De-stressing Techniques

 

Having looked into stress within my previous posts, I decided to research into de-stressing techniques as I felt my project may be moving more towards this as a purpose, rather than teaching people how stress affects them. I believe my project has taken this direction because majority of my work within phase 2 was all about the connection of emotions and colours, and so it would be a waste to throw all that information away creating an informative game.

Stress Relief that Works

REFER TO RESEARCH FOLDER
Learnt

Types of de-stressing techniques include:

  • Taking a walk break
  • Breathing deeply and slowly
  • Visualising a peaceful scene
  • Eating snacks
  • Removing yourself from a screen
  • Kissing
  • Naam Yoga Hand Trick
  • Turning off your phone
  • Listening to music
  • Eat sweets
  • Progressive Muscle Relaxation
  • Eagle Yoga Pose
Thoughts
  • Unsure how scienfitically backed some these these methods of de-stressing are as they feel very vague, obvious and with no explanation of how they help.
  • Plan to find a scientific paper on de-stressing to gain techniques that have been thoroughly tested and approved by science.

 

Stress Management Techniques

REFER TO RESEARCH FOLDER
Learnt

From the paper I learnt about a range of de-stressing methods including:

  • Progressive Muscle Relaxation – tensing and relaxing of muscles all over your body – 10 second tense 20 second release
  • Autogenic Training – Set of exercises performed that relax and control the breathing blood pressure, heartbeat and body temperature of a person.
  • Relaxation Response – 10-20 minutes a day or repeating the same sound, word, prayer etc to help stimulate the hypothalamus.
  • Biofeedback – The monitoring of brainwaves, heart function, breathing, muscles activity and skin temperature, and giving this feedback to the participant so they can see how stress has affected them and to try to stop this.
  • Diaphragmatic Breathing– Manipulation of breathing movement – lowers heart rate and stressed feeling
  • Transcendental Meditation – Sitting with your eyes closed for 20 mintues twice a day repeating a mantra or series of sonds – Shifts awareness to a deeply restful state.
  • Mindfulness – 8 week mediation program
  • Emotional Freedom Technique – Reduce the emotional impact of memories or incidents that trigger emotional distress
Thoughts
  • Most of the techniques appear to be solo activities and are based around the escape or distraction from the world.
HOW TO STAY CALM WHEN YOU KNOW YOU’LL BE STRESSED – DANIEL LEVITIN
 Notes
 Overall thoughts

The research helped me to realise that there are a range of different methods to de-stress, with most being solo activities and a way of people escaping or removing themselves from their lives for a short amount of time.

Watching the TED talk from Daniel Levitin opened my eyes to the idea of prevention, contrasting to what I had been thinking about. With all my other work revolving around how to de-stress people when they are stress, but not how to prevent stress in the first place. So the concept of prospective hindsight got me questioning whether I want my game to help long term or short term, which is certainly something tricky to answer now as I am unsure which option games are best designed for. So perhaps this is something I will consider again when I start forming my game ideas.

Plan

  • Form mechanics out of the mechanics out of the information collected from stressful and de stressful information. Which I have already began highlighting while researching and will pick some key points to expand upon to form mechanics off of.

 

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