meditation

Photo of a lit candle against a dark background.

Look, we’re living in stressful times. It doesn’t matter who you are. With issues like the economy, inflation, mass layoffs, mass shootings, political tensions, threats of war, and natural disasters linked to climate change (just to name a few), there’s a scary headline suited to your specific anxieties.

So, maybe a little relaxation?

I often have a hard time quieting my brain at night. When my daily work and fun is done and I’m supposed to be winding down, I’m just…not. Instead, I’m turning all of those worries and anxieties over and over in my brain. “Nothing to lose sleep over.” Oh, my friend! I can lose sleep over what I’m having for breakfast. And if it’s too late, I generally don’t take sleep medications because I don’t want to feel groggy from them in the morning.

I was discussing this with a friend who told me that she usually falls asleep to ASMR videos on YouTube, and I admit that I had to covertly Google “ASMR”. Wikipedia to the rescue:

“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a tingling sensation that usually begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. A pleasant form of paresthesia, it has been compared with auditory-tactile synesthesia and may overlap with frisson.”

Oh! Yeah! I know what that is! What I didn’t know until I went to YouTube and searched “ASMR videos” was that there are tons of content creators who specialize in making videos to tingle you into relaxation and help you fall asleep fast. I’ve got a few favorites that trigger tingles and relaxation, but I’ve found that when it comes to sleeping, videos mimicking the spa environment work best for me. My current go to is: The Healing Room ASMR. My eyelids usually get pretty heavy about 15 minutes into one of these videos.

In exploring ASMR for sleep, I stumbled into the world of sleep stories and guided meditations. I’ve also tried sleep hypnosis to try and maintain a sense of calm in the waking hours. I’m not always as successful with sleep stories and guided meditations because my mind is sometimes like a really loud beehive and it’s difficult to focus on the story/meditation. (When that’s the case, I relax with a quick ASMR first, and then move to stories/meditation.) For sleep stories, I’m trying out MindRest. For guided meditations and sleep hypnosis, I like Michael Sealy.

Now that I’ve explored this stuff on YouTube and found that it actually helps and isn’t just techno snake oil, it may be time to try out the sleep apps.

If you have a favorite sleep app, feel free to drop it in the comments.

When I told my husband I wanted coloring books and nice markers for Christmas, I think he thought my simple request was much too good to be true. But we were doing a modest holiday (the eventful year was also an expensive year), and the subject of adult coloring books was peppering my social media feeds with increasing frequency. With artists tweeting about the availability of their recently published coloring books, friends on Facebook talking about how they’d forgotten how much they just loved coloring, and my nostalgia for Saturdays spent under a blanket fort convincing myself that Wilma Flintstone may very well have had some purple lipstick, it was clearly time to suck it up and embrace the trend. “No, really!” I assured my husband. “Coloring books and nice markers are precisely what I want this year.” Then I added, “And socks. I definitely need new socks.”

What I did not know was that at that very moment (okay, probably not that very moment, but it sounded nice, right?), my mother was putting together a holiday box for me in which she dropped, among other things, coloring books, colored pencils, and an epic box of crayons I would have killed for as a kid. Between my mother and my husband, I ended up with this stack of awesome:

Seriously! What kid didn’t dream of that box of crayons?

It occurred to me that with a haul like that, I had damn well better enjoy coloring as an adult.

I needn’t have worried.

Art as Therapy

Art as therapy isn’t a new concept, so I’m not going to go over it again here. I will simply say that there are all sorts of emotions I can work out on a canvas or a sketch pad or whatever I choose that day, save one. Frustration. As a creative person, I get frustrated when the picture on the page looks nothing like what I had in my head. So sure, I’m working out sadness or anger or whatever when I paint or draw, but I’m replacing it with frustration, which is no more pleasant. Coloring books solve that. The picture is already there. It’s somebody else’s art; I’m just coloring it in. There’s no real pressure to make it perfect. Peace restored.

That is not to say that I don’t shout an expletive or two when my hand slips out of a line, or I’ve made the wrong color choice, but coloring books cut the expletive output by a good 80% or so.

L, completed with crayon. R, in progress with colored pencil. Approx. 16% cussing total still to come.

Easier Than Meditation

Also frustrating for me is meditation. I can’t help it; my mind just wanders. It’s loud in my head and even guided meditations often can’t quiet things down. You know what does? You guessed it. Coloring. For me, it requires just enough attention that I can clear my mind of all of the noisy but inconsequential BS and make room for some real contemplation.

I’m aware, as I type this, of how cheesy it sounds, but it’s amazing how much I’ve learned about myself by doing no more than considering how I color: where on the page I start, what my favorite colors are, how boring the picture becomes when I rely solely on my favorite colors. Yeah.

I’m not actually a fan of yellow, and yet these are my faves.

It’s Just F***ing Fun, Okay?

Look, being an adult is freaking hard. Commutes, work, bills, random life crap that inevitably happens because, “That’s life.” The fact that adult coloring books have become a trend (hopefully one that sticks around for a while) tells me that I’m not the only one who sometimes longs for the days when the biggest thing on my mind was who had my red crayon because, damn it, I need my red crayon or Wilma Flintstone will have purple lips!

After a day of long commutes, solving problems at the office, and scrambling to pay the bill that was not in the budget–a result of some unexpected life crap, adults deserve a little childlike fun.

So yeah, I endorse this trend. I endorse the hell outta this trend! I won’t be putting my coloring books down any time soon; in fact, I expect to be through my current supply by the time the holidays roll around again. Just in time to request more.

And for those who were wondering, I also got those socks.

New socks

Trust Me, I'm a Writer

Far less glamorous than playing one on T.V.

Maybe a Little Relaxation

Coloring Books for Grownups: I Endorse This Trend