Summer arrives every year with the same quiet demand: be a more interesting version of yourself. Get outside. Book the trip. Start the garden. Learn to grill. Make the most of the long evenings. Be the one in the group chat with the patio photo.
If you've ever stared down a Sunday in June feeling slightly behind on summer — this post is for you.
You don't need a season-long bucket list. You need something to do with your hands while the fan moves the air around. A low-stakes summer activity that doesn't ask you to be more than you already are.
This post is about that. Coloring is the main thing we'll talk about, because we're Good Life Color and we'd be lying if we pretended otherwise. But it's also about a wider category — quiet, low-equipment, low-skill summer activities for adults who'd rather rest than report back.
what "low-stakes" actually means
A low-stakes activity is one you can start in under a minute, stop in under a minute, and not feel like you wasted anything in between.
That's it. That's the bar.
It's not "easy" — easy is a different word that gets used a lot in wellness writing and usually means "the thing I'm selling you." Low-stakes is more specific. A low-stakes activity has:
- No setup. Open the page, pick up the marker, you're already doing it.
- No skill bar. You don't need to be good at it. You don't even need to want to be good at it.
- No proof. Nobody has to see the result. There's no photo, no group chat update, no "summer accomplishment" check-in.
- No commitment. You can stop after four minutes. You can do it once and never again.
- No cost. Or close to it. The whole thing should be cheaper than a coffee.
Most of what gets sold as "summer self-care" doesn't pass this test. A pottery class is wonderful, but it's stakes. A retreat in the mountains is lovely, but it's stakes. Even a hot-girl walk has a small social tax built in.
Coloring passes. So do a few other things. We'll get to those.
why summer makes adult hobbies harder, not easier
The cultural pitch is that summer is the easiest time to pick up something new. Long days, lighter calendars, kids out of school, "permission" to slow down.
The reality, for a lot of adults, is the opposite.
Long days mean more hours that feel like they should be productive. Kids out of school means more childcare logistics, not less. Lighter calendars at work usually means colleagues are out and the load just shifts. And the cultural pressure to "make the most of summer" turns every Saturday into a small audit — did we do enough?
Decision fatigue compounds. The pool, the park, the patio, the trip, the cookout, the camp pickup, the sunscreen. By July a lot of people are quietly exhausted not by any one thing but by the accumulation of small summer micro-decisions.
This is the part the "summer bucket list" articles miss. The thing most adults actually need is not 47 ideas. It's one or two activities that ask almost nothing of them, so the other 99% of the day's bandwidth is available for the parts of life that already need it.
A short hobby that you can pick up and put down without ceremony. That's the assignment.
why coloring fits a summer afternoon
Coloring is a strangely good summer activity, and we don't say that often enough.
A few reasons.
It's heat-tolerant. You can do it on the couch with the AC on. You can do it on a screened porch. You can do it in a hotel room, a car at the trailhead, a beach umbrella, an airport gate, a 7-year-old's swim lesson. It doesn't care about weather.
It's portable. A printed page folds in half. A book lives in a tote. Markers fit in a sandwich bag. There is no version of "I forgot the gear" that ends your summer hobby.
It's quiet. Summer is loud. Even the good summers are loud — kids in the yard, podcasts playing, the neighbor's lawn mower, the AC running. Coloring is one of the only adult activities that doesn't add noise to the room.
It's done indoors or outdoors. The same coloring page works on a couch in central air and on a picnic blanket at golden hour. That's a versatility you don't get with most "summer hobbies."
It's screen-free, but not preachy about it. A lot of summer wellness advice asks you to put the phone down for a reason that sounds vaguely shameful. Coloring just gives your hands something to do, and your phone ends up across the room because it has to. That's a much easier door than a digital detox.
It scales to your attention. Twenty minutes is the research-backed sweet spot for the calming effect (Curry & Kasser, 2005; Mantzios & Giannou, 2018). But the activity also accommodates the four-minute version, where you fill in one petal of one mandala while waiting for the grill to come up to temperature. It works at every dose.
It outlives the trend. The 2015 adult-coloring boom faded but the activity didn't — therapists kept reaching for it, and so do a lot of quiet adults who never read a trend piece about it. We wrote about that here if you want the longer version.
Summer ends. The marker doesn't.
six other low-stakes summer activities that pair well
If coloring isn't the right fit on a given afternoon, these other six activities live in the same energy register. The whole list is meant to be one or two ideas for the rest of the season, not all of them.
1. Sitting outside without a project.
Not gardening. Not reading. Sitting. A porch, a balcony, a folding chair in the yard. Look at the leaves move for fifteen minutes. This sounds like nothing. It is not nothing.
2. Reading something you already own.
Not the buzzy summer release. Not the audiobook on your list. A paperback you actually own that's been sitting on the shelf for two years. The acquisition is done — the only commitment is the page.
3. Watching something land.
A storm coming in. A swimming pool emptying after a kid's lesson. The shadow of the porch railing moving across the floor. This is what humans did before phones and it still works.
4. Working a simple puzzle.
A 500-piece, nothing fancy. The whole pleasure is sorting and matching for ten minutes here, twenty minutes there. You don't have to finish it. Some people leave one out all summer.
5. Tending one plant.
Not a garden — one plant. Water it on Wednesdays. Notice the new growth. That's the whole practice. If the plant dies, you didn't fail at gardening. You did the experiment.
6. Coloring.
We had to. Twenty minutes, one page, no project. The research is good (2005 study), the entry cost is small, and it fits inside almost any kind of summer afternoon.
You'll notice none of these list "go for a walk." Walking is wonderful and you should walk. We just don't think it fits this category because the cultural pressure around walking has gotten a lot — and the bar for a low-stakes activity is that there's no pressure attached.
what you'd actually need to try this
The honest answer is: less than you think.
The four-minute version. Print a free page off our free printables page — there's a new one every month. Color one section. Stop. You did the thing. You can do it again tomorrow or you can not.
The Sunday-afternoon version. Grab the Mandala Coloring Collection — 100 pages for $4. That's enough to cover the rest of June, July, August, and the part of September that still feels like summer in most places. Print as many as you want. Take one in the car.
The whole-summer hedge. If you read this post and thought I'd actually use this more than once a week, the Mandala & Patterns Bundle is 600+ pages across six books for $12.99 — less than the cost of a single paperback. Enough variety to find the pages that fit your mood on a given afternoon without ever feeling like you've used the whole thing up.
If you want everything we make, the Complete Wellness Library is fifteen books for $34.99. That's the one-and-done version — buy it once, color all summer, color all next summer, color in five years when you find one in the back of a drawer.
We're not asking you to commit to a new identity. We're asking you to print one page and see what happens.
a quieter summer is also a summer
Somewhere along the way, the cultural definition of a good summer became loud. Big trips. Big crowds. Big plans. The Instagram-able version.
There's another version that doesn't get written about as much. The porch version. The book-in-your-lap version. The fan-running version. The marker-and-a-mandala version.
If you read this post because the loud version of summer is wearing on you — this is permission to choose the quiet one. Not because the loud version is wrong. But because the quiet one is also a summer, and it counts, and the research on it is honestly pretty good.
Soften. Slow down. Color something.
🌿 slowing down is essential.