Stress Stress Stress

STRESS

Stress can be cause by a lot of things but generally it's because we're overworked, copious amounts of work and the penultimate deadlines. But I think we just overtime get used to it and take it on the chin as a fact of life, that there's not a huge amount we can do about it to release some pressure of our minds and be more at peace.

Overtime stress can lead to both mental and physical problems which can progressively get worse if not dealt with. This is where I want to be able to solve some of the issue because there are a lot of ways to relieve stress but they aren't discussed enough amongst people.

Meditation

Meditation is something well known to not just relieve the effects of stress but also anxiety and depression. Along with this other known benefits include:

- Helps with pressure and therefore deadlines
- Improves focus, attention and ability to work under stress
- Improves process and decision making
- Fosters creativity
- Increases compassion and decreases worries, which could lead to a friendlier work environment.

Exercise

- It pumps up your endorphins. Physical activity helps bump up the production of your brain's feel-good neurotransmitters, called endorphins.
- It's meditation in motion, often people find that they've forgotten about the day's irritations and concentrated only on their body movements.
- It improves your mood. Regular exercise can increase self-confidence, it can relax you, and it can lower the symptoms associated with mild depression and anxiety.
- Exercise can also improve your sleep, which is often disrupted by stress, depression and anxiety.

These ways are especially useful to relieve stress along with other things but thinking ahead to my practical piece I'm not sure if I want to entirely focus on creating something that quite literally informs people of signs of stress and how to relieve it. Instead I want to focus more on 'designing for stress', reimagining things that can cause stress and through design finding how this can be altered for the better.