A perspective on ‘Digital Wellness Apps’
Digital wellness is a broad umbrella term generally used to define a balance with technology that is safe and healthy. If neglected, it may severely affect people's mental, physical and emotional health. Therefore, it is very salient to understand its causes and consequences, particularly, what measures can be taken to avoid such unhealthy usage of screens & digital devices.
Unhealthy use of Smartphones is affecting our brains at a rate higher than we can imagine. Coping with the modern lifestyle is rough on our minds. The urge to stay connected with the world often takes a toll to the point where we feel overwhelmed and sore. With every beep and flash, we are drawn toward our devices irrespective of how worn out we may be. Recently, the People of Maharashtra in the Sangali district practiced something called digital detox. Everyone, be it a child or an adult, was expected to keep their mobile phone away for 1.5 hours. It was done to help children channel their energy toward studies, refocus on themselves, and for adults to interact and pick up hobbies such as reading. On a larger scale, practicing digital detox in this manner does not look possible in the near term. But on an individual level, we can make a significant change in our lifestyle by adopting digital wellness apps on our phones.
Digital wellness apps are either built-in into your smartphone or can be downloaded. They help you by revealing your digital usage habits, reminding you of your daily goals, or sometimes even locking you out of an app depending on the features of the app. Moreover, these apps help you maintain your sleep cycle. It records your sleep pattern and takes track of the number of hours automatically helping you wake up at a natural time. These apps set your screen time to track your phone usage throughout the day and then give you breakdowns to see if you have met your screen time goals. Some examples of digital wellness apps are:
1) ActionDash: This app helps by tracking your app’s usage by giving you daily stats. If a particular app is getting you more invested than the rest, you can simply ask ActionDash to lock you out of it. It's a good premise and a nice way to lower your screen time.
2) Digital detox: This app converts the concept of digital wellness into a challenge. It gives a variety of modes that you can initiate as a part of your challenge to reduce screen time. These challenges are a way to engage users and work their way up to breaking their phone addiction.
3) Forest: It works on different concepts, but of course, the objective is the same. This app solely focuses on timers. You go to the app, enable the timer and adhere to it. If you do, the tree grows into a forest and if you fail then the timer kills the tree making you start over.
4) Microsoft Launcher: Companies as big as Microsoft & Google understand the need for digital wellness. This launcher is filled with a variety of productivity features to track your usage and gives your daily and weekly goals.
5) Google Digital Well-Being: See a complete picture of your digital habits and disconnect when you want to.
I cannot emphasize the importance of digital wellness and how crucially important it is as the future depends on healthy living with ‘advancements of technology’ or the Digital World. By the time people realize this, they become so overwhelmed by the unproductive days they’ve gone through that it becomes a challenge to start again. And as they say “IF YOU CAN’T MEASURE IT, YOU CAN’T CONTROL IT”. We firmly believe and stand by this ideology & the first step in your Digital Wellness journey is to measure & understand where you currently stand when it comes to your screen time & digital life. This can be achieved through Digital Wellness Apps mentioned above. Why not give it a try?
-Aanya Rawat & Rijul Arora
