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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