By Anna Lee Beyer of Anna Be.

“No, no, no, sweetie! Those are Mommy’s colors.”

Crash. The box of colored pencils spills across the floor. I can’t blame her… who puts a box full of colors in front of a creative two-year-old and then says they are off limits? Mommy should learn to put her colors away when she’s finished.

While my daughter has been practicing her fine motor and artistic skills with crayons for over a year, I only picked up coloring a few months ago. She is the expert, exploring techniques from dark crosshatching to exuberant stippling. She also plays artistic director, telling me what to draw on her behalf.

I do my “adult” coloring after she has gone to bed and won’t beg to use my stash of markers, pens and pencils.

Coloring books for adults have reached a curious new level of popularity this year. Meanwhile, over the last summer, my unrelenting anxiety reached curious new heights too, and my psychiatrist was on maternity leave until September. I started looking for activities to help me relax.

I browsed coloring books in the book store and asked my husband, “Could this really help?” I felt silly for buying into something so trendy, but I was also tired of living with my all my mental engines revving 24 hours a day. I wondered, could doodling be the new Xanax, or does that belittle the experience of anxiety sufferers who are one rude TSA agent away from a meltdown (like I was)?

I already colored every day with my daughter without much stress relief on my end. Then I started “adult” coloring every day too, and  frankly, my hand was cramping.  Was I doing it wrong?

I lined up my coloring implements, chose a color scheme, and plotted my coloring plan. It was a regimented approach and neither creative nor relaxing.

For stress relief, coloring is meant to be a meditation, a period of attention focused through the hands and away from the tightly spiraling anxious thoughts that bore through our minds the rest of the day. I was simply diverting my controlling focus into another activity.

I see examples of coloring masterpieces online, the culmination of hours of artful shading and blending. Those are not my role models; I don’t want the stress of another area of over-achievement.

Instead, I turned back to my two-year-old to see how I could get the most pleasure out of coloring. This is what she taught me:

• Enjoy the colors. Some days you will take your crayons out of the box and put them back six times without drawing a single scribble. I also like to have my pens and pencils in an array before me. I enjoy picking colors, planning my palette — there’s no need to diminish the prelude to creativity.
• Creativity can’t be defined or confined. Sometimes you may want to carry all the yellow crayons around the house until you can marry them with the pile of yellow blocks you’ve collected. Some days you may insist there are only three colors in the rainbow: blue, orange, and blue-orange. When you get really excited about coloring, there may be stray marks on the tablecloth or sofa.
• It’s fun to show off. Take your daily masterpiece and tape it to the fridge so your biggest fan (Dad) can see it when he walks through the door. Say “Ta-da!”
• It’s also good to let it go sometimes. Some days you work on a piece of art just past the point of enjoying it. You will skip the display ritual and go straight to shredding. You might even argue the most mindful creation leaves the artist with no attachment to her art, free to destroy it on a whim.

I will continue to practice “adult” coloring, but to maximize the stress relief benefits, I plan to do it more like a child.

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About Anna Lee Beyer

Anna Lee Beyer is a writer and mother in Texas. Her work has appeared in Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, xoJane, Redbook, and Mom Babble. Read her blog at Anna Be and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.