating your personal circumstances depends heavily on the consequences that you foresee, targeting complex thoughts will require more than obsessive focus to wade your way through. Evaluating your circumstances from a different angle allows you to more easily transition your basic reaction into something much more positive.
Key Take Away
After as little as 20 minutes coloring, your mind and body are both progressively less stressed. Even if the original presenting problems pop back into your head when you’re done; your responses to them will be different! Lower stress levels and deescalated emotional states will allow you to tackle your issue much more effectively after a brief mental holiday. Don’t get bogged down in thought loops when you could be courageously keeping your eyes on the prize of a life worth rejoicing in. Try it out. Put your self-care ideas into action. Trust me, this is a break worth taking! Can you work on finding a colorful path to center today?
See if Any of these Speak to you:
Do What Works.
Be Well.
Meg Glidden, MS, NCC
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