Digital wellbeing

How to Maintain Healthy & Balanced Relationship with your Smartphone?

Technology is cool. It is our lifestyle now.

It is everywhere and it is evolving very fast. And suddenly our smartphone has become something that we can’t seem to live without.

People are using a smartphone than any other technology. People are now dependent on a smartphone for their daily works. Our smartphone has become the symbol of the technological revolution we live in.

Technology can be very helpful in providing information, efficiencies, and providing enjoyment. But overuse and addiction to technology can cause serious issues to your relationships, your job, your goal, and your health.

As you step into the new year and prepare to embrace the development the technology or mobile brings, have you also put aside some time to reflect on the negative side of our smartphone.

I want you all to stop for a while to take your time and reflect.

Have you ever think, How much time spend with mobile is well spent?

How much of it is adding value to our lives?

Are smartphone is helping us to move closer to our goals instead of distracting than ever?

Are we feeling alone and depressed due to our smartphone?

There are several questions that we have to find the answer now, otherwise, it will be too late.

Think about the moments where you’ve seemed to be very busy, but surprisingly unproductive at the end of the day.

“Most people check their phone every 15 minutes or less, even if they have no alerts or notifications,” Larry Rosen, psychology professor and author of The Distracted Mind, tells CNBC.

Besides the wasted time, there’s also the psychological grind that comes from spending too much time on your phone. Several studies have shown social media can be bad for your mental health, and Facebook admitted last year that passive use of its social network can leave people in negative moods.

Always remember one thing, only by gaining greater control over your own tech habits you will be able to get all the benefits of technology. Otherwise, you will end up being used by the technology.

So the question is how will you get control over your tech habits and maintain a healthy relationship with it?

The answer is Digital wellbeing.

“Digital wellbeing is about crafting and maintaining a healthy relationship with technology. It’s about how technology serves us moves us towards our goals, rather than distracting us and interrupting us.”

Google says, “Great technology should improve life, not distract from it.”

Before coming on How? I would like to mention some benefits of having a healthy and balanced relationship with technology.

Benefits of having a healthy and balanced relationship with technology:

  1. Being more productive at work: It really helps us to be more focussed and engaged. People are not attentive when they are working with their smartphones. People easily get distracted by the amount of notification they received and it takes 20-25 minutes to regain their focus back on the task.
  2. Being more present with others: Quality of conversation gets decreased when conversations are getting interfered by smartphones.
  3. Being able to relax: Sometimes switching off/flight mode is really important to be in touch with your own body and with your own emotions. Also, it makes you sleep better, less stressed, less anxious and more joyful.

 

Now let’s see how.

How we can maintain a healthy and balanced relationship with technology?

Raising our self-awareness of our online digital habits is the 1st essential step we can take to change and improve our relationship with technology.

  1. Self-awareness: Our satisfaction with our tech usage will look different for diff people. So when we are using technology, it’s about making sure it meets our definition of time well spent. We can start by asking some question to ourselves. How do you spend time online? How does it make you feel? Does it add value to your life? What would you like to change about your own digital engagement?
  2. Vision: When we want to make a change, it’s a really important start with a vision. What role would I like tech to have in my life? Are there certain parts of my life that I want to try and keep device free?
  3. Intention: It’s always good to have a clear intention of picking up a phone. Is your mobile going to help you with your work or kill your time? So, set a clear intention.
  4. Monitor your usage: Monitoring your usage gives you a more complete picture of your day and how you ’re spending your time on these devices. There are lots of apps out there that can help you with this. Go, Google it.

Finally, the most important point to see.

How to get started with the Digital wellbeing.

Here are some tools and tips to achieve a healthy relationship with technology, to stay focused on what matters to you.

  1. Keep your day organized – Keeping yourself organized for the day helps you to focus on your work/study. It keeps you in control.
  2. Charge your phone outside of your room –  It will help you put some distance between yourself and phone. It’s a good way to start developing a healthy habit of maintaining a good relationship with your phone.
  3. Customize notification – It allows to receive less and important notification only.
  4. Use wind-down feature – It will turn your smartphone to grayscale when you designate a time that you are ready to go to bed. This feature is provided by any new tech company.
  5. Do not disturb mode – It will generally block all notification and prevent you from being interrupted. You can always allow an exception, so you can still receive a call in case of emergency.
  6. Keeping important apps on your home screen-  It always helps you to focus on what’s essential there and ignoring unwanted apps that distract you.
  7. Free device meetups – Sometimes try meeting with your friends, colleague & family members without your phone to improve the quality of conversation and feel being valued.
  8. Try to spend more time outside of your room –   Basically, it means to keep yourself busy and focused instead of just scrolling your phone for no reason.
  9. Receive less by sending less – And one last important tip for those who are struggling with WhatsApp or another messenger. We can always reduce the message received, by reducing the number of messages sent.

 

Changing habits and changing behaviors take time. So keep trying and stay focussed. It is important that we actually sometimes take a break and slow down so that we can be very effective when we decide to engage online.

So don’t be afraid of taking a break.

All the best. Enjoy Responsibly.

Also feel free to add more points which can be helpful for others in maintaining a healthy relationship with technology
Thank you..!

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