Is “Mindful Colouring” Truly Mindfulness?

By Dr. Russ Harris

Seems like the “mindfulness colouring book” craze is getting stronger with every passing month. But is it really practicing mindfulness, to colour in pictures in a book?
Well the answer is … it depends.

Almost any activity you can think of can be done mindfully … or not. Cooking, cleaning, making love, playing guitar, having a shower, working out at the gym, driving your car, playing with your kids: these are all activities that can be done mindfully … or not.

Mindfulness is not inbuilt into the activity itself; mindfulness is a quality of attention that you can bring into any type of activity … or not. You can colour in a book mindfully, or mindlessly. If you colour in a book in a manner that consciously develops openness, curiosity, and flexibly focused attention – we could say that is mindful colouring.
But if you are colouring in that book mainly to distract yourself from anxiety or to put off dealing with an important but stressful task or problem – then rather than mindfulness, it’s what in ACT we call “experiential avoidance” (the ongoing attempt to avoid or get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings).

And if you are colouring in that book while lost in your thoughts or daydreaming – again, that isn’t mindfulness. It’s what in ACT we call “cognitive fusion”.
Of course, part of the problem is how we actually define mindfulness. It’s not like there’s one agreed definition. But even without a firm consensus, most authorities on mindfulness would agree on these things:

– Mindfulness is a form of attention-training.
– Mindfulness involves learning how to flexibly focus your attention to important aspects of your here-and-now experience: aspects of your inner world, external world, or both.
– Mindfulness includes qualities of attention such as curiosity and openness.

I like to summarise it thus: Mindfulness means paying attention, with openness, curiosity, and flexibility.

So we can make “colouring in” a mindful activity – if and when we infuse the process with these qualities. But how many people are actually doing this when they get stuck into their “mindfulness colouring” books?

Unfortunately, many people equate mindfulness with absorption or relaxation. But they are not one and the same. For example, we can be absorbed in reading a book or watching a movie – but these are rarely if ever mindful activities. Why not? Because if you tried to read a book mindfully – noticing the smell of the paper, the sounds of the pages turning, the texture of the paper against your fingers, the movements of your eyes scanning the words, the patterns of the ink on the paper, and so on – this would actually ruin your enjoyment; it would “pull you out of the story”. And the same goes for watching a movie or playing a video game. So just because we are absorbed in something, doesn’t mean we are being mindful.

Similarly, mindfulness does not mean relaxation. Many relaxing activities are far removed from mindfulness – e.g. daydreaming in a hammock, dozing on the beach, or ‘drifting off’ on a massage table. Furthermore, doing an activity mindfully doesn’t mean you will be relaxed; for example, when mindfully addressing interpersonal conflict, or mindfully dealing with an emergency situation, or mindfully parenting when your kids are completely ‘out of control’.

So the take home message: no activity is inherently mindful, in and of itself. If the activity is done in a state of fusion (lost in your thoughts) or as a type of distraction/experiential avoidance (trying to distract yourself from or avoid/get rid of unwanted thoughts and feelings), then it’s not mindful. And similarly, almost any activity can be turned into a mindfulness exercise, if we bring flexible, open, curious attention to it.

Yes, even colouring in pictures!

By Russ Harris.

Online Courses – www.imlearningact.com
In-Person Workshops – www.actmindfully.com.au
Public Resources – www.thehappinesstrap.com

The Purple Vault

By Claire Welshe

A clear blue sky beamed through my window the day I learned that I would never again see purple rain, at least not in the flesh.  The flesh of megastars such as Prince, it seemed, was just as susceptible to mortal vulnerabilities as the rest of us.  We are all human.  We will all suffer the same fate, eventually.  My clear blue sky day suddenly seemed a little cloudy.

Human beings are geared to strive for survival.   When our bodies become dehydrated, we feel thirsty and seek out water in order to stay alive.  When threatened, we feel fear and our bodies divert blood to our muscles to ensure we can fight or run, so we can survive.  So a reminder that no-one is immune from life’s inevitable demise can often be very unsettling.  We are neurologically hard-wired to avoid threats to our existence yet on some level we all know that at some point, even our best efforts will be futile. My cloudy day was now looking distinctly rainy.

There is some speculation that Prince had advance warning that his days were numbered.  On the weekend before his death, he reportedly proclaimed to his enamoured fans “Wait a few days before you waste your prayers on me.”  If indeed this was an ominous foreshadowing of his death, then the way in which he derived his resilience in the face of such adversity is something that we can all learn from.

As more and more snippets of his last few days are released to the public, it seems that the “artist formerly known as Prince” lived his last days loyal to his lifelong passion for music, his values surrounding creative expression and his devotion to philanthropic projects he deeply believed in, despite, or perhaps because, he knew that he didn’t have much time left.  His last moments were reportedly spent in his home recording studio, actively contributing to what is now believed to be an actual physical vault of up to 2,000 unreleased songs and videos in the basement of his Paisley Park estate in Minneapolis, enough to continue to release one album per year until well past my lifetime.  He created a rainbow to follow the rain. To follow the purple rain.

If you were told you had only one year, one week or even one day to live, how would you make each moment matter?  What would you want your “vault” of memories to contain?  How would you change the way you live today?  What is stopping you from living that life, right now?

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can help support clients deal with the difficult thoughts and emotions that inevitably arise when facing a life limiting illness, helping them identify valued directions for their remaining time on earth and supporting them as they take committed action towards adding to the “vault” we will all leave behind.  Research shows that distilling and focussing on what is most important during the end stage of life as part of a broader ACT intervention can help manage distress and improve quality of life during this very difficult time.

The Brisbane ACT Centre now offers a home visiting service by Claire Welshe, mental health occupational therapist, for those who are unable to access the Brisbane ACT Centre due to poor health or other restrictions.  Contact us today to make an appointment.

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(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1077722912000132)

2. Feros DL1, Lane LCiarrochi JBlackledge JT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for improving the lives of cancer patients: a preliminary study, Psychooncology. 2013 Feb;22(2):459-64. doi: 10.1002/pon.2083. Epub 2011 Oct 6.