It’s hard to imagine that young people who can’t sleep at 3 a.m. watch short videos like “squeeze pimples” and “scrape soap” with gusto, and express their relief. A short video platform “Decompression” related videos have been played more than 94 billion times. This can’t help but make people confused: can such a monotonous or even boring short video really decompress? What is its decompression principle?
The Three-Factor Model of Stress
If you observe carefully, you will find that there are basically three types of popular decompression videos: one is destruction, such as squeezing pimples, pinching instant noodles; the other is order, such as repairing donkey hooves, Clean up the room; the third is slow life, such as fire burning, pet daily life.
Why do these three types of short videos have decompression effects? To answer this question, we must understand how people’s stress comes from. American psychologist Richard Lazarus proposed a three-factor model of stress. He pointed out that when a stimulating event breaks the individual’s balance and load capacity and exceeds the individual’s tolerance, stress will occur.
Lazarus’ stress model consists of 3 factors: stressor, coping ability, and stress response. Stressors refer to various external or internal stimuli, such as workload, interpersonal tension, self-demanding, etc. Coping ability refers to the individual’s coping strategies, how the individual processes and handles stress. Stress responses are manifested in physical reactions (such as stomach pain), behavioral reactions (such as buying, buying), and emotional reactions (such as irritability and crying). When a person has too many stressors and insufficient coping ability, he will show stress reactions such as physical and mental tension and emotional and behavioral disorders. Therefore, if you want to decompress scientifically, you need to start with these three factors.
Destruction videos destroy “stressors”
In addition to helping people vent their emotions, destruction videos have a deeper psychological meaning. When people have too many stressors, such as economic pressure and interpersonal tension at the same time, these stressors press down on the individual like a mountain, making the individual feel tense, depressed, and angry. So many stressors can’t be escaped, what should I do? Just destroy them. If there are no stressors, wouldn’t there be no stress? Destroying videos have a decompression effect by expressing the subconscious desire to destroy the stressor. Whether it is the psychology of traditional Chinese culture or modern psychology, it is proposed that the external world is the presentation of the internal world. Destroying videos, on the surface, seem to be boring destroying various small objects, but in fact they project people’s inner subconsciousness of wanting to destroy and relieve stressors.
Order videos give people a sense of control. The decompression principle of
order short videos corresponds to the second factor of the stress model: coping ability. Why do people like to watch videos of rooms being cleaned and floor tiles laid neatly? Because this type of video can give people a sense of control, as long as a simple action is issued, you can get instant feedback on the results. This sense of control gives people a feeling of “I can handle it”.
Psychological experiments have shown that a sense of control plays a very important role in relieving stress. There is a classic sense of control experiment: the researchers came to a nursing home and randomly divided the elderly in the nursing home into two groups, A and B. The nursing and diet standards of these two groups of elderly people are the same, but their sense of control experience is different. Among them, the elderly in group A can arrange their own time, and if they are dissatisfied with the arrangement of the nursing home, they can try to change it. The elderly in group B do not have these autonomy, they can only passively accept the arrangement of the hospital. It was found that, regardless of self-assessment or nurse assessment, the elderly in group A were more positive and optimistic than those in group B. After 18 months, the mortality rate of the elderly in group A with a sense of control was 15%, while that of the elderly in group B without a sense of control was 30%. Experiments have shown that experiencing a sense of control reduces the elderly’s anxiety about their own health and lowers their stress levels.
Slow life videos make people temporarily “escape”
Let’s look at the last category of decompression videos, the slow life category. Why can slow life videos be decompressed? Because it changes our stress response patterns. Usually, people will show nervousness, restlessness, anxiety, irritability, etc. under pressure, and slow-life videos can make people pause, pull people out of stressful situations, and let people get a temporary escape and release. Many people watch slow life videos, whether it is a VLOG recording daily life, or a short video showing rural life, these contents are mostly simple, slow, and peaceful, and they can relieve people’s negative emotions caused by stress.
Slowing down, experiencing life and yourself is also a stress reduction method advocated by mindfulness therapy. Mindfulness therapy proposes that the human brain has two modes: an action mode and a being mode. Action patterns make people pursue goals and focus on results, but if they are too strong, they will produce constant anxiety. The existential mode is to slow down and return to the present moment, which allows people to achieve relaxation and peace.
[Knock on the blackboard]
Don’t be addicted to short videos
From the perspective of the three-factor model of stress, decompression videos can be decompressed, but we must also be careful not to let short videos become the only way to decompress, because indulging in short videos may cause addiction , emptiness, escape from reality. In order to obtain a more scientific method of decompression, we still have to return to the three factors that cause stress. Reduce stress sources, improve coping skills, gain a sense of control in real life, and use fitness, mindfulness, entertainment, etc. to adjust the physical and mental responses to stress. A multi-pronged approach can reduce stress more effectively.
