Coloring before bed: a screen-free way to wind down
It can be. The main thing coloring offers at bedtime is simple: it's a quiet, screen-free way to spend the last half hour of the day. Whether coloring itself helps you sleep is another matter, and we couldn't find a finished trial that tested bedtime coloring in healthy adults. Two other things are well supported, though. A regular wind-down routine helps, and bright screens late at night can push sleep later. A coloring page under a warm lamp happens to fit both.
What does the research say about coloring and sleep?
Not much yet. Researchers have studied mandala coloring and sleep in a few specific groups. One example is a six-week mindfulness-based mandala program for older adults with sleep problems in Bangkok (Makkabphalanon et al., 2025), and several more trials are registered but unfinished. Most of this work mixes coloring with other activities, and none of it that we found looked at coloring right before lights out. You can't learn much from it about what tonight's page will do.
The coloring studies do show many people feel less anxious after a session (Flett et al., 2017; Ashlock et al., 2018). Being less wound up at 10pm sounds useful. We still won't promise you'll fall asleep faster, because nobody has tested that. There's more on those studies in our article on whether coloring helps with stress and anxiety.
Why swap the phone for a coloring page?
Here the evidence is firmer. In a tightly controlled study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, volunteers read on a light-emitting e-reader for about four hours before bed, five nights running. Compared with nights spent reading a printed book, they took longer to fall asleep, made less melatonin in the evening and felt groggier the next morning (Chang et al., 2015). Four hours is a lot of screen, and devices have changed since then. It's still a decent argument for ending the evening on paper.
A page also doesn't compete for your attention. It won't ping you or start the next episode on its own. When you put the pencil down it just sits there.
The Sleep Foundation's guidance on sleep hygiene recommends keeping the same steps each night and setting aside about 30 minutes to wind down in dim light. Routines work partly by repetition. Do the same three things at about the same time each night, say twenty minutes of coloring, then teeth, then the light off, and after a while the sequence itself starts telling you the day's over.
How do you set up coloring before bed?
Make it effortless, or it won't happen. One page, five or six pencils and a clipboard on the nightstand is enough. If you have to dig the book out of a drawer and hunt for a sharpener, you'll reach for your phone instead.
For light, a small bedside lamp with a warm bulb (the kind labeled 2700K on the box) pointed down at the page works better than the ceiling light, which tends to make the room feel like mid-afternoon again. It still has to be bright enough to see thin lines without squinting, so if the pattern has a lot of small cells you may need to pull the lamp closer.
For coloring in bed, a lap tray or a big hardback gives you a flat surface. Stick to colored pencils there. Markers bleed through, and a marker with its cap off rolling into the duvet is a good way to wreck a pillowcase.
What should you color at night?
Something with medium and large spaces, mostly, so you can color in loose strokes and not worry about every edge when your hand is getting heavy. A mandala suits this too, since after one ring is done the next one is the same motion again and needs very little thought.
Lots of people reach for lavender, slate blue or sage at night and keep the bright reds for daytime, which is habit more than any rule, so use whatever you like looking at.
Long winter evenings are made for this. We drew Frostlight Mandalas around snowflakes, winter stars, evergreens and ornaments, and Skyward Mandalas has moon phases and night skies. Neither paperback is on Amazon yet, but both are available now as $5.99 printables, so you could print one page for tonight.
How long should you color before sleep?
For most people twenty or thirty minutes works. You'll have time to settle, and you won't end up staying up late to finish.
Watch the urge to finish. A half-done page can keep you up the way "one more episode" does, so decide before you start that the timer ends the session wherever you've got to, and leave the rest for tomorrow night.
Keep bedtime coloring separate from any serious project, too; a detailed piece with layered shading is Saturday-afternoon work, and at night flat fills are plenty.
Who should be careful?
If you've had trouble sleeping for weeks, wake up exhausted most days, or snore loudly and feel drowsy during the day, a coloring routine isn't the answer. Talk to a doctor, since ongoing sleep problems can have causes worth checking.
Questions people ask
Is coloring before bed good for you?
It's a pleasant, screen-free thing to put in a wind-down routine, and in small studies short coloring sessions lowered anxiety. Nobody has properly tested whether it improves sleep.
Does coloring help you fall asleep?
Nobody has shown that. A steady routine and less bright screen time at night do help most people, and coloring can fill that half hour.
What's the best thing to color with in bed?
Colored pencils. No bleed-through, no stained sheets, and you can drop one mid-stroke when you get sleepy.
How long should my wind-down be?
The Sleep Foundation suggests budgeting about 30 minutes for winding down, with dim lights and something calm like reading or relaxation exercises. Coloring fits comfortably in that half hour.
Elemental Mandalas
48 mandalas of water, earth, air and fire. Paperback on Amazon, or a $5.99 printable.
See the book