Do Coloring Apps Reduce Anxiety in Adults?

If you’ve ever lost 20 minutes to filling in a pattern on your iPad and felt calmer afterward, you’re not imagining things, but the honest answer to “do coloring apps reduce anxiety?” is more specific, and more limited, than most app store descriptions suggest. This guide walks through the research on adult coloring, what it does and doesn’t tell us about coloring apps, and how to set up a coloring session so it has the best chance of helping.

The Short Answer

Coloring seems to lower self-reported anxiety for a short time, and the early evidence suggests coloring on an app works about as well as coloring on paper. The effects are modest, the studies are small and mostly use university students, and none of it makes a coloring app a treatment for an anxiety disorder. Think of it as a low-cost, low-risk way to give a busy mind somewhere calmer to land.

How We Researched This

We don’t have access to paid keyword tools or to the full text of every journal, so we haven’t invented figures about how many people search for this or how many studies exist. Below we only report what we could verify from the studies’ own abstracts and pages, and we flag where we’re relying on a second-hand summary. We also don’t measure anxiety in our own app testing, so nothing here is based on our hands-on reviews except where we say so.

What the Research Found

The research on adult coloring is small but surprisingly consistent in direction. Here are the studies most often cited:

The classic experiment: mandalas versus blank pages

In 2005, Nancy Curry and Tim Kasser published what is widely described as the first randomized experiment on whether coloring a mandala reduces anxiety. Participants were given a mandala, a plaid design or a blank page for free drawing, and spent about 20 minutes on the task. According to summaries of the study, coloring the mandala was associated with a significant drop in anxiety, the plaid design with some drop, and free drawing on a blank page with none. A later replication by van der Vennet and Serice found that mandala coloring again reduced anxiety, although it did not find a difference between the plaid and blank conditions.

The practical takeaway is modest: structured coloring, where you fill in an existing design, was the activity that reliably helped, rather than open-ended drawing. That lines up with what a coloring app offers.

A week of daily coloring

In 2017, a team at the University of Otago in New Zealand published “Sharpen Your Pencils” in the Creativity Research Journal. They asked 104 female university students to spend a week doing either daily coloring or logic puzzles. The coloring group reported lower depressive symptoms and anxiety afterward, while the puzzle group did not. The authors called the result preliminary, and the effect was small and short-term, but it is one of the few studies that looked beyond a single sitting.

Guided versus unguided coloring

A summary in Psychology Today of work by Mantzios and Giannou notes that guided mandala coloring reduced anxiety, while unguided coloring showed no advantage over free drawing. We haven’t read that paper ourselves, so we’d treat it as a lead rather than a conclusion, but it points the same direction as Curry and Kasser: a clear, defined task seems to matter.

Do Coloring Apps Work as Well as Paper?

This is the question that matters if you color on a phone or tablet, and the evidence, while thinner, is encouraging.

Mantzios and colleagues (2019) ran two experiments with 100 participants each. The first compared coloring on paper with coloring on an app, and the second compared two ways of interacting with the app, tapping and swiping. State anxiety fell after a single session regardless of condition. The authors concluded that app-based coloring “may be a contemporary time- and cost-effective intervention in reducing anxiety.” On mindfulness, the picture was less tidy: the first experiment found the app helped raise mindfulness, but the second did not.

A 2026 study by Li and colleagues, which we’ve only seen summarized by the ArtWorkout blog, reportedly found that 60 university students lowered their anxiety with both digital and paper mandala coloring, with no significant difference between the two. The same summary notes that the results don’t necessarily generalize to every app or to coloring in everyday life.

So the fair reading is that coloring on a screen does not appear to be worse than coloring on paper for short-term anxiety, at least in controlled studies with a simple, distraction-free setup. That last part matters, and it’s where real-world apps can differ from the lab.

What the Research Doesn’t Tell Us

It’s worth being just as clear about the limits:

• Short windows. Most studies measure anxiety right after a 20 to 30 minute session, or after a week at most. Nobody has shown that coloring changes anxiety over months.
• Mostly students. Many participants were university undergraduates, so the results may not describe an anxious parent, a shift worker or a retiree.
• Weak comparisons. Some studies lack a true non-art control group, and in at least one, different art activities didn’t differ from each other. That means any calm may come from “doing something absorbing and low-pressure” rather than from coloring specifically.
• Lab apps aren’t app store apps. Study apps are stripped down. A real coloring app may have banners, pop-ups, streak reminders and paywalls, and none of that was part of the experiment.
• Self-reported anxiety. Most outcomes are questionnaires, not clinical diagnoses.

Psychology Today summed up the evidence on adult coloring books as therapeutic but not therapy, and that’s a fair summary of what the science supports.

How to Get the Most From a Coloring App

If you want a coloring session to actually feel calming, borrow from what the studies did and avoid what they didn’t have to deal with.

1. Give it about 20 minutes. That’s the length used in the original mandala experiments. Longer is fine; there is no proven magic number.
2. Pick a structured design. Choose a page with clear regions you can fill in, such as a mandala, a pattern or a scene, rather than a blank canvas.
3. Turn off interruptions. Use Do Not Disturb or a Focus mode so notifications don’t break the session. For tablet setups, our guide to coloring app accessibility settings covers display and touch options that reduce friction.
4. Stay on the task. The effect in the lab depended on an absorbing, low-stakes activity. Switching apps to check messages undoes that.
5. Avoid screens right before sleep. If you’re coloring to wind down, see our guide to coloring apps before bed.
6. Pair it with paper sometimes. Neither format has been shown to be better, so use whichever you’ll actually do. Our comparison of coloring apps vs. coloring books covers the trade-offs.

What to Look for in a Coloring App for Relaxation

Because the research describes calm, absorbed coloring, the app features that matter are the ones that protect that state:

• No ads or pop-ups. An interruption mid-page is the opposite of the lab setup. See why ad-free matters.
• No pressure mechanics. Timers, streak counters and competitive badges reintroduce low-level stress.
• A natural stopping point. A finished page gives the session a clear end.
• Predictable pricing. Being hit with an upsell while you’re relaxed works against the point. Check what coloring app subscriptions really cost before committing.
• Offline play. No connection means no surprise load screens or sign-in prompts.

Our tested picks for adults

We haven’t measured anxiety in any app, so these are picks for how well they protect a calm session, based on our own hands-on testing:

• Stained Glass Bible Coloring has our highest artwork score, 9.4, and its detailed pages suit a slower, deliberate session. The content is faith-based, which won’t suit everyone.
• Retro Toy Box Coloring Book (7.9) is a secular option with detailed vintage-toy art and no ads in our testing.
• Vintage Halloween Coloring (7.9) has a retro seasonal style. In our testing, finishing the single free page triggered a second upsell prompt, which is the kind of interruption you’d want to know about before choosing it for a calm session.

Our full best coloring apps for adults and best cozy coloring apps roundups cover the rest of the lineup. As with any app we mention, all three adult picks above are published by EyeZen, a developer affiliated with our editorial team; see our disclosure policy. Retro Toy Box Coloring Book and Vintage Halloween Coloring each keep only one page free out of roughly 100, so expect to pay for the full collection with either.

When Coloring Isn’t Enough

A coloring app is a gentle tool for an ordinary stressful day. It isn’t a substitute for care if anxiety is persistent, disrupts your sleep or work, or feels out of control. In that case, talk to your doctor or a qualified mental health professional. Coloring can still be a pleasant companion to that care, but it shouldn’t replace it.

Our Take

The evidence is small but consistently points the same way: about 20 minutes of structured coloring tends to leave people a little less anxious, and doing it on an app appears to work about as well as doing it on paper. What we can’t promise is that any particular app will deliver that effect, because real apps come with ads, upsells and notifications that studies don’t include. If calm is your goal, pick an app that gets out of your way, color in a quiet moment with notifications off, and treat the result as a small, welcome reset rather than a cure.

For the children’s version of this question, see can coloring apps actually reduce stress in kids.

Sources: Can Coloring Mandalas Reduce Anxiety? (Curry & Kasser, Art Therapy, 2005), summarized by Knox College, Sharpen Your Pencils: Preliminary Evidence That Adult Coloring Reduces Depressive Symptoms and Anxiety (Flett et al., Creativity Research Journal, 2017), University of Otago, Adult colouring: the effect of app-based vs. pen-and-paper colouring on mindfulness and anxiety (Mantzios et al., Health Psychology Report, 2019), Does coloring help with stress and anxiety? (ArtWorkout), summarizing Li et al. (2026), Ashlock et al. (2019) and Choi et al. (2021), Are Adult Coloring Books Actually Helpful? (Psychology Today), The effect of mandala coloring on state anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis (Store & Jakobsson, Art Therapy, 2022), listed for further reading; we have not reviewed its figures