Anxiety is not a stranger to most people who live with ADHD. The two conditions share neural territory in ways that mean they often arrive together: the racing thoughts, the hypervigilance, the sense that you are always slightly behind the pace of your own life. For me, anxiety has been a constant background hum — some days barely audible, other days so loud it crowds out almost everything else.
I want to write carefully here, because "watercolour cured my anxiety" would be both dishonest and potentially harmful. Watercolour has not cured my anxiety. It is not a treatment, and I would never position it as a replacement for therapy, medication, or professional support. What it is — and what I want to describe as honestly as I can — is a practice that reliably shifts my nervous system out of its worst states.
The Physical Act of Slowing Down
One of the defining features of anxiety is acceleration. Thoughts come faster, threat-assessment runs hotter, the body holds tension in shoulders and jaw and breath in ways you only notice when they release. The anxiety state is a kind of full-system alert that can become, over time, the default mode.
What I noticed — slowly, over months of painting — is that the physical acts involved in watercolour are the precise opposite of this acceleration. Mixing paint requires a particular kind of attention: watching colour move through water, judging saturation, deciding when the mix is right. Loading a brush demands a moment of stillness before the mark. Laying a wash requires the hand to slow to the pace at which water moves across paper.
None of this is dramatic. It is not meditation in any formal sense. But the cumulative effect of these small physical requirements — mix, pause, load, breathe, mark — is a deceleration. And deceleration, when anxiety has been running the show, feels like the most welcome thing in the world.
The Chemistry of Making Something
There is research, which I am not going to misrepresent by summarising too confidently, suggesting that creative activity engages neural pathways associated with reward and calm differently from passive activities like watching television. Making something — even something imperfect, even something no one else will ever see — seems to produce a different quality of engagement from consuming something.
My experience aligns with this. There is a particular quality of attention when painting that I do not find in other activities. It is not the distracted half-presence of scrolling, or the passive absorption of watching. It is engaged, active, purposeful. And within that purposefulness — because the task is genuinely difficult, genuinely interesting, genuinely responsive to what I do — the anxious commentary that usually runs underneath my thinking goes quiet.
Not silent. But quiet.
Letting Go of Outcome
One of the things that sustains anxiety is control — or rather, the desperate attempt to maintain control in situations where control is impossible. Anxiety and perfectionism often live close together: if I can just get everything right, nothing bad will happen.
Watercolour is a direct confrontation with this. You cannot fully control watercolour. You can learn to work with it, to predict roughly how it will behave, to make the most of its accidents and surprises. But it will never do precisely what you intended, and the sooner you accept that, the better your paintings become.
This is not an abstract lesson. It is something you learn in your hands, through the physical experience of a wash spreading somewhere you did not expect, or a colour blooming into another colour in a way that is more interesting than what you planned. Over hundreds of sessions, this teaches something — slowly, in the body — about the impossibility and unhelpfulness of total control.
I do not want to overclaim this. Learning to let go of control in watercolour did not automatically mean I let go of control in my life. But it created a reference point: I know what it feels like, in my hands and my nervous system, when I stop fighting the material and start working with it. And that reference point has, gradually, become accessible in other contexts.
The ADHD-Anxiety Link
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my forties. In retrospect, a great deal of what I had been calling anxiety was actually the downstream effect of an executive function system that was working harder than it needed to because I did not understand how it worked.
Many of the situations that trigger my worst anxiety share a common feature: they require me to hold too many things in working memory simultaneously, while managing social performance expectations, while staying alert to what might go wrong. This is a description of most meetings, most busy environments, most deadlines. It is also a description of what ADHD makes specifically, structurally difficult.
Watercolour does not ask any of these things. The cognitive demands are real — composition, tone, colour, timing — but they are sequential and visual rather than simultaneous and social. I can manage them. I can succeed at them, on my own terms, at my own pace. And that sense of competence — so often absent in a world designed for neurotypical cognition — is itself calming in a way that goes beyond the painting session.
What I Actually Do
I want to be concrete, because vague advice about "creative practice" as anxiety relief tends not to help anyone.
When I notice anxiety rising — the familiar tightening in the chest, the thoughts starting to speed up — I do not immediately go to the studio. I go for a walk first, usually to somewhere I might paint: the ponds, the park, the canal. Walking before painting is essential to my practice. It gives the anxiety somewhere to go — forward motion, fresh air, the simple task of noticing what is around me.
Then, in the studio, I start with the simplest possible exercise: a colour wash. One colour, one wash, from the top of a half-sheet to the bottom. The whole exercise takes four minutes. It does not produce a painting. But it returns my hands to the material, establishes the pace and stillness that the session will run at, and — reliably — begins the deceleration.
After the wash, I can begin a painting. Usually something from a sketch made on the walk. Sometimes just an exercise in tone, working with a single neutral pigment to explore a composition. The complexity of the session builds from the simplest starting point.
A Note on Not Pushing Through
One thing I have learned, slowly, is the difference between resistance and incapacity. Resistance is the reluctance to start, which almost always dissolves once the brush is in the hand. Incapacity is the state — rare but real — when the anxiety is so high that forcing a painting session makes things worse rather than better.
On those days, I do not force it. I clean brushes instead. Or I look at reference photographs. Or I just sit in the studio without expecting anything to happen. The studio as a space of permission — not obligation — matters.
Anxiety thrives in environments of obligation and performance. A painting practice that becomes obligatory — where you must produce, must improve, must justify your time — feeds the very thing you are trying to reduce. The goal is not productivity. The goal is a reliable way of returning to yourself.
If you are curious about watercolour as an anxiety practice but do not know where to start, my workshops in Carshalton are designed for exactly this: small groups, no experience needed, no outcome pressure. Booking is open at simonrobinstephensart.com/workshops.
