How I Proposed Mindfulness as Stress-Buster For Youth In A Design Thinking Project
More than 25% of today’s youth is facing stress. Exams, relationships, parental expectations, financial worries, job tensions are a few of reasons. Unobserved and untreated stress can lead to major physical and mental disorders. Good news is Stress can be cured with Mindfulness !
The First step in curing Stress is to realize that you are stressed.
Apparently this is most difficult part. Fortunately, these days we have wearables which monitor our body vitals all the time. Appropriate data captured from wearables can indicate increased stress levels.
The Second step in curing stress is to be Mindful
What is the situation causing stress ? Are there any external symptoms of the stress ? Is the stress temporary/one-time or recurring for same reason ?
The Third step is to leverage themes of mindfulness, specifically, Connection !
Connection forms an integral part of everyone’s life -
- Reminding someone who is stressed for the moment about his/her good memories can create a spark of feel-good.
- Reminding someone of their previous achievements can help boost their confidence and help tackle the stress.
- Connecting the stressed individual with their loved ones can give them an opportunity to calm down.
What is Design Thinking all about ?
Under the disguise of a fancy name, design thinking is basically human centric design approach where the focus of design is not only on the rational needs, but also on emotional needs of humans. Design Thinking entails shadowing the potential user (youth, for the context of this essay) to identify certain hidden pain points and needs.
Based on the findings, nest step is to build a very crude, super-basic model for your proposed solution — aka Prototype. There would be further iterations on refinement of this prototype.
Design Thinking is rapidly becoming popular among designers and marketers for building new and innovative products. You can check out blog by IDEO on Design Thinking to explore more !
Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog
