It's Time To Take Care Of Your Digital Health

You’ve worked on your physical health and your mental health, now it’s time to focus on your digital health too. After more than a year of dependence on tech, psychotherapist Zoë Aston guides you through how to develop a healthy, reasonable relationship with your screens

- David Levesley

There comes a turning point in anything where what we once thought was unabashedly good or bad has to be viewed in subtler shades: Technology, it seems, is the latest to face this bind. We have become entirely dependent on tech, both overtly and covertly, to live any semblance of a normal life. Technology can no longer be seen as the enemy of society, but it also can’t be seen as an absolute boon. Now, after a year of maximising our screen time and reconsidering what it means to live via video call, we need to look at a more nuanced view: we need to consider our digital health.

While previously the way we talked about technology was about either using it or detoxing from it, having it on or having it off, such absolutes are not always possible (and, in many ways, never were). Just as physical health and mental health have entered mainstream conversation – and we have come to understand there is no panacea for all people all the time – the way we talk about our digital hygiene is in need of changing. Or so, at least, Zoë Aston thinks.

A psychotherapist and mental health consultant who has worked with some of the world’s top companies and gyms as a mental health expert, Aston is now working with Microsoft Windows to come up with new ways for a tech company to make sure it promotes healthy use of its product. While we’ve previously spoken to experts about how to have a healthy relationship between social media and mental health, Aston wants us all to reconsider the good and bad things about our relationships with technology at large after the year that was and what we start doing going forward. Below are some of the steps she suggests taking to make sure you, your tech and the people contacting you via your tech all find a healthy balance.