Anxiety Research

The largest part of my project was actually research. My plan was to make something that would help with anxiety so I was adamant on finding the best ways to help this. I talked a lot with some of my friends who suffer from anxiety attacks and I also looked into what helps me when I'm feeling anxious. So without further ado, here is all of my research.

 So SAM (or Self Anxiety Manager) is this app that a lot of my friends and I use.

My favorite feature of the app would be the clam breathing. This give you a visual of breathing in and out to help regulate and calm down from hyperventilating. I've used this many times for stress purposes. The default is set to 4 second of breathing in and about 6-8 seconds of breathing out.

I knew that I wanted breathing to be incorporated into my project but this app focuses on a visual help for anxiety, when as I decided that I wanted to focus on more of an auditory media. I find that calming music helps me calm down so I decided that this would be incorporated as well.

I talked with a few of my friends with anxiety to see what helps them when they have an attack. One friend said that she didn't find anything with light calming at all. In fact, it sometimes made her feel even more stressed out. She also told me that it is important to have something that reminds you to stay grounded when having an anxiety attack, so keeping something that has to do with nature around helps a lot.

I decided that my best course of action for this project was to make something soft and calming, such as a pillow, that would play a calming track that included music, breath support, and a voice over that described various calming scenes in nature.

So, my project was set and it was time to get to work on making the pillow.