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Scientists analyze systems and connections in order to identify relationships and areas among the system that can be improved. In this activity, you will use Loopy to understand connections between events that happen in your day, and how they impact your well-being. If you are unfamiliar with Loopy, you can find a tutorial in the Loopy - Disease Dynamics or on the Loopy website.
Applied Exercise - Understanding Your Day Through a Systems Approach
Applied Exercise - Understanding Your Day Through a Systems Approach
Background: In 1954, physiologist Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchy of needs one must have in order to achieve wellness. The needs order from physiological basics like having food and water to emotional needs such as self expression. Each tier of the hierarchy affects your overall wellness. At the end of the day, you may feel exhausted and overwhelmed or happy and calm. It is important to understand the elements or nodes of your day that impact your wellness so that you can anticipate their effects on future days.
1. Think about something that had the biggest effect on how you felt today. For example, you may have taken a big test, had a fight with a friend, or missed your bus.
2. Connect the element of your day to a node in the Loopy model
- Open the Loopy Model by clicking on the link. The model should look like the picture to the right.
- Each node of the model represents a tier in Maslow's Hierarchy of needs arranged in a random order. The nodes contain differing amounts based on their tier ranking. Your basic needs (sleep, food and water) have the largest amount; whereas your perception that you are reaching your potential has the smallest amount. In Loopy, the amount of one node will determine the size of impact on connecting nodes.
- Take the element of your day and think about nodes it could relate to in your model. Draw an arrow connecting your element to one of the nodes and change the type of arrow (+/-) based on the relationship.
Note:
- Positive and negative arrows do not coincide with "good" or "bad" interactions. A positive arrow implies that change occurs in the same direction and a negative arrow implies that change occurs in the opposite direction. For example: Consider a node called "meditation" that is connected to your "basics" node. This would indicate that meditation influences sleep and sleep influences meditation. A positive arrow moving from meditation would indicate that if you increase meditation, it increases sleep, and if you decrease meditation, it decreases sleep. A negative arrow would indicate that if you increase meditation, it decreases sleep, and if you decrease meditation, it increases sleep.
3. Building off of nodes
- From here, you can start to add to your day and build your system by thinking about what influenced your node and what your node influences. For example, maybe your friends were busy today, so less time with friends leads to more meditation (-) which leads to more sleep (+), and so on. Keep in mind the relative sizes of each node that you add.
Note:
- It is important to add multiple nodes because a few factors do not represent your whole day. Do your best with the space you have!
- The directions of this project are intended to be very loose so that you can be creative and generate a model specific to you!
3. Interpreting your model
- Once you feel like you have a model that represents your day, press the play button and drag the speed dial closer to the turtle so you can interpret what is going on.
- To begin, hit the up or down arrow on the node that starts your day.
- Did you see any patterns? Maybe certain people or things contributed to a good day, or there was a cycle of negativity that could be improved.
4. Modifying your model
Now you can make some hypothetical improvements to your day by adding nodes to your model.
- Let's say there is a cycle of negativity where an event decreases your sleep which increases your bad mood. Your bad mood increases bad decisions which then decreases sleep.
You have:
- decrease to increase (-)
- increase to increase (+)
- increase to decrease (-)
- What can you change about this cycle ? You cannot fix the initial event, but you can look for ways to increase your sleep and/or decrease your bad mood. Consider the things you can control to have the best, long-term effect.
- To change this cycle, you can create a new node or look for a preexisting node that makes your day better. For example: if you are using a preexisting node, you may need to add a node that will increase the quantity of your preexisting node.
- Once you have made your changes, you can run through your model again and determine if the cycle was improved by monitoring changes in the node amounts.
- You may go through several iterations of changes before your model makes sense in action.
5. Summarizing your day as a system
- In a few sentences, summarize your day. Note any cycles and where improvements can be made.
- You may have also identified pathways that may be grey areas. You may need more days in order to identify how those factors play a role.
Future directions
- At this point, you have modeled one day. Try the exercise again in about a week to compare to compare the relationships and nodes that contribute to your day.
- Another idea, is to start a new loopy model from scratch. Add nodes to the blank screen that represent all of the parts of your day. Add connections between nodes that may directly impact each other. As you did above, designate any (+) and (-) relationships between nodes. Next, consider how you can add new nodes or connections to your system that would mitigate or "fix" your day so that it could be as good as possible. What does that new modified day look like as a systems diagram? Feel free to share that with us to help others find patterns and possibly more happy days!
The Systems Approach
Every system contains pieces and relationships. While we may not study mental health models like this at ISB, we use a similar modeling approach in order to better understand relationships and plan future research. Feel free to share your model with us and future students by clicking the link or our share your model tab. Feel free to also share your Stella Online models with The isee Exchange, an online modeling community. By sharing your models on this platform, you can help others learn and gain insight into the mysteries of our world.
Please take this 1-minute survey, now that you've completed this activity. We are interested in learning about your experience so we can improve these resources. All responses to this survey are anonymous, all questions are optional, and your feedback is much appreciated.
Please take this 1-minute survey, now that you've completed this activity. We are interested in learning about your experience so we can improve these resources. All responses to this survey are anonymous, all questions are optional, and your feedback is much appreciated.
Funding to support the development of this lesson was provided by the National Science Foundation Award DBI-1565166 & 0640950. The content of these pages was created by students for students with the help of teachers and scientists. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.
More coming soon on the specific students, teachers, and scientists who participated in this work!
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