I never thought I’d be someone who turns to colouring books for peace of mind. But here we are.
It started during COVID-19. Like a lot of people, I was going through a really stressful period. There was so much uncertainty, so much heaviness, and I reached a point where nothing I usually relied on was helping me cope. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t settle. I’d try to rest the way I always had — watching a TV show, putting on a movie — but my mind wouldn’t stop. I wasn’t actually resting. I was just sitting, thinking in front of a screen.
Like most people during that time, I was trying my hand at everything. From cooking new recipes to experimenting with hairstyles, finding ways to fill the hours with something that felt productive or at least distracting. Then I picked up a mindfulness colouring book. I don’t even remember what made me try it. But something shifted. It was quiet. It was slow. And for the first time in a while, I felt like I was actually present in what I was doing instead of being dragged down by my own thoughts. It gave me a kind of peace I genuinely wasn’t getting from anything else. Not rest in the “doing nothing” sense, but rest in the sense that my mind finally had somewhere calm to land.
That was the beginning.
From there I started exploring more. A couple of close friends introduced me to craft workshops and I started trying all kinds of things — calligraphy, Japanese paper cutting, painting. Every new form came with its own tools and techniques and I quickly realised just how massive the world of arts and crafts actually is. I tried a lot of different mediums and crafting experiences, and each one taught me something different about how I engage with creating.
Those same friends kept inspiring me, mostly through very cool and creative craft reels on social media, and through them I learned about forms of art and craft I didn’t even know existed. What surprised me wasn’t just how much I enjoyed the creating part. It was the people. Sitting around a table with strangers who became familiar, talking while making something with our hands. Some of them told me that these workshops were the only place they felt a sense of community. That hit me. Because I felt it too.
This was around 2020 and 2021, and after that season passed, I’ll be honest — I kind of fell off. I stopped making things and part of it was life getting busy again. But a bigger part, if I’m being real, was perfectionism. I’d look at supplies or see posts about creative projects and think I don’t even know where to start. I wanted whatever I made to be good, and that pressure made it easier to just not try. I think a lot of people can relate to that. The idea that if you’re not naturally talented at something creative, it’s not for you.
Here’s what I started noticing about myself. I’m an overthinker. Always have been. My thoughts can completely take over my body and it becomes really hard to be present. But when I’m painting, or colouring, or working with my hands on something that needs my attention, I leave that space. I go somewhere else. I’ve since learned that what I was experiencing is called a state of flow — that feeling of being so absorbed in what you’re doing that everything else falls away. And honestly, it’s one of the most incredible feelings I’ve found for managing my own mental health.
Then I got introduced to a completely different world. Functional crafts. Art that actually does something. And I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner — because I’d been doing this for years without realising it. Working with kids and young adults, I was always creating ways to make activities more engaging for them. Reward charts, fun scheduling systems, visual tools that made their routines feel like something they owned. I was always into arts and crafts. I just didn’t realize it back then.
So I thought — why not apply the same idea for adults? And once I started looking, everything fell into place. I came across the concept of a dopamine menu, which became what I now call the Recharge Guide. Suddenly I wasn’t just making art for the sake of making art. I was designing tools that people could actually use in their daily lives.
And then, as I always do, I researched it. I found an incredible systematic review called The Effects of Crafts-Based Interventions on Mental Health and Well-Being. Reading that paper was a turning point. Here was empirical evidence confirming what I had been feeling in my own life and seeing in other people. Craft genuinely supports mental health and wellbeing.
I started talking to more people about this. Friends, colleagues, strangers at workshops. And what I kept hearing was the same thing — people go to craft workshops to meet others, to do something fun, but they don’t realise there’s a real psychological benefit underneath. And nobody in the space was connecting those dots. Nobody was designing these experiences with that awareness built in. That’s where my psychology background met my personal experience, and that’s where The AllSpace Hub was born.
And recently there’s been another layer. I’ve been trying to live more analogue. Less scrolling, less screen time, less of that passive consumption that leaves you feeling emptier than before. Craft gives me the opposite. It gives me something real, something I made with my own hands, and a room full of people who showed up to do the same.
That’s why I do this. Not because I have it all figured out. But because I found something that helped me, and I want others to find it too.
