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I asked an expert about why people don’t think about their work stress and anxiety, she answered: Feeling your own feelings/emotions/moods, this kind of ability has never been in the territory of education. Most people can’t be aware of something outside of their cognition. The establishment of this perception also requires a diversified and inclusive social environment; this is entirely different from a society dominated by consumerism. If society advocates coping anxiety with material desires, then everyone will think that this is the only way.

Her point of view directly pointed out that consumption dilutes people’s ability to think. I mentioned this in my previous blog, and we have reached unity on this point.

Then I tried to find some popular decompression or meditation apps for reference, and then I downloaded Calm and Headspace. After the experience, I found that they all have made good brand packaging and sound content. There are some small visual designs, but they are very subtle. They are mainly in the form like podcasts and online courses. This discovery made me realize that related fields do lack visual guidance and interactive content. There is a breathing exercise in Calm that has a strong sense of interaction, and the live wallpaper gives people a very comfortable visual effect, but this is just a tiny part, but this is a good point I can refer to.

The meaning of metacognition is thinking about your cognition and get deeper understand .

This concept is a good summary of what I want people to think through my project. People are aware of rest and stress, but what needs to be further thought about when people feel uncomfortable with it? This step is metacognition in this project. I think this concept is very similar to reflection. Metacognition is divided into three steps, Content Knowledge–Task Knowledge–Strategic Knowledge.  I think I can try to guide target audiences in my project to talk to themselves first , and then make targeted strategies to think and overcome the stress?

https://www.globalmetacognition.com/post/meditation-metacognition

This article links metacognition and meditation to better connect with my previous project (relaxing board). The intervention I have done is itself a process of promoting metacognition, and now I have found a more precise conceptual reference and method reference.

After that, I did more research from the perspective of methods and practices. I think Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a good reference for me. I studied a personal case provided by a netizen, and he treated himself well through cbt of psychological pressure and anxiety; the following steps are:

1. Relax
2. Record and face your stress and anxiety
3. Reverse thinking, try to reason, and find a neutral foothold

Generally speaking, the first two steps are relatively easy to achieve, but the last step is the most difficult to achieve because this step is difficult to conclude. You can use various methods and guides to be rational. In psychotherapy, the third step usually requires considerable guidance and analysis by a psychologist to complete, but the problem I am studying is not such a serious mental illness, so I think I only need to think about how to guide people to believe and keep people’s emotions in a stable and relaxing atmosphere.

But the above methods need to be completed by Nudging. The book “Nudge” mentions helping people set default options and giving good feedback, I have not considered these two points before, but I have researched how to measure stress; I think this is a good connection with good feedback. I also need to get general positive feedback after people ends my intervention. I have studied the Barnum effect in previous projects that could be applied here( https://www.britannica.com/science/Barnum-Effect ), let people have interest and trust in subsequently repeated thinking?

In terms of setting default options, I think this will have a strong tendency to guide. Although the project should not be preset and inclined, it is inevitable to guide people to think, so I need to make enough options and guidelines for people to produce The desire to think, rather than being completely laissez-faire?

Abbeduto, L. (2006).Taking sides: Clashing views in educational psychology.(4th ed.). Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill.

I found that my previous interview had little effect on my project, so I reflected on the content of my interview, and I found that I had two problems recently:

1. I rely too much on letting everyone talk directly about their problems or their needs, and I lack the analysis of feedback.
2. I try to presuppose the problems people encounter and the development direction of future projects.

Based on these two points, I canceled the third question in the previous interview because I am presupposing or guiding everyone’s thinking direction on this question. After that, I interviewed 8 home-based creative workers about the stressors of home-based work and whether they had any reflections and tried to combine the previously read “Consumer Society” and “One-dimensional Man” to conduct a better critical analysis.

1. I find that most people lack thinking about work stress because people believe that a lot of stress caused by the society rule (or potential rule) and history cannot be changed, so thinking is useless.
2. People generally know how to relax, but they will lose the ability to calm down and think and will negatively deny themselves when under stress and anxiety.
3. Some people will think more after being stimulated by the outside world. Many people’s losing stress way depends on outside world’s change and other’s help rather than from their own perspective.

This reflects a lot of interesting issues. First of all, people need more time and space to think, but now the technological advancement in society (views from one-dimensional man) is constantly reducing people’s time to think, working from home also reduces the possibility of people’s space or environment to think (such as the way to work, the company’s lunch break, etc.), so the gaps created by the relaxing board( unit2’s intervention) will emphasize thinking more in unit3.

Secondly, for people over-relying on the outside world to solve their stress, I can refer more to “Nudge” to find a balance between free and control. Here I am not simply helping people think about how to relax; it is to help to think about why they need to think.

When I realized that what everyone lacked was thinking about stress, I interviewed some people working at home about their views on stress.

1. Do you feel that working at home (study or creating) is more stressful?How?
2. Do you usually think about your pressure and worries (is it worth it, influenced by others, etc.)?
3. Do you think that you are more often trying to pursue the high standards better from social media or those around you have or expect (such as parents’ expectations, friends’ achievements, trends in the news)?

From the feedback:

From people’s feedback, I get:

1. Freshness is an excellent way to release strength
2. Overtime (growth), people will think less
3. Creative work will be more stressful

One thing that makes me more concerned about is the point of view that everyone puts forward about freshness. I agree very much, but it is more or less inconsistent with my previous way of recalling the past, but according to previous feedback, it is relatively remote. Memories are more helpful to help. Is this also a kind of freshness of recollecting valuable content that is about to be forgotten?

So I think there is resonance and freshness; it seems that I can try to find a balance; I need to try to think.

My current thinking way is that people under stress need to do more to change, but there should be a balance between stress and people under stress; the balance will be worth exploring for me.

So I try to find more critical theory to support my project, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society and The Consumer Society exposed the psychological changes brought about by many social developments and the era of less thinking, I’ve learned some about these theories before and this time could explore more with clear aims.

The two books mentioned a common point that I want to raise first. It is the unfairness caused by the consumer society and one-dimensionality. This kind of unfairness is implicit compared to the previous one, and people cannot clearly feel it. This leads to more anxiety. This situation is mainly due to technological development and consumption. For example, successful capitalists and I have massive wealth and social status gaps. Still, we are all using IPHONE; we have many same things and lifestyles. We all created this for ourselves through consumption, but the pressure on me and the richer one is different. I spend more time on consumption and bearing the stress it brings instead of thinking about the unfairness of other aspects that are more or less unreasonable.

I am not against consumption; even the temporary numbness and satisfaction during consumption can positively affect certain extreme exhaustion situations. Still, it makes people avoid the problem itself. As I emphasized in my project, people have ways of coping with work stress, but very few people think and reflect about it. From a long-term perspective, this is a kind of internal friction; people need to think.

So for me, there are two very intuitive follow-ups. One is to interview users whether they have thought about the pressure they are under. More specific questions need to be developed here，The other is to present the dangerous consequences of internal friction caused by paralysis.

Regarding interviews, I found that many people are very stubborn about the concepts they have accepted. Some people think they can bear the stress; they cannot change the stress brought by society, they don’t want to think like dreaming. It’s tough for me to cope with such a negative response, may be I need to show more clear guidance and patience to them?

I have another project that tried to persuade people to overcome the fear of electromagnetic radiation in life(2019). At that time, I found it difficult for people to accept preaching, but I can try to relax people while thinking in a joking way. So my before work maybe could be this one’s reference, it’s a good thing. https://www.j24design.com/r-p-c

https://www.bemindfulonline.com/test-your-stress

I have tried to contact people about the related tests, but no one responded, but I got one reply from a workplace mental health and work-related professional coach. I replied some questions:

1. Is work stress all negative? If not, where is the boundary between negative and positive?

2. Are procrastination and “no rest working” both negative ways of dealing with work stress without regard to work? Is occasional laziness or high-intensity work healthy?

3. When people try yoga or meditation, their work stress will be relieved, but they will still be anxious and irritable at work. Is there a separation between relieving stress and learning how to face and pay attention to stress? How can they better combine?

4. Are there any famous visual cases (such as films, posters, artwork, etc.) that have helped people pay attention to work stress?

5. Are there any convenient ways (like an online test) to help people better understand the degree of their work stress?

I also shared the test with my target audience; all people (4) felt it was useless because there is no direct way to show how to change, so it’s good evidence and feedback that I could combine my test and this test.

After that I do more research about testing of stress:

Nowadays, there are many science and technology to judge people’s stress degree through simple heart rate and humidity detection, which is very worthy of reference, but the accuracy may not be reliable. But I think this can be a work of speculative design, looking at this matter from the perspective of the future and the unknown and bringing people some warning or awareness from the future.

Previous useful information and future goals：

Most important: visualisation, soft fascination(Attention Restoration Theory)

Important: meditation，bonus system？

Distinguish between stress and pressure:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amymorin/2015/03/18/your-failure-to-differentiate-stress-from-pressure-could-be-your-downfall/?sh=3fb4513b3a32

• Stress refers to the situation of too many demands and not enough resources – time, money, energy – to meet them.
• Pressure is a situation in which you perceive that something at stake is dependent on the outcome of your performance.

Stress can be alleviated through relaxation and reflection, and the only way to face pressure is to work hard to succeed. I think that stress that is not resolved in time may lead to pressure. So the word that should be used in my project is STRESS.

Make my target audience more specific:

My audience is remote workers who are troubled by their ambitious future goals and future arrangements. The general scope is those who have started working during school or have not found a suitable personal position after graduation. I am also at this stage. At the time, people face many choices, and most of them do not face too many physical illnesses and family problems (such as children, marriage, etc.).

My potential tool/ways:

Visualisation and imagination are what I think are most worthy of better application(before), but this also requires me to conduct appropriate guidance. I conducted interviews with potential users:

1. Compared with transformation pressure, people are more often troubled by pressure.
2. People think they value stress and use more psychological hints to relax appropriately, such as “Nothing can be perfect quickly. “
3. People don’t know the value of the pressure they receive，there are some controversies about this issue; some people think it makes sense, some people think it’s not very meaningful ，I need to test it.

Until now, my topic is more like

Before I found a way to visualize, I tried to stick to the theme of nature. At that stage, I realized that interrupting people’s work by means of alarm clocks or pop-up windows would cause more people to be troubled, but in the following research I I also realize that people want to passively accept signals that they need to rest.

Until now, my topic is more like :How to better remind people to be aware of the problem.

How to apply visualisation and visual guidance to help （ ）remote workers aware of their stress state and relax.

After deciding to try to “wake up” people from the perspective of valuing their own remote work pressure, I first interviewed the meditation teacher I contacted before, and I asked if I would try to adjust the way and attitude of everyone to deal with stress during the teaching process.

From her answer, I learned that her main responsibility is to teach customers methods. As for how they view their own pressure, it depends entirely on their own practice. I also found that when propaganda in related fields, people pay more attention to explaining the method, rather than making audience aware of the seriousness of the original problem, so I searched for the content I want to see.

This is a very good video that reminds people and pays attention to it. Although the speaker is an expert in the relevant field, its content is worth thinking about. He gave people enough data and evidence to make people fearful. I once deeply understood the important effect of fear and confidence in the propaganda process before in 2019 by other projects, so I think I can try to combine them in unit3. After the research in the previous years, I prefer to replace the spread of fear by giving people confidence. This is also worth studying later.

As for David’s suggestion about measuring people’s degree of relaxation mentioned in the tutorial, it inspired me a lot; it can make my project more convincing. Combined with the confidence-giving ideas mentioned above, I think It can be combined in the future step.

From various angles, I think my previous definition of fatigue was narrow. I focused more on the pressure caused by the heavy workload and long working hours. However, after continuous investigation and reflection, I found that fatigue comes more from how people coping with stress.

In this case, procrastination is also an important cause of inner fatigue. People’s Procrastinates is due to unconfidence in the content of the work and the feedback results, which will lead to a more significant psychological burden.

So what I want to try next is how people deal with work pressure rather than helping people relieve fatigue. This also includes my UNIT2’S reflection. I am pursuing effectiveness and results while not balancing how to make people realize The severity of the problem. Now I have a solution(relaxing board kit), so in the next stage, I will mainly study how to improve people’s awareness through visual methods and try to improve the previous solutions and combine them.

The reason why I emphasize that vision is also related to the starting point of the entire project. First of all, my previous field has always been visual. I think that attempts in related directions can combine a lot of prior experience, and secondly when conducting expert interviews in the second stage of the second unit. I also realise that in meditation training, more trainers will focus on auditory guidance. The visual aspect mainly depends on imagination, so this is relatively scarce and brings more research possibilities. Afterward, I will further explore and study the possibilities and uniqueness of visual narrative for alleviating the pressure of remote work.

As to whether I need to satisfy more people’s preferences, my intervention before just a way to let people get into the relaxing situation in a very short time, like 30s, I should emphasise that this is just a way to quickly transfer attention, and will not limit other more, so this will not affect everyone’s choice of other follow-up rest methods，it’s not to let people keep it in the whole rest time. In another hand, what I want to study is mainly visual materials as guidance, other methods can be used as reference and support.

However, people’s feedback also make me think is that mean my ideas need to be showed more clear? Facing the occasional related problems, I realised that I should use one clear sentence or some simple words to emphasise the uniqueness and necessity of my focus on visuals to persuade people better when showing the idea to others.

After I collected pictures from people, I tried to imitate the covid flower’s Facebook and set up social accounts on Instagram to share the relaxing moments of each other. I picked some representative ones and asked everyone’s opinions. The feedback is as follows:

1. The effect is not too significant because social media is now more popular with videos, and pictures are less convincing.
2. It may be better to fix the theme, but the content is now a little messy.
3. After my deliberate description, some people have a sense of resonance with the scene, but in fact, I have written these words below the picture.

People’s feedback made me realise that social media really needs to consider more popular models and promotion and operation factors, and my previous intervention goal is personalised, It is indeed very contradictory for me to use personalised content for widespread dissemination directly. But this account can be fascinating, its content and visual unity may require more consideration.