Rethink Stress:
Koko
//A Social Network for Mental Health
It’s All About Perspective
It’s all about perspective…. isn’t it? Most research indicates that stress is helpful, not harmful (i.e., it is a series of physical symptoms that serve survival purposes). Of course, the experience of stress does not always function that way. This is due to our perception* of stress rather than the stress itself! The good news about perspective is that changing it is something we CONTROL. In fact, learning to REFRAME and RETHINK stressors is probably one of the best coping strategies you can learn to develop from an early age. This is generally termed, “reappraisal” in mental health practice.
Specifically…
Cognitive Reappraisal is having the ability to redefine or reframe a potentially emotional situation so that its emotional impact is lessened, while …
Positive Reappraisal is an actively replacing negative thoughts or attributions about an emotional event/issue with positive ones.
The real beauty of this approach is that it is easy. Thinking a thought takes almost zero effort. You can do it from the comfort of …. Anywhere. All you need is to know it can and it very well will work!
[REAPPRAISAL] Applied to Teens/Young Adults
Reappraisal is particularly effective in shaping resiliency in adolescence. Young children tend to have a difficult time separating their perspective from others’ perspectives, or understanding that others may have a different perspective on a given situation or issue (i.e., they operate ego-centricly). However, in adolescence, a young person can come to understand that other people hold different perspectives and that those people appreciate different perspectives themselves (i.e., “mutual perspective-taking”). This developmental progession is tightly linked with age. Thus, reappraisal as a coping straegy is most effectively developed in adolscence especially as the begin to negoiation transitioning to young-adulthood.
Koko: Rethinking Everyday Stress.
Koko is a mental-health social networking app that utilizes both the ideas of peer-to-peer support and Reappraisal. It’s conceptualized as a tool to help encourage rethinking stress and in the age of technology, where cellphones and adolescence go hand-in-hand (literally), it can be a very helpful tool when you consider the therapeutic value – learning how to Reappraise everyday stress.
[?] How Koko Works?
In traditional clinical practice, a practitioner might ask his/her patient to imagine the worst case scenario and then guide and encourage him to rethink that scenario from a different perspective to avoid psychological traps that can underlying unhealthy thinking. Koko embraces the same idea only instead of a practitioner, it relies on other users to help you rethink your situation and to help guide your thin inking back to a more positive, realistic, manageable and rational place.
Koko asks users to choose a topic of concern (e.g., school, work, relationships, family) and in a few sentences describe their worry and the worst-outcome scenario. If another user swipes through a problem they can offer insight on, they tap a button that says “help rethink this.” A text box then pops up and gives sample suggestions written in to get users started, asking people to help others ‘rethink’ an issue – “What’s a more optimistic take on this situation?”, “This could turn out better than you think because…” or “ A more balanced take on this could be...”
Responses can be up-voted to increase their visibility. You can list your worries anonymously, so there’s no feeling of shame in sharing.
All of the comments and posts are moderated in real time and built-in filters or trigger words signal a better course of action.
- ABOVE: Example from Koko - |
The creator of the app explains that mental health is like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularily if we want to be strong. “If you can hone the skill of being able to rethink stressful situations, you can really gain this super power of resilience.”
Koko offers a tangible way for adolescence (or us all) to learn how to alter their own perspective and manage everyday stressors by reappraising them. Also, the practice of helping others see their problems in a new light can, in turn, help adolescence to learn how to rethink their own stressors. And having a community to turn to in tough times can help people feel less alone, allowing them to unload anonymously to a supportive group. Koko is not advertised as a substitute for talking to a mental health professional, but it's a lot more helpful not telling no one at all and being stuck in an unhealthy appraisal of the a situation.
Koko is available through the itunes store for free at http://itskoko.com
If you would like more information about Koko, please visit http://itskoko.com
Thanks so much for reading!
<3.
Exercising my mental health muscle and … swiping finger!
Image Sources:http://itskoko.com
Screenshot blurred out: Taken from the Koko app
Hands and Thought bubbles: Image
Quote: Here