If invitations to "Discover your inner creative" make your soul cry, look away now. Adult colouring-in books are now a thing, and craft-loving, artsy people the world over are regressing to the mental age of seven. When they're not playing Candy Crush or Flappy Bird, busy city-dwellers are turning to crayons and felt-tips for their soothing and therapeutic qualities. While in the past people had to wait until they had children to sneakily rediscover the joys of colouring-in, now you can proudly buy colouring books for yourself alone. In fact, why not colour in this copy of the Observer New Review? (Crayons not provided.) You might also enjoy the following.

Sacre bleu

The French, apparently, know it all: how to be thin, how to raise children, how to manage their cinq à sept. They are also one of the world's top consumers of antidepressants. So now they have discovered how to beat stress, or so the publishers of 100 Coloriages Anti-Stress, a new wave of colouring books, promise. These "art therapy" manuals feature intricate pictures of medieval art, psychedelic patterns and "extraordinary gardens". Some 350,000 sales later, colouring books are now selling faster than cookbooks in France. In the UK, Hachette's Colouring Books for Grown-ups had less success.

Red-faced pin-up?

The time for sticking posters on to walls may be past, but now you can connect with your inner teenager by colouring in your celebrity crush, in Colour Me Good. The best-selling editions of this series of colouring-in books feature accidental feminist icon Ryan Gosling, cumbersomely named otter impersonator Benedict Cumberbatch, and eyebrowed Vogue-botherer Cara Delevingne. The books are fine-tuned to the sensibilities of the internet generation: pictures of cats abound, Gosling poses with a dog, and you can draw yourself photobombing Cumberbatch. Other editions include Swooooon and Girl Crush, but niche interests are also catered for, from Horror Films to 90s to Ginger.

Befriend your neighbours

If you live in a big city, chances are you have never met your next-door neighbours. Why would you? They're strangers. On moving to London, student and former farm-dweller Jemima Wilson was surprised by Londoners' obstinate resistance to speaking to one another. Instead of drifting deep into urban alienation like the rest of London, Jemima put letters into every door on her street with crayons and Blu-Tack, asking her neighbours to draw themselves and stick their pictures on to their windows. Soon, 35 colourful portraits adorned her east London street, revealing that lots of them had beards and glasses. Only really works on ground-floor flats.