Are adult coloring books worth it? Short answer: yes, for most people, for under $20 — but not for the reasons the 2015 hype cycle promised. They’re not going to cure your anxiety, replace therapy, or unlock your “inner artist.” What they actually do is give you a cheap, screen-free, low-stakes way to regulate your nervous system for an hour, and the research backing that effect is more solid than the marketing suggests.
I ran a 30-day test across four colorers — me, my partner, my mother, and a friend with diagnosed GAD — to see whether the benefits hold up outside lab conditions. They mostly do. Here’s the honest breakdown.
The Research Says Yes (With Caveats)
The most cited study is a 2017 paper in The Arts in Psychotherapy by Mantzios and Giannou, which found that participants who colored mandalas for one week showed roughly a 37% reduction in self-reported anxiety compared to baseline. A separate 2018 study from Curry and Kasser found similar drops, but only with structured patterns — free-form drawing didn’t produce the same effect.
The mechanism isn’t magic. Coloring occupies the parts of your brain that would otherwise be ruminating, and the repetitive motor activity downregulates sympathetic arousal — same general pathway as knitting, dishwashing, or any other focused manual task. The American Art Therapy Association is careful to distinguish coloring from actual art therapy, which is a clinical intervention. Coloring is a wellness tool. That distinction matters.
So when someone asks “are adult coloring books worth it” they’re really asking two questions: do they produce a measurable effect, and is that effect worth the time and money? The first is well-established. The second depends on you.
5 Reasons They’re Worth It
1. Cheap Stress Regulation
A decent book is $8–$15. A set of 24 pencils is $10. For under $25 you have a reusable stress-management tool that requires no app, no subscription, no Wi-Fi, and no instructor. Compare that to a meditation app at $70/year or a yoga class at $25/session. The unit economics are absurd. Even if you only use it twice a month, the cost-per-session is under a dollar.
2. Screen-Free Evening Ritual
This was the most consistent benefit across all four testers. Coloring in the 60 minutes before bed displaced phone scrolling without requiring willpower — once a book is open and pencils are out, the friction of picking up the phone is just slightly higher than the friction of continuing the current page. Three of four testers reported falling asleep faster within the first week.
3. Builds Focus (Slowly)
The “attention restoration” claim is real but modest. None of the four testers became dramatically more focused at work. What did happen: each of them found it easier to sit with a single task for 20+ minutes by week three. If your baseline attention span is shredded by social media, coloring is a low-stakes way to rebuild it. Think of it as the cardio of focus — boring, gradual, effective.
4. Actual Creative Output
This sounds trivial, but it’s underrated. Most adults make zero creative output in a given week. Coloring produces a finished, visible artifact in 30–90 minutes. That dopamine hit of “I made something” is genuine, and four out of four testers reported feeling more creative in other domains (writing, cooking, problem-solving at work) within the month. Correlation, not necessarily causation — but the pattern was unanimous.
5. Sleep-Prep Effect
Related to but distinct from the screen displacement: the act of focused, low-stakes manual work appears to ease the transition into sleep. My friend with GAD reported the largest effect here — falling asleep within 20 minutes of putting the book down versus her baseline of 60+ minutes. We track this and related effects in more detail in our 30-day adult coloring for anxiety experiment, including the days it didn’t work.
The Honest Caveats
Not everyone gets the effect, and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
- It’s not for every personality. Highly goal-oriented people sometimes hate it because there’s no “win.” If you struggle with activities that have no measurable outcome, coloring will feel pointless within a week.
- It can become a chore. The minute you commit to “coloring every day for mental health” you’ve ruined it. The benefit comes from doing it when you want to, not when you should.
- Dense books frustrate beginners. Highly detailed mandalas and Johanna Basford-style botanical books look beautiful but take 4+ hours per page. New colorists abandon them. Start with simpler designs — we cover this in our roundup of best coloring books for stress relief.
- Cheap supplies undercut the experience. Bad pencils on cheap paper feel terrible and produce muddy results. If you’re going to try it, spend the $20 on decent pencils — our take on markers vs colored pencils for coloring books covers what’s worth buying at each price tier.
The 30-Day Test Results
| Tester | Sessions completed | Self-rated stress drop | Will continue? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Me (baseline low anxiety) | 22/30 | Mild | Yes, 2x/week |
| Partner (moderate work stress) | 18/30 | Moderate | Yes, weekends |
| Mother (retired, high baseline calm) | 27/30 | Minimal — but enjoyable | Yes, daily |
| Friend with GAD | 25/30 | Significant | Yes, before bed |
Three of four reported reaching for the book voluntarily by week two. The one who didn’t (me) still found it useful as a deliberate tool but didn’t crave it the way the others did. That tracks with what the research suggests: the higher your baseline stress, the more pronounced the benefit.
When Adult Coloring Books Are Actually NOT Worth It
I want to be honest about who shouldn’t bother:
- You hate sitting still. If quiet manual tasks make you crawl out of your skin, this won’t fix that — try walking or running instead.
- You’re looking for a creative outlet. Coloring is structured, not generative. If you want to make something original, take up sketching or watercolor proper.
- You expect therapeutic results. Coloring is wellness, not treatment. Clinical anxiety needs clinical tools.
- You buy one and never open it. Two of the four testers admitted they’d bought books years ago that sat shrink-wrapped. The book itself doesn’t help — sitting down with it does.
The Verdict
So are adult coloring books worth it? For under $25 to find out, almost certainly. The downside risk is a book that sits on a shelf. The upside is a low-cost, evidence-backed wind-down ritual that displaces phone time and produces something you made with your hands. That’s a strong bet.
Pick one book in a style you actually like — not the one with the best reviews, the one whose images you’d want to look at for an hour. Buy decent pencils. Color when you feel like it, not on a schedule. If you haven’t reached for it again in three weeks, sell it on a buy-nothing group and move on. If you have, you’ve found something worth keeping.
When are adult coloring books worth it — and when they’re not
The bottom-line answer to are adult coloring books worth it: yes, for most people who’d ask the question. The case where adult coloring books aren’t worth it is when you treat them as another goal-driven activity. The whole point is that they’re goalless.
The shortest possible answer to are adult coloring books worth it: yes, if you’ll actually use them. People who ask are adult coloring books worth it tend to be the ones who’d benefit most — but only if they remove the friction by keeping pencils and a book in one spot. Are adult coloring books worth it if you only color twice a year? Probably not. Daily? Absolutely.
Final note on are adult coloring books worth it: this article is the long version of what we’d tell a friend asking are adult coloring books worth it over coffee. Hope it’s useful. If you have a specific use case not covered, ping us and we’ll add it. Are adult coloring books worth it reviews evolve as new options come out — bookmark this and check back.
