A Thesis Presented to

To find comfort and peace in the rhythms of building, comfort in the security of partnership. Not to hide pain or gloss over ugliness, but to revel in the growth born of struggle. This thesis came in the context of both art and psychological projects that deal with one or two of the factors I have explored, but to my knowledge there are no other works that include all three ideas of spirituality, studio practice and stress.

This article describes the journey through examining the interplay of my spirituality, studio time, and stress. Specifically, I collected quantitative data—reports from a smartphone app designed to collect multiple reports each day, two questionnaires, and a smartphone sleep tracking app—and qualitative data—a dream journal and morning pages. (Cameron, 1992) - to search. a link or relationship between the amount of time I spend in the studio, how spiritually fulfilled I feel, and stress levels. After all, there was a very noticeable relationship between my stress levels and my time in the studio; the more time I spent in the studio, the less stressed I became.

Of these various things, I am particularly interested in the role of art, or creativity in general, and spirituality. Also, even knowing that this wasn't really a case study, I still predicted that my spiritual life and the amount of time I spent in the studio would affect my stress levels, in that the stronger my spiritual connection and as much studio time as possible. , the less stressed I would be. Throughout this data collection, I was looking to see if the amount of time I spent in the studio and/or my spiritual connection would predict my stress level.

When I woke up, I first wrote down all the dreams I could remember in the appropriate diary.

Perceived Stress Questionnaire Score Over the Course of Data Gathering

Here, I established a baseline for overall stress over time that I was able to compare not only to studio time and spirituality during data collection, but also to stress scores over time collected in the Reporter app (Reporter App Inc, 2016). ). Some items on the PSQ (Hodge, 2003) were reversed and after summing the numbers, thirty was subtracted and then this sum was divided by thirty. Another subjective experience I tracked quantitatively—my spiritual fulfillment and connectedness—shows a sharp jump from start to finish, as shown in Table 1.

Here I am again establishing a baseline as well as creating a target that I could compare with data from Reporter App (Reporter App Inc, 2016). When this data is compared to the data from the reporter application, a similar, yet subtly different picture emerges, as can be seen in Figure 2. Again, there is a notable drop in stress, but here the drop is between weeks one and three. . followed by a slow increase until week eight, which shows a slight decrease, and then ends with a steep increase in week nine. Reporter App Inc, 2016), I am able to test my prediction with both long-term data from the questionnaires and more frequent, immediate data from the application.

From week one to week two, my spirituality increased, coinciding with a sharp drop in stress; After a plateau in spirituality from weeks two to three, stress began to increase again, although the slope of the increase was moderated by another increase in spirituality. A decrease in spirituality from week five to six was followed by an increase in the rate at which my stress increased, and the subsequent improvement in spirituality was followed by a decrease in stress.

Table 1: Intrinsic Spirituality Scale Pretest/Posttest Scores Pretest Posttest Difference

Stress and Spiritual Fulfillment From Daily Reporter App

Examining spirituality, the application and the ISS (Hodge, 2003) paint a fairly similar picture of dramatically increasing spiritual connection. This can be seen even more clearly in the weekly breakdown of stress, spirituality and study time, shown later in Figure 4-12. The following graphs (Figure 4-12) contain data for spirituality, stress and study time, separated by week.

Stress From Daily Reporter Application and Studio Time Over the Course of Data

Gathering

Stress, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Studio Time Week 1

Stress, Spiritual Fulfillment, and Studio Time Week 8

First, as I noted earlier, my spiritual fulfillment and connection tend to fluctuate much less than my stress levels. Second, the relationship between studio time and stress is much less clear at the weekly rather than the semester level. When comparing studio time and stress over the semester, there is an obvious 1:1 relationship, while there really is no relationship when looking at the individual weeks.

After examining stress, studio time, and spiritual fulfillment, the following graphs (Figures 13-21) show the relationship between stress and the amount of sleep I had that day.

Hours of Sleep and Stress Level Week 1

Hours of Sleep and Stress Level Week 8

Sometimes my stress is the lowest when I've slept the least, sometimes it's the lowest when I've slept the most, and sometimes there are spikes in stress even when the amount of sleep has been relatively stable. Moving from the quantitative to the qualitative reveals that I have a few things in mind. Although there wasn't much overlap between the things I dreamed and what I wrote in my Morning Pages after the third week, there was (unsurprisingly) an incredible amount of overlap between the two types of data.

The first three weeks I collected data, what I wrote about in the Morning Pages directly reflected the things I needed to accomplish before my graduate school interview, and I mentioned feeling less and less stressed as the interview approached.

Hours of Sleep and Stress Level Week 9

The next most frequent themes were the presence of the desert, which appeared in 14% of my dreams, and a. In the morning pages, in order of most frequent occurrence, the future included 33%, romance 31% and the circumstances of my apartment and stress 26%. At the beginning of this process, I predicted that increased study time and spirituality would decrease stress; the data support this prediction in study time but not in spirituality, and there are differences in data on stress reported in the PSQ (Levenstein et al., 1992) and the Reporter App (Reporter App Inc, 2016).

I would suggest that the differences between my stress as I reported it in the application and my stress as I reported it on the PSQ (Levenstein et al., 1992) (shown in Figures 1 . and 2) have everything to do with the perspective I took in the different reporting methods. In the PSQ (Levenstein et al., 1992), my stress levels dropped after week three because I stopped looking at the past week and realized how much more I needed. Looking at studio time versus stress in Figure 3, it becomes clear that the more time I spend in the studio, the less stressed I am.

First, the more time I spend in the studio, the more I accomplish and the less I feel pressured by what's left to complete. Second, because my creative practice is so connected to my spiritual practice (see Appendix A), which I find calming, the more time I spend in the studio, the less stressed I am because I'm nurturing my spiritual life. There are a bunch of events or things that can increase or decrease my stress from moment to moment that have nothing to do with my time in the studio or my spirituality, like conflict with my roommate or bad news from home.

For the most part, both my dream journal and my morning pages have dealt with the camp where I work in the summer more than any other topic; I would offer two reasons for this. First, from the end of January until the start of practice in May, various notifications and information are sent out on a random schedule, keeping the c amp very much in mind. If that's the case, I don't know why it didn't show up until the first half of the semester when my spirituality reports were lower than later in the semester.

As for the mismatch with reality, this may be an expression of my frustration at feeling trapped in the world of fine arts when I consider myself more of a maker, and I am extremely driven to learn any and all tools and skills at to leave and use me. disposition to help others. I expected there to be more of a relationship between what appeared in the qualitative data and what the quantitative data reflected, but the two have no clear relationship. There were a few instances, especially in the dream journal, where arbitrary things happened as well, like me occupying two bodies at once, but nothing completely unclassifiable.

It's only correlational at this point, but there's a pretty clear connection; the more spiritually connected I am, and the more time I spend in the studio, the less stress I have overall. I think the most substantial impact was that because I was thinking about, monitoring, and dealing with the idea of stress so much, a sense of therapy emerged and that process began to permeate the work.