Journal #48 Can Colouring Really Help Your Brain Handle Stress?
The surprising connection between colouring, your nervous system and HRV — and why we're exploring it with cognitive neuroscientist Dr Stan Rodski.
Our brains rarely get a quiet moment.
Emails. Messages. Deadlines. Notifications. News. Work. Family. And, inevitably, that quick look at your phone that somehow turns into another 20 minutes of scrolling.
Even when we think we're relaxing, our brains are often still processing an enormous amount of information.
So what happens when we deliberately give the brain something much simpler to do?
Something as simple as… colouring?
It might sound unlikely, but cognitive neuroscientist Dr Stan Rodski has spent years exploring the relationship between stress, the brain and the nervous system — including how focused activities such as colouring may help us shift out of a heightened state of stress.
And his work involves something we're becoming particularly interested in at The Vitalogy Project:
Heart Rate Variability, or HRV.
First, what is HRV?
Despite its name, HRV isn't really about how fast your heart beats.
It's about the tiny variations in time between each heartbeat.
A healthy heart doesn't beat like a perfectly regular metronome. The intervals between beats are constantly changing as your body responds to breathing, movement, emotions, stress, recovery and the environment around you.
That variation gives us a fascinating window into the activity of the autonomic nervous system — the system responsible for many of the processes your body manages automatically.
Generally speaking, greater HRV can be associated with better adaptability and recovery, while lower HRV can occur when the body is under greater physiological or psychological strain.
Importantly, HRV is influenced by many things — including sleep, exercise, alcohol, illness, hydration, age and stress — so it isn't a simple “good score/bad score”.
What makes it interesting is the pattern over time.
What does colouring have to do with any of this?
This is where Dr Stan Rodski comes in.
Stan is a cognitive neuroscientist whose work has focused extensively on stress, performance and how the brain responds to the demands of modern life.
His work ultimately led to the development of Colourtation — an approach combining colouring, patterns and focused attention to encourage the brain to slow down and engage with a single, simple task.
The idea is refreshingly straightforward.
Instead of asking an overloaded brain to process more information, you give it less.
✔︎ Choose a colour.
✔︎ Follow a pattern.
✔︎ Stay within the lines.
✔︎ Repeat.
There is no inbox to clear, problem to solve or decision to make.
Just one task requiring enough attention to occupy the mind without overwhelming it.
Stan has also explored these responses using HRV, looking at changes in autonomic nervous-system activity associated with stress and relaxation.
And that's what particularly caught our attention.
Your brain doesn't always need more stimulation
We spend a lot of time looking for ways to do more.
→ More focus.
→ More productivity.
→ More energy.
→ More information.
But cognitive performance isn't simply about pushing the brain harder.
Recovery matters too.
The ability to move between periods of effort and periods of recovery is an important part of maintaining performance.
It's also one of the reasons practices such as walking, breathing exercises, meditation, time in nature and focused creative activities can feel so restorative.
Sometimes the brain doesn't need another hack.
It needs fewer inputs.
Try the 10-Minute Brain Reset
Here's an experiment you can try for yourself.
Put your phone somewhere you can't reach it.
Find a quiet space and take a Colourtation page — or any colouring page you have available.
Set aside 10 minutes.
❌ No television.
❌ No podcast.
❌ No emails.
❌ No scrolling.
Just choose your colours and colour.
And when the 10 minutes are finished, notice how you feel.
Are your thoughts moving as quickly?
Do you feel more settled?
Is your breathing different?
Do you feel ready to return to whatever you were doing?
You don't need to measure anything.
The point is simply to give your brain something we increasingly struggle to give it:
a few minutes with less coming in.
Why we're particularly interested in HRV
There's another reason Dr Stan's work has caught our attention.
At The Vitalogy Project, we've been exploring how we can go beyond simply asking people how they feel and begin looking at objective measures that may help us better understand the relationship between stress, recovery and cognitive performance.
HRV provides one potentially fascinating window into that relationship.
That's why we're now working with Dr Stan Rodski to incorporate HRV into upcoming research involving our Brain Health performance supplement.
We want to explore whether changes people experience over time can also be observed through an objective physiological biomarker such as HRV.
There's plenty of work ahead, and we're not going to pre-empt what the research may find.
But that's exactly why we're doing it.
Ask the question. Measure it. See what the data tells us.
We'll be sharing much more about the project as the research progresses.
In the meantime, perhaps your brain could use 10 quiet minutes
Cognitive performance isn't about operating at maximum speed all day.
Sometimes performing better starts with becoming better at switching off.
So how about, instead of automatically reaching for your phone, try something different.
✔︎ Order Dr Stan's Colourtation book.
✔︎ Pick up some coloured pencils.
✔︎ Give yourself 10 minutes.
And see what your brain thinks.
Discover Colourtation
Developed by cognitive neuroscientist Dr Stan Rodski, Colourtation combines carefully designed colouring patterns with focused attention to create a simple way to step away from the constant stimulation of modern life.
