Digital Wellness vs. Physical Wellness: What are the Differences?
Digital wellness is at the core of our mission here at Myrth. It informs everything we do, from the perspectives that we share to the way we design our platform to how we encourage people to interact with us and each other. We want to help people engage helpfully with their technology and their online world.
We realized, though, that sometimes it can be a little confusing when we use the phrase “digital wellness.”
Do people think we are talking about pursuing physical wellness through the use of digital tools? Do they think we're talking about using digital tools in a healthy way? The answer, of course and somewhat confusingly, is yes.
See, the concept of digital wellness is pretty broad, but it does dovetail in some ways with regular physical wellness. There is a sector of the digital wellness field that is focused on helping people use digital tools to improve their physical health. Think of apps and programs like Strava, Couch to 5K, the 100 Situp Challenge, and so on. Those apps are rooted in the digital space but are designed to cause physical change in your non-digital world.
There are also organizations and platforms designed to encourage people to engage more healthily with their online world or to remove themselves completely from tech for a while. Those can include anti-cyberbullying projects, quantified self software, mental wellness programs, digital detox retreats, apps that help limit screen time, and so forth. They exist in the digital space and work to change that digital space.
And of course, there are companies and projects that occupy both domains. That’s where Myrth tries to be.
We recently became a member of the Digital Wellness Collective, which is a group of entrepreneurs and companies devoted to promoting both types of digital wellness. We love their definition of digital wellness:
“The optimum state of health and well-being that each individual using technology is capable of achieving. A way of life, while using technology, that promotes optimal health and well-being in which body, mind, and spirit are integrated by the individual to live more fully within the human, natural, and digital communities.”
The thing is, we believe in the old saying of a healthy mind in a healthy body. When we take care of ourselves mentally by ensuring that we are engaging with digital content that nourishes us instead of depleting us, and by using our online time effectively, we also help keep ourselves in a mindset that allows us to take care of our bodies, too. The two are closely interrelated.
Which is not to say that digital wellness and physical wellness are identical. There are all sorts of things in the physical wellness world that don't have a perfect match in digital wellness. For example, there's no digital health doctor that you can go to for a physical and make sure you're okay (although if you want to perform a mini digital wellness physical on yourself, check out our blog post on that). There aren't clear symptoms that firmly establish your digital life is unhealthy, unlike a high temperature which definitively shows that you are physically sick.
Instead, digital wellness is a bit more nebulous. It involves self-reflection and self-awareness, checking on how you feel about interacting with your technology, and having the self-control to either avoid certain stimuli or remove them from your immediate surroundings if you need to.
On the other hand, there is plenty of overlap, too. When you're trying to stay physically healthy, you consume lots of fruits and vegetables, limit the alcohol and the french fries, and increase your activity levels. In the same way, when you're trying to improve your digital wellness, one of the things that you can do is consume material that you know is good for you, blog posts that encourage you to be more productive, podcasts that teach you things, social media accounts that make you smile or encourage you to be kinder or help you look at problems from a new perspective.
Here’s another example: when you're trying to maintain physical health, it helps to have a buddy along for the ride. Similarly, when you're trying to improve your digital health, it matters who you choose to hang around with online. If you hang out with unkind, snarky people, that's going to affect how you engage with your digital world. That’s why we’re so into the idea of nanonetworks, where people can build small, supportive circles of friends they can rely on and trust.
In the end, the two realms are distinct, but they're not wholly separate. There is a Venn diagram of the two, with an awful lot of overlap in the middle.
In 2020, we encourage you to take charge of your digital wellness and make changes that help you feel good.
Have you ever realized your digital health was out of balance? What corrective measures did you take? We would love to hear about it in the comments to this post.
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