The product ‘Mood Booth’ as a solution to these problems. This is when they finally rest and withdraw, as desired.įigure 3: Mood Booth placed in the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of TU Delft They ignore all other struggles which tends to exhaust them, resulting in a lack of energy when they arrive home. The study shows that female students do not want to show weakness, they want to work as well as they normally do at university and take painkillers to do so. The most practised mood strategies are rest, withdraw and repress. These fluctuations exist in personal patterns, but no literature nor this project’s field study shows universal patterns in mood fluctuations. Their moods are mostly influenced by pain and the inconvenience of bleeding, while the study also showed that the biggest obstacle in daily life is the fluctuating moods caused by hormones. Literature research and a field study (sensitizing booklets, interviews, questionnaire and focus group) conducted in this project showed that menstruation is very negatively experienced by women, regardless of how heavy their menstruation is experienced. It is quite unlikely that these activities are healthy coping mechanisms, since these are mainly relief-focused mood-regulation strategies, which are known to only have a short-term effect on moods, as opposed to resilience-focused mood regulation strategies, which have long-term benefits and are therefore a healthier way of coping with menstruation.įigure 2: the main menstruation coping mechanism: eating chocolate Surrounded by my peers at Industrial Design Engineering at the Technical University of Delft, I have noticed that the main advice given (and practised) amongst female students regarding menstruation is “eat lots of chocolate and spend your evenings watching series in bed”. The psychological discomfort menstruating women experience is even more complicated, many women experience a more negative mood, mood fluctuations, lack of concentration and so on.įigure 1: negative moods and mood fluctuations as a result of menstruation 50 to 90% of all women suffer from primary dysmenorrhea during their menstruation, which means they suffer from pelvic and abdominal pain, otherwise known as menstrual cramps. At universities, approximately 20% of all female students is menstruating at any given time., many of them battling with both physical and psychological discomfort.
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