flux: emotional awareness research

This is a deeper dive into the research study I ran to inform decisions on what became my housewares project ‘flux’. Walking in to this project, I chose to focus on emotional tracking and mental health literacy. I started with a simple problem; when my therapist asks “how are you doing?”, my automatic response is “I’m okay.” That type of polite programming often causes us to forget our actual emotional responses to past events, and when looking at a full week or more it can be hard to pinpoint specific mood shifts if they’re not accompanied by some visual or physical indication. This is why “the straw that broke the camel’s back” is such a common occurence, because sometimes we don’t even acknowledge to ourselves how much a small instance affects us and how much it builds into a big issue.

A common practice to encourage reflection and better intrapersonal growth is journaling or writing down what happened that day and how you felt about it, but that isn’t recorded until after the fact and outside the moment. Remembering instances that aren’t in the top three significant points of your day can be tricky, even when you are trying. I wanted to see how the end of day reflection was affected by a physical/visual log of mood shifts to review.