MindNavigator: Exploring the stress and self-interventions for mental wellness

Abstract

Mental wellness is a desirable health outcome for students. However, current personal informatics systems do not adequately support students in creating concrete mental health-related goals and turning them into actionable plans. In this paper, we introduce MindNavigator - a workshop in which groups of college students were invited to generate behavioral change goals to manage daily life stress and practice personalized interventions for two weeks. We describe the manner in which participants identified both stressors and pleasures to create actionable, engaging, and open-ended behavioral plans that aided in stress relief. We found that the social nature of the workshop helped participants understand themselves and execute self-intervention in new ways. Through this practice, we build on prior studies to propose an analytical framework of personal informatics for mental wellness.