Digital Well being

Fitness and Phones. Not two words you would expect to hear in the same sentence; until recently. Gone are the days of stopwatches and pulse rate checkers and welcome the days of smart phones and watches. Anything fitness or health related can be done on a phone now and much more efficiently than any fitness device.

Every single day, without a single bit of acknowledgment in most cases, your phone is just sitting there quietly in the background, monitoring various things like your step count, distance traveled and workout lengths. This can be hugely beneficial for fitness fanatics but also wannabe fitness freaks. All these features are great for people who aren’t huge into fitness but want to ease their way into the scene.

Even people who couldn’t care less about fitness (like myself) will find themselves looking at their step count occasionally to see if they’ve walked more than their mates or just to see if they can beat their own previous step count from the last day. Online related fitness therefore is helping everyone to become more fit and healthy.

However, what people don’t see and sometimes because it sounds quite hypocritical is how phones can also help with mental health. A lot of phones now will update you on your screen time and even tells you on which app you have the most hours on. This can help people with mental health as it can show people what apps to cut down on and possibly which apps can be making you feel the way which you do feel.

There are apps on phones which can help you get better sleep, meditate more efficiently and even meal plan for you. All these features combined can really help people who struggle mentally become productive and feel a lot better. A lot of people without mental health issues still use these apps though for productivity. I use sleeping apps to help me sleep in order for a more productive next day for example.

Overall, the introduction of digital well being has hugely helped with health and fitness within society due to the fact that most people have a phone. Due to this being healthy has become a lot easier for people to do as it doesn’t require any extra investments past a phone really. If I can appreciate this, the least healthy man I know, I’m sure you all can too!