This study was motivated by a desire to help working-age individuals gain a better understanding of their daily nutritional intakes with a new self-reported dietary assessment method because an unhealthy eating behavior increases the risks of developing chronic diseases. In this study, we present the design and evaluation of NutriColoring, a food diary that leverages doodling on sketches to report and reflect on everyday diet in the working context. Through a 2-week field study involving 18 participants, the usefulness of NutriColoring in facilitating dietary assessment was tested by making comparisons with the typical bullet diary method. Our quantitative results showed that NutriColoring provided users with improved dietary assessment experience and intrinsic motivations, with significantly low task frustration and high enjoyment. Because of the freedom and playfulness in reporting intakes at work, the interview findings showed a high acceptance of employing NutriColoring at work. This article is concluded with a set of implications for the design and development of a Doodling toolkit to support healthy eating behaviors among office workers.

Doodling and fidgeting-traditionally viewed in educational contexts as markers of inattention and poor classroom behaviour-have more recently been considered as possible routes to improve performance by reducing boredom and its negative impact on memory. However, there is a surprising lack of well-controlled studies examining this possibility, despite the widespread adoption of fidget toys and doodling exercises within classroom settings. Here we report two experiments (total N = 222) that assess the impact of doodling on boredom, attention, mind-wandering, and subsequent recall of auditory information. In Experiment 1, participants first listened to a 15-min section of a lecture known to induce boredom. Immediately thereafter they were asked to jot down important information from a short voicemail that they listened to while either doodling (adding shading to shapes) or doing nothing in between note-taking. In Experiment 2, participants listened to a 45-min section of the same lecture under one of four conditions: structured doodling (i.e., shade in shapes), unstructured doodling, note-taking, or listen-only. Thought probes assessed self-perceived levels of state boredom, mind-wandering, and attention throughout the lecture. Across studies, doodling neither reduced boredom or mind-wandering nor increased attention or retention of information compared with other conditions. In contrast, attention and test performance were highest (and boredom and mind-wandering lowest) for those focused solely on note-taking.

Pre-COVID-19, doodling was identified as a measure of burnout in researchers attending a weekly, in-person health narratives research group manifesting team mindfulness. Under the group\'s supportive conditions, variations in doodling served to measure change in participants reported depression and anxiety-internal states directly associated with burnout, adversely affecting healthcare researchers, their employment, and their research. COVID-19 demanded social distancing during the group\'s 2020/21 academic meetings. Conducted online, the group\'s participants who chose to doodle did so alone during the pandemic. Whether the sequestering of group participants during COVID-19 altered the ability of doodling to act as a measure of depression and anxiety was investigated. Participants considered that doodling during the group\'s online meetings increased their enjoyment and attention level-some expressed that it helped them to relax. However, unlike face-to-face meetings during previous non-COVID-19 years, solitary doodling during online meetings was unable to reflect researchers\' depression or anxiety. The COVID-19 limitations that necessitated doodling alone maintained the benefits group members saw in doodling but hampered the ability of doodling to act as a measure of burnout, in contrast to previous in-person doodling. This result is seen to correspond to one aspect of the group\'s change in team mindfulness resulting from COVID-19 constraints.

This essay emerged from my clinical experience of working psychoanalytically by remote means due to the pandemic of COVID-19. During analytic listening, in the absence of bodily togetherness and in the presence of heightened anxiety about survival, I turned my attention inwardly towards the interior of my own body and made a spontaneous gesture of doodling. These two moves, mental and bodily, both unintentional and unconventional to my analytic training, restored my psychic aliveness and facilitated the process of analytic holding. I will reflect on this particular experience using Milner\'s concepts: framed gap and the analyst\'s concentration of the body, which I further conceptualize as \'visceral attention\'. I consider it as a corporal counterpart of \'free-floating attention\'. It is my contention that the concept of visceral attention has a wider implication for analytic technique in the ordinary psychoanalytic setting when uncertainty prevails in psychoanalytic treatment and with patients whose predicament is marked by body-mind split. The essay explores an analogy between visceral attention and doodling to hold the analytic process at a non-verbal level. The blank paper and blank inside of the body stand for the \'framed gap\', the negative space for a new symbol to emerge.

Burnout adversely affects healthcare researchers, their place of employment, and the production of valuable research. It is directly associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety. Having an easily employed and reliable measure of depression and anxiety in healthcare researchers is important if burnout is to be diminished. Doodling may be one such measure. Doodling became a possible indicator based on unexpected outcomes associated with one diverse and voluntary health narrative research group where doodling was introduced. The result, with respect to casual, self-reported levels of depression and anxiety, ranged from researchers expressing low levels of distress to those revealing clinical diagnoses of depression and anxiety. Changes to doodling execution and content, and their effect on the doodler-metrics previously unmentioned in the literature-hold promise for evaluating depression and anxiety levels of researchers. Maligned in academic settings with increasingly punitive outcomes, doodling should be reassessed as a possible indicator of internal states of distress, dysphoria, depression, and anxiety based on this University of Toronto Health Narratives Research Group result of doodling. Under certain well-defined conditions, variations in doodling may serve as a measure of change in these internal states and, therefore, act as an aid in reducing burnout.