Progress update on my 2026 Masters Research Project: The Conscious Awareness of Being Alive
The project investigates what happens when you bring a conscious, focal awareness to the simple fact that you're alive. Most of us carry a background sense of being alive without ever really feeling it. My research asks: what if you did? For 10 days, participants received daily text reminders designed to bring that awareness to the foreground — and I measured the effects on well-being and stress, alongside in-depth interviews exploring what people actually experienced.
I gave this progress report presentation as part of my Masters this past week and thought I'd share it with you here. I am in the final year of getting my Masters in Transpersonal Psychology. The culmination project is to run a research project and write a dissertation research report on it. This presentation shares what my project looks like and some interesting preliminary results.
Looking forward to sharing more when the project is complete this summer.
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Thanks for being alive with me
-Kate
Adjacent areas of research: Mortality salience, Terror Management Theory, Ernest Becker, Antonio Damasio, Emilia Barile, Thomas Fuchs, Subjective vitality, Foreground & background awareness, Transpersonal psychology