I recently came across a new technique that's made its way across the web called Rejection Therapy. The main rule of Rejection Therapy is to try to be rejected by another person at least once every day. The basic goal is to increase self-awareness of the irrationality of most social fears individuals have and consequently decrease the social anxiety and stress that result from them. I find this mechanism to be incredibly powerful, as it not only decreases the negative effects of rejection for individuals, but also enables them to take on greater challenges in the future.

A lot of the research we've gone through so far in class, including an insightful guest lecture by Dr. Dan Siegel, has revealed extensive evidence for the power of mindfulness; reevaluating what's on your mind on your own terms can have substantial benefits for both your mental well-being and stress levels. It seems to me that the power of Rejection Therapy lies in its utilization of mindfulness; while individuals can tell you how much better your life will be if you take more risks, it's not until you take that risk and have that "a-ha" moment that you actually realize for yourself how much better off you are.  

Recreating that "a-ha" moment is what one of my proposed expert focuses attempts to do. Instead of rejection, however, I want to focus specifically on failure. Failure is something that most Stanford students are not accustomed to experiencing and oftentimes have a difficult time coping with. People are often told that failures are minor in the grand scheme of things, but while within the cognitive straitjacket of failure, it is often difficult for individuals to pick out those instances in which failure was inconsequential. In this case, the "a-ha" moment that isn't occurring is realizing that a past failure was fairly inconsequential. 

In order to reconcile this issue, my idea is to push the "a-ha" moment to the individual. The basic framework would be something like this:

1. Have the user send in a failure that occurred on that day
2. Push one of the users previously sent-in failures back to them

It requires a little bit of investment from the user, and I by no means see this as a final design, but I think that both steps encourage mindfulness of the individual's current and past failures and can potentially help in relieving stress from both.

 

Posted by Sean Rose

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CS 106A is one of Stanford's most heralded courses. Computer Science, as many here would have it, is approaching the same level of importance to educated individuals as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Because of this, students of all majors are encouraged to take CS 106A, as no prior coding experience is required. However, while CS 106A does a fantastic job of teaching coding fundamentals, it does not do such a great job at teaching some key programming fundamentals.^[1] 

Because people are coming from different majors with no programming experience, they tend to bring with them the practices that they were able to succeed (or get by) with in their respective fields. One such habit is working late in to the night until a particular assignment is completed. As many seasoned programmers will tell you, this is far from the most effective way to approach programming assignments. There is a substantial amount of research that indicates the negative effects and stress buildup associated with accumulating sleep debt, and this is no more evident than in the field of programming. Programming assignments demand a full cognitive dedication from an unstressed mind; without these two things your code likely won't work. 

While you might be able to transcribe a bunch of vaguely connected ideas that an exhausted brain produces into an  "effective" essay, this approach will not work in programming.^[2] For example, look at this output from an assignment at the beginning of the night when I ran into an error:

…and look at the output after I inputted a bunch of vaguely connected code into it:

One doesn't work and… one doesn't work. 

My point, if it hasn't been clear yet, is that the vast majority of novice programmers unwittingly hit a point where the time they're spending on programming starts showing diminishing returns. At this point, they're better off, both in the present and in the future, taking a break and resting to let their brain recharge. In summary, here is what I'm looking at for my expert focus:

• Population: Novice programmers in courses such as CS 106A
• Stressor: Late night coding sessions
• Calming Mechanism: Mobile alert/test system which gauges how cognitively capable they are at that time, telling them to rest if not at a certain threshold^[3]

This is obviously very much a work in progress, and I appreciate any input (positive and negative). 

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1. This distinction doesn't necessarily exist. but for my purposes, "coding" refers to the production of the code whereas "programming" refers to the practices involved with coding i.e. decomposition, time spent coding, rest periods, etc.

2. There is, of course, the case where individuals have to work all night because they've procrastinated and have no other choice; I believe that's a separate issue than the one I'm addressing.

3. This is still a work in progress

Posted by Sean Rose

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