By the disappointing results from the user research in VR therapy, I got into a crisis point in my research. Where I should decide which direction will be the best for my topic and what I want to have as a result of it. During this rethinking process, I got different approaches to get into a good path for developing the project. The first decision I took was to stay or not into the topic of mental health. The second point I thought was to decide how I want to help, and which way is the best to do it. The last point is to decide on a new starting point to start developing the project. All these processes took weeks to pass through and the result is something that I am happy about.
As I describe in the last topic of my thesis research I got not the best results during my first user research, this impulses me to think about reapproaching the topic. During the process, I realize that I do not want to get out of the field of mental health. But it was difficult to find something where I can help people without being involved directly in medicine. To be a part of medicine is tactics that prevent me to get into certified permissions, medical regulations, and for that moment the users that will manage the app. This decision put me in the position of prevention of mental illness in a state of treatment. At the same time, it opens the ways to alternative methods.
As I just mentioned before alternatives methods to prevent anxiety, stress and depression are often used by people to keep their mental state positive. There are various methods in the world that people use some like sports, hobbies, religion, and more. Each method has a different perspective of helping through the process and each of them has different efficiency and effect on our mental health. After a small research, I decided to focus on meditation because it shows the best results on preventing and improving the mental health of people. As it says in the article Effect of Transcendental Meditation on Employee Stress, Depression, and Burnout: A Randomized Controlled Study “Studies indicate that practice of TM reduces the psychological and physiologic response to stress factors, including decreased sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, and reductions in elevated cortisol (stress hormone) levels” (Perm, 2014).
Meditation is a kind of practice that has hundreds of years of existence and has a different cultural background. Each kind of meditation has a different purpose on our minds and bodies, which is important to be considered. A meditation process is simple to be taught and to learn what is hard about it is to keep yourself constant on the practice. The meditation practice brings multiple benefits for your health but, it is important to organize the way to do it to get the right things you are looking for. In the next part, I will focus to explain how I will look to achieve this through the use of an app.
