Service Design can help for your mental health in several ways:

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In Service Design work a lot of time is spent trying to using quick and dirty ways to see if an idea has value or not. The idea is to create a first shitty draft that you can then show to other people to see your idea makes sense to them. That’s what we call prototyping and testing.

You can also prototype things not just for other people but for yourself. If you’re interested in making a big life change like wanting to be location independent and travel the world with a remote job this is something where you can create a first shitty draft to see if you’ll like it.
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For example you could work from another location for just 1 or 2 days and see how you feel after it.

Knowing that you for the big scary things you can first try them out without much risks can help you be more comfortable with trying new things and therefore help also with your mental health.

For more details on this idea of using prototyping in your personal life check my interview with Maaria Tiensivu at the Swiss Service Design Day 2024.

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It’s a story that I often tell my students. When my wife announced me that she was pregnant I was first very happy and then I started to be stressed by all the things that popped in my mind. What’s all the bureaucratic stuff we should not forget? What’s the culture we want to create?
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Being a service designer I took an hour with my wife and we filled a Miro board with all the things that were in our heads that stressed us, questioned us or just took mental space. Once we had an overwhelming Bircher-müsli of sticky notes we then categorized those into smaller groups. Stuff like:

Once we had that, we could then transfer the elements into our existing systems. Tasks would go in our todo apps or calendars for reminders for example.
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In about an hour I went from: my god I’m not ready at all and I’m gonna be the worst dad! To « okay let’s enjoy these last months that we have alone as a couple ».
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What we did there is some basic affinity sorting. A fancy way of saying grouping random pieces of information into categories that make more sense. And this method is part of what in Service Design we call « synthesis », or the art of turning messy shit load of information into something manageable, useful and actionable.
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So yes, when you learn skills like synthesis and know how to do a basic affinity mapping, which is the bread and butter of Service Design work, you can use that to be less overwhelmed and improve your mental health.

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Life outside of work can feel very chaotic and uncertain. There is no calendar that lets you know when people will die, be sick or just mad at you. Emergency just happen. Things change course.

Many Service Design practitioner have models that they know that help deal with the chaos of work.

For example the Design Squiggle shows how at the start of developing a new idea things are very messy instead of linear.

SCRUM or design thinking for example show that instead of planning a long project perfectly it’s better to do it step after step and iterate.

Which means breaking it down into: what’s the first thing we should build? And then deciding is it good enough to continue or should we improve it?

These ideas can really help in life outside of work. They help to see that a certain level of chaos is normal at some stages of a project or life. And they show that you can’t make things perfectly in one go.
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Therefore Service Design gives me ways of thinking for work that I can apply in my personal life that help me know that uncertainty is normal and give me practical ways to deal with it.

For more on this check out my free course called What is the Service Designer mindset?