Me Time
Wanzheng Jiang
Me Time is a subscription service that focuses on self care. It includes an app and a subscription box that gets mailed to users each month. The service will guides users through daily self-improvement activities with the objective to establish healthy habits for managing anxiety and stress.
With daily practice, Me Time teaches the user methods to overcome and alleviate negative emotions, improving their mental health.
Challenge
In our fast paced society, the population faces various negative emotions and great pressures in day-to-day life. Without good countermeasure strategies to reduce pressure-induced stress, all the feelings and pressure will seriously affect people’s mental and physical health. Many people don’t have an effective or /suitable response to stress. Therefore, how to safely and effectively help users adjust to their emotions and stress has become the biggest challenge for this project.
I was able to contact “zzLand自在的心理 “ a psychologist who is a Member of the China Association for Mental Health. We discussed the problem areas in my project and she gave some valuable suggestions. It is here that I learned about “Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)”.
She points out some of the goals of DBT are very similar to my idea for the project. DBT teaches people how to live in the present and cultivate healthy ways to deal with stress, emphasizing finding a balance between “change” and “acceptance”. This is exactly what I am hoping to provide my user. I began to integrate the four methods contained in DBT into my project and provide my users with some of its core skills and methods.
- Core Mindfulness
- Distress Tolerance
- Interpersonal Effectiveness
- Emotion Regulation
Daily activity
Through some daily self-care activities and external help, users can gradually form the habit of self-regulation and be able to release all their pressures in life.
The purpose of daily activities is not to complete tasks. It helps users learn a healthy way to deal with the problems they are facing, find their own tips through usage to regain control of their emotional life and shape a better mental state and living habits through self-improvement.
How does it work
Reflection
Working on Me Time, and trying to achieve an idea from scratch for the first time is a very interesting experience. Through this journey, I encountered many problems and challenges but was always able to learn from them.
At the beginning of the project, all my initial concepts and ideas were developed based on my own experience, information collected from interviews and research on the Internet. However, with the progress of the project, I started to find that the information and knowledge I had at the time were not enough for the problems I gradually started to face. In order to ensure the safety and effectiveness of the products I designed, I contacted some psychological professionals hoping to get some professional support. Deep down inside me, I was very doubtful that anyone would respond to me. To my surprise, one of the therapists actually responded. I’m so grateful to have her as my advisory support in this project. Her professional knowledge led me to improve many key functions in my design.
Looking back, if I didn’t have the courage to reach out for help, my project would not be as successful as it is now. The biggest lesson I learned from this experience is don’t be afraid to ask for help. You will only get an answer if you ask. Even if the answer is no, it is still an answer.
