TO CHECK-IN WITH YOURSELF – A reflective card-based toolkit for articulating emotional labour in everyday relationships

To-Check In Yourself is a card-based reflective toolkit designed to support individuals in recognizing and reflecting on emotional labour in their daily lives.

Rather than offering solutions, the toolkit creates a space for awareness and encourages users to pause and reflect on patterns within their relationships without replacing professional therapy. This was done in collaboration with Linnaeus University’s Student Health (Studenthälsan) team and a student from Linnaeus University’s Psychology Students (Linnepsykologerna) which were used as gatekeepers to ensure that the prompts remain reflective, ethically considerate, and emotionally responsible.

Based on my own experiences, I began to notice how emotional support is often expected in relationships, but not always acknowledged or reciprocated. I also realized how difficult it can be to set and maintain healthy boundaries, which over time can become emotionally exhausting. This led me to question how emotional labour operates in everyday relationships, and how it can be better articulated through the use of Visual Communication and card-based design to support self-reflection.

Emotional Labour was first introduced in Arlie Russel Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983) as “the process of managing one’s own feelings in order to meet emotional expectations of others.”

Hochschild described how service workers such as flight attendants, are expected to “induce or suppress feelings” to create a certain atmosphere for others. While, the concept of Emotional Labour in The Managed Heart is mainly used in terms of service work, the concept can also be applied in terms of friendships and relationships as emotional labour can take the form of calming others down, avoiding conflict, repeatedly reassuring someone, or hiding one’s own frustration to keep peace. Furthermore, Hochschild distinguishes between “Surface Acting” and “Deep Acting”. Surface Acting involves pretending to feel something directly, whereas Deep Acting involves trying to change someone’s internal feelings. From there, the cards were built within the framework of Hochschild’s concepts. As well as more theoretical frameworks from Sara Ahmed’s The Culture Politics of Emotion (2004) and Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007). Sara Ahmed explains and showcases that emotions are not purely personal but are shaped by social expectations and relational norms, which explains why some people feel obligated to care for others without that care being reciprocated. Moreover, Eva Illouz focuses on social constructs and cultural norms that shape emotional experiences by how emotional availability is seen as a social construct. Furthermore, they also focus on how modern relationships often involve emotional communication, self-reflection, and responsibilities by highlighting the subtle ways emotions are negotiated in personal life. Reading these theoretical frameworks has not only made me feel connected to the topic of emotional labour, but has also provided a lens for me to understand how emotional labour operates in everyday relationships and why it can be invisible but prevalent.

With this toolkit, I focused on how emotional labour is experienced by young adults particularly Millennials and Gen Z navigating everyday relationships. Early adulthood is widely understood as a period of life transitions such as developing independence, forming new relationships, and shaping one’s identity, a phase described by Jeffery Jensen Arnett as “Emerging Adulthood” in their work “Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood” (2001). Within this life stage, individuals are actively negotiating their roles in relationships without fully established boundaries, which makes emotional labour difficult to pinpoint and recognize. Furthermore, research has highlighted concerns around mental health among young adults, including stress, anxiety, burnout, and emotional strain all are rooted within personal relationships. A report from the ‘Harvard Graduate School of Education’ found that 36% of young adults report anxiety and 29% report depression, which is significantly higher compared to other age groups. These generational and cultural factors make emotional labour especially relevant to young adults today, as they are negotiating boundaries, emotional responsibility, and social expectations.

Conversations around mental health, well-being, and self-care are becoming more visible, emotional labour in everyday relationships is difficult to identify and articulate which feels very concerning. This is where visual communication becomes an important tool for me to use. As a visual communicator, I got interested and curious about how design could make these invisible emotional experiences more tangible and reflective, without turning them into therapy or advice. From there, this is where I translated these emotional experiences into a card-based toolkit with written prompts and illustrative visual motifs. This project explores how visual communication can make emotional labour more visible, understandable, and easy to reflect on. The Toolkit encourages self-awareness and dialogue while allowing participants to engage at their own pace.

The cards toolkit uses a minimal visual language by combining simple typography with a consistent illustrated figure. The front of each card presents a question prompt, while the back features a visual motif that supports reflection.

The illustrations are intentionally reduced and use a mix of abstract and symbolic elements to tell a story.

By representing emotional tension, boundaries, and interpersonal dynamics. This allows the user to interpret the visuals in relation to their own experiences.

The cards are organized into 4 themes: Boundaries, Responsibility, Expressing Yourself, and Self-Awareness. A soft and limited color palette is used to distinguish between these categories while maintaining a calm and cohesive tone. The consistent use of the figure creates continuity across the system and avoids assigning a specific identity, making the cards more open and relatable.

The toolkit is designed as a tactile object by using matte paper to create a more intimate and personal experience. An instruction card titled “A Way To Begin” introduces the toolkit and guides the user on how to engage with the cards in a calm and reflective way.

The final outcome is a set of 16 cards forming a reflective toolkit that can be used individually or in small group settings. The cards demonstrate how visual communication can support emotional awareness through simple, accessible interactions.

Through the process and throughout testing the cards, I found that simplicity in both visual form and language was essential. Reducing the visuals and refining the wording made the cards more softer and easier to engage with. I am highlighting how visual communication and design can function as a tool for self-reflection, making complex and often invisible emotional experiences more visible and easier to understand.

References:

Ahmed, S (2004) The Culture Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Press.

Hochschild, A.R (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berekley: University of California Press.

Illouz, E (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Arnett, J. J. (2001). Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties. Oxford University Press.

On Edge: Understanding and Preventing Young Adults’ Mental Health Challenges Making Caring Common – Harvard Graduate School of Education (2023). Available At: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/on-edge

Accessed: 13 March 2026