Things to think about in your Digital Diet

Most of us have smartphones and our lives are intertwined with them often for both work and our personal life. Our lives have been transformed in the last 10 years but being ‘always on’ has become a way of life for most of us and this is having terrible consequences for our Wellness in this age of the smartphone.  Many of us are totally addicted to them, look at people on a busy street and most of them are head down walking starting into their phone. The huge increase of chronic stress, poor sleep, poor self image and feelings of inadequacy when we compare ourselves to the beautiful curated collections of images all essentially to inspire us to buy more stuff so that our lives will be better.   Around the pool recently on holidays I noticed a trend of lots of young kids with smartphones and big sets of headphones on – all essentially shutting out the real world for an online soulless connectionless world. If we continue like this, we will be raising our kids for a lifetime of poor sleep, poor self-esteem, an inability to connect and form lasting friendships hence a lifetime of loneliness and much increased risk of depression and other mental illnesses.

So just because we have smartphones and they can do so many things for us, what I have thought about is having a charter on how I want to use my phone. With this in mind, this is mine:-

1)     Digital Mindfulness; Ok, I get that it's an overuse of the term but I am trying to make conscious decisions about what I want to use my phone for and to establish clear rules around my use of my phone, when I go online, when I check my email, when I update Instagram etc; Its not the first thing I do when I wake up, and it certainly shouldn’t be the last thing I do at night. I need to use the phone for our work but I don't have to be on it all day.

2)     Parental Role : It is our role to educate our daughter on the technologies I will allow her use. It is not up to the school and it is not up to her. I am not particularly popular holding this position as she would love a smart phone but I intend to make the decision based on need and appropriateness and there is no case to be made for her to have one right now.

3)     In real life : It’s easy to stay in contact with people using the smartphone but this is no substitute for actual connections, being with people, having a laugh with your friend and family in person.  Become aware of what the agenda of these technology companies is, they want us to have a ‘frictionless life’ where we spend the majority of our time on line, shopping, interacting, consuming services, media, TV, heck even Netflix says it ‘competes for sleep’.

Become aware of this and rather than mindlessly consuming technology spend your time on line with intent and purpose so that technology serves you and not vice versa.