Last week we decided to focus on the domain of stress. Earlier this week, we had a fruitful discussion about the content of this world, after having a conversation with professionals the week before.
In the discussion, it was decided to focus on the 20-30 years old students. We have made a number of assumptions about this world, a world that is familiar to all of us since we are all students who sometimes feel pressured.
We made sure to get as clean and not opinionated as possible for the interviews, so we prepared a number of objective questions in order to get to know this world through the eyes of the interviewees, without our personal guidance.
We split into pairs and conducted a number of interviews. The various interviews and answers interested us so we researched them and found a number of common factors and points for thought. Here are some of them:
There are two kinds of stress, one that paralyzes you and one that drives you. According to our interviewees, the need for perfectionism and the fear of not getting all the tasks done in time arouses the pressure that paralyzes them and creates the opposite outcome, they miss things and skip on tasks. “It is very important for me to be perfect at everything I do. It puts me under a lot of pressure if there's something I'm not succeeding in”. The perfectionism is so strong for some of the interviewees, that even if something goes wrong in the beginning of the task, the pressure that accompanies the mess up stops the interviewees from continuing with the task. “My first and last panic attack happened in an exam after I didn't manage to answer the first question”
All of our interviewees love to be in control and when they feel they are losing control they begin to stress. Accordingly, When they feel stressed, they try to gain control over the situation to reduce their stress.
Truthfully, we feel that this issue is very interesting and indeed concerns us all. We're sure it touches every person. The choice to focus on the above group seems like a natural, interesting and instructive choice that we can contribute to. We hope this is indeed the case.
In conclusion, the feelings are very deep when it comes to interviewing people who have had difficult personal experiences. But we understand that this is the goal and only in that way can we learn and get to know new content, perhaps in which we can deepen our content world.
Looking forward to next week.
