Pondering Thoughts

Solution lies within

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Inspiration

Negative feelings lead to bigger mental problems. As a person who has gone through this a lot, depending on external aid doesn't help much. There comes a point in your life when you feel like you knew what to do and not feel helpless and vulnerable to such feelings. A long term solution would be knowing how to deal with them. (Meds are not always the solution). Something that often helped was being real with how I actually felt and thinking of the actions that I can take in order to better myself. This also made me self-reliant and helped me in making better decisions.

Journaling is a great way to do this. But sometimes it can be a bit laborious, sometimes you might not know what to write and how to deal with your feelings.

Hence, we bring to you "Pondering Thoughts" , an interactive journal which asks you questions that are thought-provoking and would help you deal with your feelings. These questions are scientifically-proven to be helpful in making the right decisions. (And tried and tested by us throughout the past few years).Now, these might seem like very basic questions but they are effective if you think over them carefully. (We also would suggest answering them by writing because that would just consolidate the effect of these questions)

What it does

The negative feelings that we are going to deal with through this website are:

  • Overthinking : This could lead to major mental health issues like anxiety and the person might not know when to stop. So, we have curated a bunch of questions that would help the person realise that they have been overthinking and also to help them in stopping this. Example questions are:
    • What are you overthinking about? Was it a recent event?
    • Now, concise that thought in less than 10 words.
    • Step back and observe your thoughts rather than believing your thoughts are facts.
    • Is it a problem you can act on or solve, or are you trying to control the uncontrollable?
    • Okay, 10 more minutes of ruminating and then you should stop thinking about it.

  • Anger :According to recent research, one in ten say that they have trouble controlling their own anger. This shows how wide-spread anger issues are. Anger often results in bad responses which might lead to problems in future. These questions would make the person ponder about the situation that they have been in and if their anger was justified. Once a person is given enough time to think rationally they would be able to make better decisions and would be able to react better. Example questions are:

    • Why are you feeling angry today?
    • Do you think you might have overreacted today?
    • If you were to describe the story from the other perspective, how would you do it?
    • Okay, relax and calm down for a while.

  • Procrastination : How often we all have felt like not doing anything, while sometimes its okay to relax, there are times when we have pending tasks and it is of prime importance to finish those tasks, external motivation might not suffice, it needs to come from within. These questions would help the person think and realize how important it is to start with the tasks. A method to trick your brain that has been tried and tested is that to begin with the task and do it only for 5 minutes, and then you are allowed to quit, but if you do feel like continuing the task, do it for 5 more minutes and continue like this, this way you would be able to finish a major chunk of your task. Example questions are:

    • What is the task at hand? Why do you feel like procrastinating?
    • What do you think is the smallest step that you can take right now, in order to start with the task?
    • How about you start right now? Only 10 minutes at this task and then you can quit. What do you think?

How we built it

HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL

Challenges we ran into

We were having our end-term exams so definitely time management was the main problem which we faced. As we were stressed about our exams so thinking of an idea was also a major issue for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make a fully working prototype for an idea which we thought of despite the time crunch.

What we learned

By participating in this and by making this project we learnt how to manage our time better. As we implemented backend for the first time, we got to learn about that as well.

What's next for Pondering Thoughts

We would like to make:

  • interactive journal questionnaires
  • a dedicated blog.
  • We also want to make a counselling chatbot by which people with serious issues can get help.
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