Colouring books - they’re for five-year-olds, right?

Wrong. I was astonished to see on Saturday in The Times bestsellers list that no fewer than FOUR of the top 10 paperback nonfiction books were colouring books for adults.

Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Colouring Book by Johanna Basford was at No 2, Enchanted Forest: An Inky Quest and Colouring Book came in at No 3, at No 4 was The Little Book of Calm Colouring by David Sinden and Victoria Kay, while Millie Marotta’s Tropical Wonderland was at No 7. This last one was also the subject of a free colouring poster giveaway with a Sunday newspaper at the weekend.

And Marotta has also published a similar one entitled Animal Kingdom, while Basford also has a second, called Enchanted Forest.

There’s also The Mindfulness Colouring Book by Emma Farrarons, billed as “anti-stress art therapy for busy people”.

And there’s even a Facebook colouring-in group.

At least The Sunday Times lists them as ‘manuals’ – and at least the other books in The Times Top 10 have actual words.

But between them, these infantile “books” have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

To whom, I wonder?

Do women buy them? Do men?

And what on earth do children think when they see their mothers sitting at the table colouring in? To me, these “books” are simply more complicated versions of colouring books for children, but according to Waterstones – which, of course, is trying to sell them – they’re popular because “psychologists say it’s because when we focus on the activity of colouring, it calms the mind and takes our focus away from worries, whilst stimulating motor skills, senses and creativity”.

I think it’s another sign of our culture’s chronic infantilism, along with adland’s insistence on trying to flog goods on TV to adults through the medium of childish fake fluffy animals (think the meerkat, the creepy polar bear in the Birds Eye ads, the mafia-style grizzly bear trying to sell us Muller Rice… the list goes on). Plus voiceovers speaking to us as if we’re all five years old, and the adults insisting on wearing hats with bobbles on and intentionally ripped jeans.

In fact, I found a very telling quote from a Guardian article on this subject from a woman called Annie Brookfield, 42, from Warrington, who explained that she started colouring in when she was an agency worker on a zero hours contract and was staying up until the early hours waiting for a phone call about her shift.

“If I haven’t had enough work or enough the week before, or there’s a bill coming up, my husband will actually say, just go and do some colouring, and he’ll watch the telly.

"We’re like toddlers who parallel play.”

With these colouring books, it seems they can act as an antidote to life’s stresses, calming with just enough activity to keep the brain occupied but not overused.

And no, they certainly don’t tax the brain.

Colouring-in as an adult promotes convergent thinking, i.e. thinking within the box (or the lines), as opposed to divergent thinking, which is more creative because it requires you to use your imagination to create your own art.

Colouring-in is prefabricated creativity that doesn’t stretch the imagination, a precious commodity these days for overworked people who overuse social media and their gadgets.

Even in prison, prisoners are encouraged to produce art from their own imagination in art classes to “work for achievement and transform their lives”, according to the Koestler Trust, a charity that aims to help detainees to lead more positive lives through art.

It seems ironic that in a country where people have almost unlimited freedoms, they choose to box themselves in, to outsource their minds to people who draw for them. We seek to repress our own imaginations. Think of all those repressive regimes where artists and their imaginations are always harshly controlled.

Perhaps when people have too much – not just material things but too many options in life – the abreactions seem to include regression.

Hedonism can only be tolerated for so long: when life is too good, it seems, we need to regress back to childhood, where there are clear boundaries and choices are limited.

Colouring-in for adults doesn’t achieve anything, as far as I can see.

Instead of busying themselves with an activity that leads nowhere and achieves nothing of note, it seems to me that the stressed need to look closely at why they feel the need to take up an infantile activity – one that should occur at a very young age when children are learning about form – and find out why they are so stressed.

Perhaps they need to take stock of their lives and work out what steps they can take to make changes instead of colouring in pointless pictures.