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Using Symbolic Colour for Emotional Well-Being
Colour can give form to feelings that are hard to name.
Some days, you know you’re carrying something emotionally, but you can’t quite name it.
You move through meetings, answer questions, make decisions, and keep going. By the time you finally pause, the feeling is still there, but words seem inadequate. You may know you feel off, tense, flat, irritated, or overwhelmed, yet the exact shape of it remains unclear.
For women in STEM*, this can be especially familiar. Your work may ask you to be precise, logical, and articulate throughout the day.
But emotions do not always arrive in neat categories or complete sentences. Sometimes colour can offer another way in.
The emotional language of colour can help you notice what is happening beneath the surface without demanding an immediate explanation. A dark blue might feel heavy. A sharp red may carry irritation or urgency. A soft green might suggest relief, rest, or something you are longing for.
If you appreciate grounded reflections on creativity, stress, and emotional well-being, you can subscribe to The Creative Shift here.
In this blog, we’ll explore how colour can carry meaning, why those meanings are deeply personal, and how a simple art therapy-inspired activity can help you create space for emotions that may be difficult to put into words.
*Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
WHY COLOURS MATTER IN EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION
Colour is often treated as decoration. We choose it for clothing, presentation slides, interiors, or visual design. But colour can also carry memory, mood, and emotional association.
You may feel drawn to a colour without knowing exactly why. Another colour may make you tense or uncomfortable. Those reactions can come from culture, memory, personal experience, or simply how your nervous system responds in the moment.
Blue is often linked with calm, sadness, or distance. Red may suggest energy, anger, urgency, or warmth. Yellow can feel hopeful, bright, restless, or cautionary.
But these associations are not fixed.
A pale blue may remind one woman of quiet summer mornings and another of a difficult hospital stay. Red might feel energising to you and overwhelming to someone else. White may suggest spaciousness in one context and emptiness in another.
That personal meaning matters more than any standard colour chart.
When you work with colour creatively, you do not need to choose the “correct” colour for an emotion. You only need to notice what feels true for you right now.
Reflection Question
- What feelings, memories, or physical sensations do you associate with your favourite colour?
THE EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE OF COLOUR
There are times when verbal expression feels too narrow.
You may be able to say, “I’m stressed,” but that one word does not capture the full experience. Perhaps the stress feels sharp and scattered. Maybe it is slow and heavy. Perhaps there is frustration underneath it, or grief, resentment, worry, and fatigue all tangled together.
Colour can hold that complexity without requiring you to explain it immediately.
A page can contain several colours at once. They can overlap, sit side by side, or compete for space. One can dominate while another barely appears. That visual arrangement can say something that a single emotional label cannot.
This is one reason creative expression can feel relieving. It gives an internal experience an external form.
You are no longer carrying the entire feeling invisibly. Some part of it now exists on the page, where you can observe it with a little more distance.
Colour can help you:
- notice emotions you have been pushing aside
- give shape to feelings that are hard to name
- express several emotions at the same time
- create a sense of release without needing a complete explanation
- see how much emotional space one feeling is taking up
This does not mean the page needs to make sense to anyone else. It only needs to reflect something honest for you.
Practical Tip:
When you feel emotionally crowded, choose one coloured marker that seems to match your mood. Let it move across the page for a few minutes without trying to draw a specific object.
SYMBOLIC COLOUR IN ART THERAPY-INSPIRED PRACTICE
Symbolic colour means using colour as a stand-in for an emotion, memory, need, or internal experience.
The symbolism may be cultural. It may also be entirely personal.
For example, black may be associated with mourning in some cultures, while white carries that meaning in others. Green may suggest nature and renewal, but it could also remind you of a particular workplace, classroom, or difficult period of your life.
This is why symbolic colour works best when you begin with curiosity instead of interpretation.
Rather than asking, “What is blue supposed to mean?” try asking, “What does this blue mean to me today?”
That small shift keeps the exercise personal and grounded.
When you use colour in an art therapy-inspired way:
- choose colours based on instinct rather than logic
- notice which colours you reach for quickly
- pay attention to colours you hesitate to use
- observe where each colour appears on the page
- let meaning emerge instead of forcing it
You may discover that the colour you expected to represent calm actually feels cold. Or that a colour you usually avoid feels surprisingly comforting.
The point is not to analyse every choice. It is to notice your response.
Reflection Question
- Are there colours you tend to avoid in your creative work, clothing, or surroundings?
- What feelings or memories might be connected to them?
THE EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE OF COLOUR AND MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness asks you to observe what is happening without immediately judging, fixing, or pushing it away.
Colour can support that kind of attention.
When you choose and apply colour slowly, you begin to notice more than the finished image. You notice pressure. Movement. Texture. Preference. Resistance. You may notice that your hand wants to press hard with one colour and barely touch the page with another.
Those details can offer useful information.
From a psychological perspective, focused sensory activities can help bring attention back to the present. Choosing a pencil, watching colour fill a shape, or noticing how different marks feel can interrupt repetitive thought patterns for a few minutes.
The emotion may still be there, but your relationship with it can shift. Instead of being completely inside the feeling, you are also observing it.
That creates a little more room.
A Simple Colour Pause
Choose one colour and spend five minutes filling part of a page with lines, blocks, dots, or repeated shapes.
As you work, notice:
- whether the colour feels soothing or uncomfortable
- whether you want to press harder or more lightly
- what memories or thoughts arise
- whether your breathing or posture changes
- whether you want to add another colour
You do not need to interpret the experience immediately. Let observation be enough.
HOW COLOUR CAN SUPPORT EMOTIONAL CLARITY
Emotional clarity does not always mean arriving at a tidy answer.
Sometimes clarity is simply recognising that you are carrying more anger than you thought. Or that sadness is present beneath the busyness. Or that what looked like irritation is actually exhaustion.
Colour can help reveal those layers because it allows you to represent them side by side.
Imagine creating a page about your workweek. You begin with grey because everything has felt heavy. Then you add bright orange around one meeting that gave you energy. A thin blue line appears along the edge, representing the rest you keep postponing.
The page may not solve the problem, but it can help you see the emotional landscape more clearly.
That matters because unrecognised emotions often influence how you respond. They affect your concentration, patience, decisions, and ability to recover after work.
When you can see what is present, you have a better chance of responding to what you actually need.
CREATIVE ACTIVITY: COLOUR EMOTION WHEEL
This art therapy-inspired exercise invites you to represent your current emotional state through colour. It does not require artistic skill, and the finished wheel does not need to look balanced or attractive.
Materials
- Blank paper or a journal
- Coloured pencils, markers, crayons, or paints
- A pen or pencil
- Ten to fifteen quiet minutes
Steps
- Draw a large circle in the centre of the page.
- Divide the circle into several sections, like a loose pie chart.
- Think about the emotions that have been present for you lately.
- Write one emotion lightly inside each section.
- Choose a colour for each emotion based on what feels right to you.
- Fill the sections using solid colour, patterns, shading, or different kinds of marks.
- Adjust the size of each section if one emotion feels as though it is taking up more space than another.
- Step back and observe the wheel without trying to judge or correct it.
- Write a few words beside the circle about what surprised you.
Let the wheel reflect your real emotional mix. You do not need to make every section equal, and you do not need to include emotions you think you should be feeling.
If you would like more guided creative practices for reflection and stress relief, you can join the free 5-Day Creative Reset Challenge here.
REFLECTION QUESTIONS
After completing your Colour Emotion Wheel, pause with these questions:
- Which emotion was easiest to represent with colour?
- Which emotion was hardest to place on the page?
- Did any colour choice surprise me?
- What feeling appears to be taking up the most space right now?
- Is there an emotion or need that is present only in a small section but still deserves attention?
You are not trying to diagnose the page. You are simply listening to what it may be showing you.
OVERCOMING HESITATION WITH COLOUR EXPLORATION
Working with colour can feel unexpectedly vulnerable.
You may worry that you are choosing the wrong colour, that your page looks childish, or that you do not know enough about art to do the exercise properly. Those thoughts are common, especially if you are used to environments where accuracy and expertise matter.
But this kind of creative work does not have a correct answer.
The colour does not need to match anyone else’s interpretation. Your choices do not need to be aesthetically pleasing. The exercise is useful because it reflects your experience, not because it meets an external standard.
A few reminders can help:
- There are no incorrect emotional colour choices.
- Your associations may change from day to day.
- A colour can represent more than one feeling.
- You are allowed to change colours halfway through.
- The process matters more than the finished page.
If you feel stuck, close your eyes for a moment and select a pencil or marker without looking. Use that colour to make the first few marks. You can decide what comes next once you have begun.
Starting is often the hardest part.
USING COLOUR DURING A DEMANDING WORKDAY
You do not need to complete a full creative activity every time you want to use colour as emotional support.
Small practices can fit into a busy workday.
You might choose a colour that represents your energy level and add a small mark to your notebook. You could use two colours at the end of the day, one for what drained you and one for what supported you. Before a difficult meeting, you might draw a small shape in a colour that represents how you want to feel.
These actions are simple, but they can create a brief moment of contact with yourself.
For women who spend much of the day responding to data, systems, deadlines, and other people’s needs, that moment can be easy to miss.
Colour offers a quick way to ask, What is happening inside me right now?
You do not always need a verbal answer.
REFLECTION AND INTEGRATION
The creative act itself can bring relief, but reflection helps you carry the insight forward.
After working with colour, take a minute to write down what you noticed. Keep it brief. You might describe the emotion that felt strongest, the colour that surprised you, or the area of the page that drew your attention.
You could ask:
- What emotion feels most present in this piece?
- What colour felt comforting?
- What colour felt difficult to use?
- How does this page connect with what has been happening in my life or work?
- Is there something this emotion seems to need from me?
Sometimes the answer may be rest. Sometimes it may be a conversation, a boundary, movement, quiet, or time away from a difficult task.
Not every emotion needs immediate action. Some simply need acknowledgement.
That can be enough for now.
TAKEAWAY: COLOUR AS AN EMOTIONAL BRIDGE
Colour can move between what you feel and what you can express.
It can hold emotional complexity without demanding that you turn everything into a clear explanation. It can show you where your energy is concentrated, what you have been avoiding, or what is quietly asking for attention.
For women in STEM, this kind of practice can offer a useful counterbalance to days built around precision and verbal clarity. It provides another way to listen to yourself, one that is sensory, intuitive, and less dependent on finding the perfect words.
You do not need to understand every colour choice. You only need to notice.
Choose one colour. Make one mark. See what follows.
If you would like more grounded reflections on creativity, work, and emotional well-being, subscribe to The Creative Shift below:
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