Colouring and flow state
Flow needs a challenge that stretches your skill, and colouring by number deliberately has none. What you get instead is comfortable absorption, which is a different and perfectly good thing.
People who colour often describe losing an hour without noticing, and the word that gets reached for is flow. It is worth being precise about that word, because flow is a defined construct with specific conditions, and colouring by number meets some of them very well and one of them not at all.
What flow actually means
Flow is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s construct, developed from interviews with people describing deep engagement in demanding activities — climbers, surgeons, chess players, musicians. It is not a synonym for concentration or for enjoyment. It has components, and the usual list runs roughly as follows.
- A balance between the challenge of the task and your skill at it. The task must be difficult enough to demand your full capacity and not so difficult that it defeats you.
- Clear goals. At every moment you know what you are trying to do.
- Immediate and unambiguous feedback. You know at once whether what you just did worked.
- A merging of action and awareness — you stop narrating your own performance to yourself.
- A distorted sense of time, usually time passing faster than expected.
- The activity feeling worth doing for its own sake, independent of any outcome.
- A loss of self-consciousness.
The first item is the load-bearing one. Flow is described as living on a narrow band between anxiety, where challenge exceeds skill, and boredom, where skill exceeds challenge. That band moves as you get better: an activity that produced flow last year may not this year, because you have improved and it has not got harder.
Where colouring scores well
Clear goals
Colouring by number has possibly the clearest goals of any activity anyone does voluntarily. Every step is written on the canvas. There is never a moment of wondering what you should be doing, which is the point of the format.
Immediate feedback
You tap and a region fills. The result appears instantly, is unambiguous, and requires no interpretation. Compare that with most work, where you find out whether you did the right thing weeks later, or never.
Nothing ambiguous about what comes next
Selecting a colour marks every unfilled region belonging to it across the picture, so the task at any moment is visible rather than inferred. There is no planning phase, no strategy, no risk of doing the steps in the wrong order.
Autotelic quality
Nobody colours for the finished picture. The output is a rendering of an artwork that already existed; you are not producing anything anyone needs. The activity is entirely done for the sake of doing it, which satisfies the autotelic condition about as purely as anything can.
Where it fails, and it fails on the important one
The challenge is fixed, and it is low. That is not an oversight in the design; it is the design. The entire proposition of colour by number is that it removes difficulty — no drawing skill, no colour decisions, no composition. If it were challenging it would not be the thing it is.
That has a consequence for the flow argument. Because the challenge never rises, it cannot track your improving skill, and there is not much skill to improve anyway. After twenty minutes you are as good at colouring by number as you will ever be. On Csikszentmihalyi’s own model, an activity where skill comfortably exceeds challenge sits in the boredom region, not the flow band.
Anyone claiming that colouring reliably produces flow either has not looked at what flow requires or is using the word to mean “absorbed”. Those are not the same, and the difference is not pedantic — the challenge condition is the part of the construct that distinguishes it from ordinary pleasant concentration.
Comfortable absorption
So what is actually happening when someone loses an hour to a mandala? A better description is comfortable absorption: attention is occupied enough that it does not wander to anything unpleasant, the hands are busy, the task is legible, and the demand is low enough that you can sustain it indefinitely without depleting anything.
This is a different state from flow and in some respects a more useful one. Flow is demanding by definition — it takes everything you have, which is why it is tiring and why you cannot enter it when you are already exhausted. Comfortable absorption is available precisely when flow is not: at the end of a long day, when you are too depleted to do anything that would stretch you, and yet do not want to sit doing nothing.
Calling it the lesser thing gets the value backwards. Very few activities occupy a tired mind without demanding anything from it and still produce something to look at. That is a narrow and useful category.
How flow is measured, and why that matters here
A note on the evidence, because it is relevant to how much weight any of this can bear. Flow is almost always measured by self-report — questionnaires administered after an activity, or experience sampling where people are prompted at intervals and asked what they are experiencing.
That carries the usual limits of self-report. People are being asked to introspect about a state whose defining features include losing track of yourself and of time, which is an awkward thing to report on afterwards. The questionnaire items also describe the construct, so a participant who understands what is being asked can produce the expected pattern without much effort.
None of this means flow is not real; it is one of the more durable ideas in the psychology of engagement. It means that any claim of the form “activity X produces flow” is resting on softer ground than the confidence of its phrasing usually suggests. That applies to colouring as much as to anything else.
What breaks absorption
Whatever you call the state, it is fragile in identifiable ways, and most of them are design decisions rather than facts of the activity.
- Interruptions. Anything that takes the screen away — a notification, an advert between pictures, a prompt — ends the state, and re-entering takes far longer than the interruption itself. Numbrush has no advertising anywhere in the app.
- Penalties. If a wrong tap costs something, you become careful, and being careful means monitoring your own performance, which is precisely the self-consciousness that absorption requires the absence of. A wrong tap here does nothing at all: no fill, no penalty, no warning.
- Hunting. Searching the canvas for the last few regions of a colour switches you from a rhythmic task to a search task, and the rhythm does not survive it. Use the highlight to find regions, and the Next control for stragglers.
- Ambiguous controls. A tap that does nothing without any indication of why forces you to stop and reason about the app rather than the picture. Knowing that a silent tap means the region belongs to another colour is enough to keep going.
- Clocks and streaks. A timer converts a paced activity into a race, and a streak is something you can lose, which means you are carrying a small debt into the session. There are neither here.
A reasonable way to think about it
If you want flow in the technical sense, colouring by number will not give it to you, and neither will anything else with a fixed low difficulty. Flow requires an activity that gets harder as you get better — an instrument, a sport, a craft with real technique.
If what you want is to occupy an hour without effort and without it feeling wasted, colouring is well suited to that, and the fact that it is not flow does not diminish it. The honest claim is smaller than the one usually made and more likely to be true, which is generally a better trade.
Frequently asked questions
Does colouring put you in a flow state?
Not in the technical sense. Flow requires a challenge that balances and stretches your skill, and colouring by number deliberately has a fixed, low challenge. It meets the other conditions — clear goals, immediate feedback, autotelic motivation — well. What people experience is better described as comfortable absorption.
Is absorption worse than flow?
It is different, not worse. Flow is demanding by definition and unavailable when you are already tired. Comfortable absorption is available exactly then, which makes it useful in a way that flow is not.
Who defined flow?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from interviews with people deeply engaged in demanding activities. The construct includes a challenge–skill balance, clear goals, immediate feedback, merging of action and awareness, and an altered sense of time.
How is flow measured?
Almost entirely by self-report questionnaires and experience sampling. That carries the ordinary limits of self-report, made slightly worse here because participants are being asked to introspect about a state defined partly by loss of self-awareness.
What most reliably breaks absorption while colouring?
Interruptions, penalties for wrong taps, and having to hunt for the last regions of a colour. The first two are app design decisions; the third is solved by using the colour highlight and the Next control rather than scanning the canvas yourself.
Try it on a real canvas
Numbrush is colour by number for adults: mandalas, rose windows and geometric pattern work, twelve colours a picture, a magnifier for the tight spots, and a wrong tap that costs you nothing. Free, offline, no ads and no account.