The Scientifically Proven Benefits of Drawing and Colouring with Art Therapy and EMDR
Updated: 2 days ago
Drawing and colouring are often seen as simple, relaxing activities. But research shows they offer much more. These creative acts can help heal emotional wounds, reduce stress, and improve mental health. When combined with therapies like Art Therapy and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), drawing and colouring become powerful tools for trauma recovery.
In this post, I will share scientific evidence on how drawing and colouring support emotional healing. I will also explain how these activities fit naturally into Art Therapy and EMDR approaches.
The Healing Power of Drawing and Colouring
Drawing and colouring are not just enjoyable pastimes; they can be transformative. Engaging in these activities can lead to emotional healing and stress relief. They provide a safe space for self-expression and exploration. This post will delve into the science behind these benefits and how they relate to trauma recovery.
How Drawing and Colouring Help the Brain and Emotions
The act of making marks on paper, whether following the contours of a pre-printed mandala or freely externalising an inner emotional landscape, has long been regarded as restorative. Over the past two decades, experimental psychology has moved this claim from the realm of folk wisdom into controlled research. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that drawing and colouring produce measurable reductions in anxiety, improvements in mood, and meaningful physiological changes. When situated within the frameworks of art therapy and Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), these activities take on additional clinical significance, particularly for clients working through trauma, emotional dysregulation, or chronic stress.
This paper reviews the scientific evidence for three specific activities: colouring a pre-existing design, creating an original design, and drawing to express or process negative emotions. It integrates findings from key studies by Curry and Kasser (2005) and Turturro and Drake (as cited in Drake, 2019), alongside additional recent research, and examines how art therapy theory and EMDR practice converge around the use of visual images.
Drawing and colouring engage the brain in unique ways. They activate areas linked to creativity, focus, and emotional processing. This can lead to calming effects and new ways to express feelings.
Studies show that colouring inside lines can reduce anxiety. It helps people focus on the present moment, similar to mindfulness. This focus lowers stress hormones and quiets negative thoughts.
1. Colouring a Design: Structured Activity and Anxiety Reduction
The Curry and Kasser Study (2005)
The foundational experimental study in this area was conducted by Curry and Kasser (2005) at a Midwestern university in the United States. Eighty-four undergraduate students completed a baseline anxiety inventory before being asked to write for four minutes about a past stressful or fearful event, a standard anxiety-induction procedure. Participants then completed the inventory again before being randomly assigned to one of three conditions: colouring a pre-printed mandala, colouring a pre-printed plaid pattern, or drawing freely on blank paper.
The results were striking. Both structured colouring conditions, the mandala and the plaid pattern, produced significantly greater reductions in anxiety than free-form drawing. Crucially, the mandala condition was the only one that reduced anxiety below participants' own baseline scores, a finding the authors attributed to the meditative, centring quality of the circular mandala form. Jung (1969) had described the mandala as a symbol of psychic wholeness, and its circular structure appears to invite a focused, contained attention that free drawing on a blank page does not.
This study has since been replicated and extended. Van der Vennet and Serice (2012) exposed 50 graduate students to the same conditions and found that change scores, measuring the degree of reduction from pre- to post-activity anxiety, were significantly greater for the mandala group than for the plaid group, even though both were matched for visual complexity. This refinement suggested that the specific geometry of the mandala, rather than structural complexity alone, carries therapeutic value.
Ashlock, Miller-Perrin, and Krumrei-Mancuso (2019) extended the line of inquiry further, comparing four different colouring activities, including commercially available adult colouring books, in a sample of 160 undergraduates. All four conditions produced significant reductions in state anxiety, and no condition was statistically superior to any other. The authors concluded that adult colouring books are as effective as other structured colouring activities for short-term anxiety reduction, and noted their potential as a low-cost, accessible adjunct to clinical practice.
Mechanism: Attentional Narrowing and Cognitive Engagement
The anxiety-reducing effect of structured colouring is understood through the lens of attentional narrowing. Engaging with a pre-existing design occupies the visual-spatial processing system in a way that competes with ruminative thought. The task is sufficiently demanding to maintain focus but not so demanding as to generate frustration. This produces a state functionally similar to mindfulness, characterised by present-moment attention and reduced self-referential processing (Curry & Kasser, 2005; Ashlock et al., 2019).
Colouring mandalas can help reduce anxiety and promote calmness.
2. Creating a Design: Agency, Wellbeing, and Self-Awareness
From Passive Colouring to Active Creation
Moving from colouring a given design to creating one's own introduces the dimension of creative agency. Pisarik and Larson (2011) studied 68 first-year college students who were asked to create their own mandalas across two separate sessions. Participants reported increased self-awareness and a greater sense of psychological authenticity, suggesting that the act of making choices about form and colour engages self-reflective processes beyond what structured colouring alone can reach. The authors proposed that mandala creation is a particularly effective tool for individuals navigating identity transitions.
Babouchkina and Robbins (2015) explored the effect of shape on mood by asking 47 adults, following a negative mood induction, to colour or design within either a circular or a square outline, with or without emotional instructions. Circular patterns produced significantly more positive mood outcomes than square patterns, regardless of whether participants were instructed to colour in relation to their emotions or freely. The authors' findings suggest that the bounded circularity of the mandala form carries psychological properties that extend to creative composition, not only to passive colouring.
The implication for clinical practice is important: creative design tasks offer clients agency in the therapeutic encounter, moving them from recipient of structure to author of it. This shift is consistent with art therapy's emphasis on the creative process as inherently therapeutic, independent of the aesthetic quality of the product (Malchiodi, 2011).
3. Drawing to Express Negative Emotions: Venting, Distraction, and Emotional Regulation
The Drake and Winner Research Programme
Jennifer Drake and Ellen Winner have conducted the most systematic programme of research on drawing as a form of emotion regulation, producing a series of studies that distinguish between two distinct mechanisms: venting (expressing negative feelings through drawing) and distraction (expressing positive or neutral content to redirect attention away from distress).
In an early study, Drake, Coleman, and Winner (2011) induced a sad mood in 40 participants and randomly assigned them to either draw or write. Mood was assessed at baseline, post-induction, and post-activity. Drawing produced significantly more positive mood than writing. Critically, distraction was more effective than venting for both mediums. Participants who drew something unrelated to their sadness recovered mood more effectively than those who drew to express their negative feelings. The authors concluded that drawing improves mood primarily through its capacity to redirect attention rather than through cathartic release.
Drake and Winner (2013) extended these findings to children, demonstrating that drawing to distract from, rather than express, negative thoughts improved short-term mood in young participants. This research challenged a common intuitive assumption underlying expressive art activities: that externalising difficult emotions necessarily makes one feel better in the short term. The evidence suggests that for immediate mood repair, redirection is more effective than expression. This does not negate the long-term value of expressive work in a structured therapeutic relationship; it underscores, rather, the clinical importance of sequencing and context.
The Drake (2019) Longitudinal Study
Drake (2019) conducted a longitudinal study examining the psychological and psychophysiological benefits of drawing over one month. After a sad mood induction, 66 participants were randomly assigned to draw to express, draw to distract, or serve as a non-drawing control. Mood, overall life satisfaction, heart rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA, a measure of autonomic nervous system flexibility linked to emotional regulation) were assessed at the first session and one month later.
Drawing to distract improved mood significantly more than drawing to express, both immediately and at the one-month follow-up. RSA increased after a single drawing session for both drawing conditions, indicating that the act of drawing itself, regardless of strategy, produces immediate physiological calming. After one month, drawing to distract increased RSA marginally more than the control condition, suggesting that the psychophysiological benefits, while present acutely, consolidate over sustained practice. This study provides some of the clearest evidence to date that drawing has both immediate mood benefits and longer-term physiological effects consistent with improved emotional regulation.
Turturro and Drake: Comparing Colouring and Drawing
Nicole Turturro and Jennifer Drake conducted a study comparing the psychological and psychophysiological benefits of colouring against those of free drawing (as referenced in Drake, 2019, and described in subsequent literature). Their work highlights that while both activities produce measurable benefits, the mechanisms differ. Colouring a structured design draws primarily on focused attention and reduces anxious arousal; free drawing, particularly when used as distraction, engages creative self-expression and produces broader mood repair. Their findings contribute to Drake's (2017) clinical suggestion that colouring can be used strategically by art therapists, for instance to provide containment and grounding following intense expressive work, rather than as a standalone therapeutic equivalent.
4. Integration with Art Therapy: The Therapeutic Relationship and the Image
Art therapy is a form of psychotherapy in which the creative process of making art is used within a professional therapeutic relationship to improve and enhance physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing (British Association of Art Therapists, 2023). The evidence reviewed above aligns closely with several core theoretical assumptions of the field, while also complicating some of its longstanding commitments.
The Relational Frame
Ashlock et al. (2019) noted, following the American Art Therapy Association (AATA), that while colouring books and structured art activities are a useful complement to self-care, they cannot replace the relational component of art therapy. The research evidence supports this distinction. The studies reviewed above measure outcomes in non-clinical populations using specific, isolated activities. Clinical art therapy integrates these activities within an ongoing therapeutic relationship in which the art product becomes a third presence in the room, mediating the therapeutic exchange between client and therapist (Malchiodi, 2011; Springham & Huet, 2018).
The Image as Bridge to the Non-Verbal
A recurring theme across both art therapy theory and the neuroscientific literature is the special status of the visual image as a vehicle for accessing pre-verbal, non-symbolic, and somatically held experience. Van der Kolk (2015) argued that traumatic events are stored primarily as sensory images rather than as verbal narratives, making image-based approaches uniquely suited to trauma work. Art therapy's emphasis on the image as a carrier of meaning that does not require verbal translation aligns with this account. Lusebrink and Hinz (2022) elaborated the Expressive Therapies Continuum, describing how different art materials and levels of processing, from sensorimotor to cognitive, engage different neural systems, offering the therapist a map for titrating the depth of intervention.
5. Integration with EMDR: Convergent Uses of the Image
The EMDR Model
EMDR, developed by Shapiro (1989) and refined through extensive subsequent research, is a structured eight-phase protocol for the treatment of trauma and other distressing life experiences. Its core mechanism involves dual attention stimulation, most commonly bilateral eye movements, during which the client simultaneously holds a distressing memory in mind. The Adaptive Information Processing (AIP) model proposes that EMDR accelerates the natural processing of traumatic material, allowing it to be integrated into adaptive memory networks rather than remaining isolated as a source of ongoing distress (Shapiro & Forrest, 2007).
The Convergence of Image in EMDR and Art Therapy
García-Reyna (2021) identified a fundamental point of convergence between art therapy and EMDR: both approaches are organised around the image. In EMDR, the traumatic event is initially identified as a mental image, the most distressing moment. Bilateral stimulation then generates associative chains that allow new connections to form around that image. In art therapy, the physical image produced by the client externalises internal experience, making it available for reflection, symbolisation, and transformation.
García-Reyna documented clinical vignettes with children and adolescents in which the combined use of art therapy and EMDR, applied within the same treatment frame though not necessarily within the same session, facilitated a symbolisation process in which mental images and physical images became mutually clarifying. The non-directive approach she describes, in which art materials are always available and the client leads the themes, mirrors the bottom-up emphasis common to contemporary trauma-informed practice.
Bilateral Drawing and the Body
A related area of clinical practice is bilateral drawing, in which clients draw simultaneously with both hands, engaging both cerebral hemispheres. McNamee (2006) and Talwar (2007) documented art therapy protocols integrating bilateral stimulation consistent with EMDR methodology, reporting satisfactory outcomes in client recovery from traumatic symptoms. The theoretical basis for this convergence lies in the neuroscience of memory consolidation. Bilateral stimulation of any kind, including rhythmic drawing movements, may engage interhemispheric communication in ways that facilitate the integration of fragmented traumatic memories. While the research base for bilateral drawing as a standalone intervention remains at an early stage relative to the EMDR literature, its theoretical coherence with established EMDR mechanisms makes it a clinically promising and widely used adjunct.
6. Recent Supporting Studies
Several recent studies have extended and contextualised the evidence reviewed above.
Chong and Kim (2023) compared mindful mandala drawing with emotion-based directed drawing in a videoconference-delivered group intervention for children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both interventions produced significant reductions in emotional distress, and emotion-based drawing produced comparably positive outcomes to the mandala condition, suggesting that the therapeutic benefit of drawing is robust across different structural approaches when delivered within a supportive relational frame.
A systematic review and meta-analysis examining mandala colouring and drawing for state anxiety in adults confirmed that structured colouring activities are associated with significantly reduced anxiety levels compared to free-form colouring activities, consistent with the Curry and Kasser (2005) and Van der Vennet and Serice (2012) findings (Ashlock et al., 2019; as reviewed in the NeuroArts Resource Center, 2022).
Research summarised by the NeuroArts Blueprint initiative (2021) documents neurobiological evidence that art-making, including drawing and colouring, activates dopaminergic reward pathways, reduces cortisol, and supports immune function, providing a biological substrate for the mood and anxiety outcomes observed in behavioural studies.
Conclusion
The evidence across experimental psychology, art therapy, and EMDR research converges on several clear conclusions. Colouring a structured design, particularly a circular or mandala form, reliably reduces state anxiety through attentional narrowing and meditative focus. Creating an original design adds the dimension of creative agency and self-awareness. Drawing to express negative emotions shows more nuanced effects: in both clinical and non-clinical settings, distraction-based drawing is consistently more effective than venting for immediate mood repair, though expressive drawing retains its clinical value when held within a therapeutic relationship and a structured treatment frame.
At the level of mechanism, these activities share a common foundation: they engage the image-making capacity of the mind, activate attentional and physiological self-regulation systems, and, in their more expressive forms, provide a non-verbal channel through which somatically held experience can be externalised, symbolised, and integrated. These properties align precisely with the theoretical commitments of both art therapy and EMDR, making drawing and colouring not merely pleasant pastimes but scientifically supported components of an integrated approach to emotional healing.
Remember, healing does not have to be rushed or forced. Drawing and colouring can be your quiet companions on the path to emotional well-being. Take your time, be kind to yourself, and let your creativity guide you.
This post is for informational purposes only and does not replace professional medical advice.
References
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