About seven years ago, I was given a small book. That small book was named Calm and it got me on a path that would change my life.
From the age of three until I was in middle school, I loved to draw as a form of expressing my humor and interests in life. But when I became emotionally invested in football, Tae Kwon Do and track, my interests went elsewhere. By the time I was 14, my passion for being an artist had largely faded, as I felt as if the only way to achieve acceptance was to be an athlete.
Not that being an athlete was a bad experience nor did it have an overall negative impact on my life. Overall, it taught me what hard work, dedication and discipline truly meant to my well-being as a person. However, unless I was to become a professional athlete (spoiler alert it didn’t happen), this could not last forever as a career to help pay the bills.
Like a typical young adult, I struggled to truly find my calling at one point. But in June of 2017, something changed very quickly.
The Game Changer
At the age of 21, I almost felt being an athlete was all I knew. I was attending St. Ambrose University with intent to get a graphic design degree, but I wasn’t sold that I wanted to do this as a profession. My interests were simply not leaning on my creative side. I had played football for my school for two years and was about to transition to the cheer team as a backspot. The seemingly never-ending anxiety of being an athlete was stuck in my mind even during the summer months. Deep down though, there was a part of me that felt I needed to start thinking about another passion other than sports.
In June of 2017, my family and I took a road trip to Coralville, Iowa, to shop at the mall district and tour the University of Iowa. In order to counteract the constant anxiety from my athletic career, my mom gave me a book called Calm which provides methods such as meditation and self-reflection as forms of mental health treatment. I found myself looking through this book on the hour-long commute from my hometown of Geneseo, IL. For some reason, I saw one page while skimming through curiously, and I’ll never forget how it led to a trigger in my creative response. The only thing I saw was one page of colors, (see image below), and how I had an epiphany that something that was once a staple in my life had gone missing for the last seven years.
It was my passion for being an artist.
The color therapy portion of the Calm book.
That weekend, I went out and purchased oil pastels from Hobby Lobby and sort of frustratingly painted these pictures below. I say it like this because my general stamina and patience were rusty from being away from traditional art for so long at the time these paintings were created. It also didn’t help that I’m naturally a perfectionist, meaning if I wasn’t able to capture the image exactly how I felt I needed to be, frustration would settle in.
By no means are either of these paintings perfect (in fact they aren’t really finished), but I do hold on to these as it was the beginning of a reignited ambition that will never look back.
The two paintings made after seeing the book.
This would ultimately be the beginning of a graphic design career that lasts to this day. I can point to this very moment where my ambition for art had been refueled as the turning point which eventually led to me having a full-time job as an artist. Since this subtle, yet significant experience, there still has been one question that has been on my mind since that June day in 2017. That is whether or not color therapy is effective.
Coloring Book Therapy
Using color as a form of therapy is a still relatively unknown form of treatment for mental health. However, there is evidence of this form of therapy being used to help boost mood.
The National Library of Medicine conducted an experiment from January 2020 to December 2020 on patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GED), to determine if color therapy and physical therapy can act as a more effective method of treating anxiety as opposed to the more traditional method of using anti-anxiety medication and physical therapy.
For the experimental group, adults were given a 32 page coloring book with 24 colored pencils with the guidance from the nurses and nursing graduates to help direct the patients in picking the coloring book pattern that was most compatible to express their conditions, with little influence from the nurses and nursing graduates once they made their decision on which patterns or colors they ultimately chose.
In the final results of this experiment, they found that color therapy and physical therapy within the experimental group was a more effective method of reducing anxiety and increasing mood than the more traditional method of anti-anxiety medication and physical therapy within the control group. In a medical journal published by the National Library of Medicine, they explained that “color therapy was found to have caused deep stimulation in the brain’s reward system and motivated the patients to seek pleasure through rewarding and stimulating events.”
The journal does point out that there are some limitations to this experiment, as it explains there was “limited observation and stronger analysis of the influencing factors.” They also explain that patience with certain conditions were selected which meant that they could not monitor neural activity.
Green Light Therapy
Green light therapy is a form of therapy using green light through LEDS.
Mohab M Ibrahim, PhD, MD, director of the Chronic Pain Management Clinic at the University Medical Center Tucson, discovered that green light therapy has the ability to help reduce headaches and fibromyalgia.
Ibrahim explains “25 patients were exposed to white light for two hours before being exposed to green light, with the patients reporting to have had an average pain score of 8 before green light treatment on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.”
By the end of the experiment, Ibrahim reported that the average pain score dropped to an average score of 2.8 after completing the green light portion of the experiment. Upon even further testing, he also stated that their general quality of life climbed from “48 to 78 percent.”
Ibrahim also believes that this can be a good form of therapy for cost-effective people.
“Since it’s a normal light and not a lazer, it’s much more cost friendly since it doesn’t require high-end technology with high-end energy while also keeping patients from experiencing side effects,” he says.
What I Think of These Experiments
Before I researched these two experiments, I had previous familiarity with the mental health benefits of using a coloring book coming from a family of mental health professionals who have used this practice. I’ve generally noticed it creates a quiet, more relaxed mood in the room when we have something else to focus on other than being on a phone!
This made me curious to analyze more facts and statistics on how effective color exposure truly was compared to other forms of therapy, such as anti-anxiety medication. The results of this experiment do suggest that it creates the feeling of reward or stimulation that we so often seek as a society, which shows it has the potential to be a more effective form of medication.
However, I do realize that this is something that needs to be tested more due to the broad range of mental health issues and their interactions within our own minds. To say that this is the cure would be completely disregarding people and their experiences. I ultimately would want to see more experiments conducted like this because having actual statistics will be a strong influencing factor in determining if this is a stronger form of therapy.
The green light therapy was pleasantly surprising to me, as I have been an advocate for the mental health effects of the color green since it’s commonly associated with growth and healing. Interestingly, the color pantone in the Calm book was also a shade of green (see image below par. 5). The statistics on this experiment were also encouraging, and the fact that the patients reported an average pain that went from an average of 8 to 2.8 is significant. Like color book therapy, more experiments like this need to be conducted so we can continue to obtain information on the impacts of color on our mental health. I wouldn’t consider any relatively unknown or new form of therapy the answer unless it was agreed upon and proven to be the most effective form of treatment.
In the end, gathering data and finding consistent patterns on the positive impacts of color therapy in different interactions will be key in determining if it should begin replacing forms of therapy that potentially produce less effective results for patients. But for now, we definitely know it has potential.