Most people assume the adult coloring book trend started sometime around 2013 with a pretty botanical illustration book from Scotland. And while that’s true in a commercial sense, the real story of coloring as a tool for mental health dates back over a century, to a Swiss psychiatrist who asked his patients to sit down, pick up a pencil, and draw circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That psychiatrist was Carl Jung. And what he discovered in those sessions laid the groundwork for how we understand the relationship between coloring, creativity, and psychological well-being today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961) was one of the most influential psychologists in history. A contemporary and early collaborator of Sigmund Freud, Jung eventually broke away to develop his own school of thought, known as analytical psychology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where Freud focused heavily on repressed sexuality and childhood trauma, Jung was drawn to broader questions about the human psyche: the unconscious mind, archetypal symbols that appear across cultures, and the process he called individuation, which is the lifelong psychological journey toward becoming a whole, integrated self.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jung believed the unconscious mind communicated not through words, but through images and symbols. Dreams, myths, religious art, and spontaneous creative expression were, in his view, all windows into the deeper layers of the psyche. This belief is exactly what led him to the mandala.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jung’s relationship with mandala drawing began not as a clinical experiment but as a deeply personal practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Starting in 1916<\/strong>, during a period of intense psychological crisis following his break with Freud, Jung began drawing small circular images in his private notebook every morning. He described these drawings as reflecting his inner psychological state on any given day. The images were complex, symmetrical, and circular, fitting the classic definition of a mandala (a Sanskrit word meaning “circle”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n He continued this practice for several years. In his autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,”<\/strong> Jung wrote that the mandala drawings helped him track and understand his own inner transformations. He noticed that on days when he was psychologically unsettled, the drawings reflected chaos and imbalance. On calmer, more integrated days, the forms became more harmonious and orderly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over time, he came to believe that the mandala was not just a personal tool. It was a universal symbol of the self, appearing spontaneously across cultures, religions, and centuries in ways that no single tradition could account for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What began as a private journaling practice eventually became part of Jung’s clinical work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the 1920s<\/strong>, Jung was encouraging patients to draw and color mandalas as part of their therapeutic process. The instruction was deliberately open-ended. There were no rules about what the mandala should look like or which colors to use. The point was not to produce a beautiful or technically correct image. The point was to let the unconscious express itself through the hands, without the interference of the analytical mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jung observed that the act of creating and coloring a mandala seemed to have a calming, organizing effect on patients who were experiencing anxiety, fragmentation, or psychological distress. The circular structure of the mandala provided a container, a boundary within which chaotic inner experiences could be expressed and given form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He described the mandala as representing “a safe refuge of inner reconciliation and wholeness.” In clinical terms, focusing on a structured, repetitive, and visually absorbing task appeared to quiet what we would now recognize as the overactive threat-response system in the brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was not a formal clinical trial by modern standards. Jung was working intuitively, drawing on his observations of individual patients and his extensive study of symbolic imagery across world cultures. But his conclusions were remarkably consistent with what neuroscience would later confirm, nearly a century later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jung’s intuitions about mandala coloring were grounded in his theoretical framework. Still, the underlying mechanisms he was observing are real and have since been studied more rigorously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is what the psychology of coloring actually involves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Focused attention without cognitive demand.<\/strong> Coloring a detailed image requires just enough visual concentration to occupy the mind’s default mode network, the part of the brain responsible for rumination, worry, and self-referential thought. This is why coloring tends to quiet anxious thoughts without requiring the kind of mental effort that exhausts you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Repetition and rhythm.<\/strong> The repeated, rhythmic motion of coloring shares structural similarities with other established calming practices, including certain forms of meditation, knitting, and even walking. The regularity of the movement creates a mild meditative state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Creative expression without judgment.<\/strong> Unlike many other art forms, coloring does not require skill or technical ability. There is no wrong answer. This removes the performance anxiety that often accompanies creative activities, allowing the process itself to be the reward rather than the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The completion effect.<\/strong> Finishing a colored page produces a small but genuine sense of accomplishment. This activates the brain’s reward pathways in a mild, sustainable way, which is useful for people dealing with low motivation or low mood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jung understood most of this intuitively through his clinical observations. He simply described it in the language of depth psychology rather than neuroscience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The line from Jung’s private mandala practice in 1916 to the global adult coloring book trend of the 2010s is longer and less direct than you might expect, but the connection is genuine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jung’s work was not widely known outside academic and clinical circles for much of the 20th century. The therapeutic use of art more broadly did gain traction through the development of art therapy<\/strong> as a formal discipline in the 1940s and 1950s. Practitioners like Margaret Naumburg in the United States drew on psychoanalytic principles, including Jungian ideas, to develop structured art therapy programs for patients in psychiatric settings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mandala coloring specifically began appearing in therapeutic contexts with more regularity through the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in humanistic and transpersonal psychology settings where Jung’s influence was strongest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then came the adult coloring book boom of 2013 to 2016, which brought these ideas out of clinical settings and into living rooms, coffee shops, and bedrooms around the world. The timing aligned perfectly with a broader cultural shift toward mindfulness and self-care practices. Publishers marketed adult coloring books explicitly in terms of stress relief and mental wellness, language that would have been completely recognizable to anyone familiar with Jung’s original observations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By 2015, researchers at medical schools and psychology departments were publishing studies examining the effects of adult coloring on anxiety, stress, and mood. A 2005 study by Nancy Curry and Tim Kasser in the journal Art Therapy<\/em> found that coloring complex geometric designs, specifically mandala-type patterns, reduced anxiety significantly more than coloring on a blank page or coloring simpler, less structured designs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jung would not have been surprised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among all the possible coloring subjects available today, the mandala retains a particular reputation for psychological benefit, and there is a reason for that beyond cultural tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The mandala’s circular, symmetrical structure provides a natural focal point. The eye moves inward toward the center and then outward again, a pattern that supports sustained, gentle attention that produces a meditative state. The symmetry also creates a sense of visual order and balance that may have a subtly organizing effect on the mind, echoing exactly what Jung described in his clinical notes a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is not to say that other coloring subjects are less valuable. Horror illustrations, intricate botanical designs, grayscale portraiture, and kawaii characters all engage the same fundamental attentional mechanisms. But the mandala has the deepest and most well-documented historical connection to deliberate mental health practice, and that history runs directly through Jung’s consulting room in Zurich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is remarkable, when you trace the full arc, how consistent the core insight has been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carl Jung sitting in his private study in 1916, drawing circles in a notebook to make sense of his inner life. Art therapists in the 1950s handed patients pencils and paper as a route toward psychological expression. Millions of adults in 2025 are reaching for a coloring book at the end of a long, overwhelming day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The tools are different. The settings are different. The cultural language used to describe the experience has shifted from Jungian archetypes to neuroscience to mindfulness to self-care. But the fundamental human experience underneath it all is the same: sitting quietly with color and form, letting the hands work, and coming back to yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jung called it individuation. We call it a coloring night. The distance between those two things is smaller than you might think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The history of coloring for mental health is not a new trend dressed up in wellness marketing language. It is a genuinely old idea, documented by one of the most important psychologists who ever lived, that has been quietly validated by research and lived experience for over a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have ever finished a coloring session feeling noticeably calmer than when you started, you were not imagining it. You were experiencing something that Carl Jung observed in his patients more than a hundred years ago, and something that your own nervous system has been wired to respond to long before anyone gave it a name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pick up the pencil. Fill in the circle. It works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most people assume the adult coloring book trend started sometime around 2013 with a pretty botanical illustration book…","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"csco_singular_sidebar":"","csco_page_header_type":"","csco_page_load_nextpost":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1115","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-color-lab","7":"cs-entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1115"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1116,"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1115\/revisions\/1116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/river9studio.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Mandalas in the Clinic: Coloring Psychology History in Practice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Psychology Behind Why Coloring Works<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
From Jung’s Notebook to the Modern Coloring Book<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What Makes the Mandala Special<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
A Hundred Years of the Same Good Idea<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The Takeaway<\/h2>\n\n\n\n