A Few Minutes of Coloring Can Erase Your Stress

—Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: Kinga Krzeminska—Getty Images)

Girija Kaimal likes that you can turn your brain off when you color. The few minutes it takes to fill in a page is enough to break your brain’s cycle of stress, it turns out.

“Anyone can do it—it’s not asking you to make anything. It's asking you to enter into a pre-made space,” says Kaimal, chair of the department of creative arts therapies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “You have assured success. There’s very...