Science-Backed Ways to Boost Your Digital Wellbeing

By Dr. Kristy Goodwin

In our always-on, digitally demanding world, employee wellbeing has become increasingly important. At Hoogly, we believe wellbeing encompasses digital, social, mental, and emotional health, with digital wellbeing playing a critical role in managing our interaction with technology. Just like putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others, prioritizing our individual digital wellbeing helps us better contribute to social wellbeing. By cultivating healthy, productive, and sustainable digital habits, we can improve our physical health, mental wellbeing, and overall performance.

Unhealthy or unsustainable digital habits can lead people to feel powered-down, burnt out, and living low-res lives. Why? While technology is changing at rapid rates, our biological design remains the same. Many of our digital behaviours are incompatible with this biological wiring, contributing to increasing rates of stress and burnout. This is why we need to address our digital wellbeing.

Today, our digital habits are causing many of us to live in a way where we’re:

• Always on: Constant notifications and expectations to be reachable at all times leave us feeling overwhelmed.
• Rarely focused: The continuous barrage of pings and alerts makes deep work and sustained attention increasingly rare.
• Never recovered: Without intentional breaks, we often stay mentally 'plugged in,' leading to chronic fatigue and lack of true rest.

If our digital habits are incongruent with our biological needs, our digital wellbeing is compromised. If we want to thrive in the digitally intense world we now live and work in, then we must consider our digital wellbeing.

How Can We Achieve Digital Wellbeing?

To achieve digital wellbeing, there are three key pillars to consider: building stress tolerance, optimizing focus, and embracing recovery.

1. Build Your Stress Tolerance and Resilience

An inevitable reality of our modern, digitally intense days is that we’ll experience stress. Now, the good news is that we’re neurobiologically designed to cope with stress, but not the chronic stress we're currently seeing today in our always-on world.

Gallup reports 50% of people experience stress at work, with 38% facing burnout due to unresolved stress. Gallup found that only 20% of people are thriving. Mitigating these challenges requires fostering healthier digital habits and creating supportive environments that help individuals thrive. These are sobering statistics, and our digital habits are one of the chief factors contributing to these elevated levels of stress.

The first pillar emphasises the importance of managing stress in a digital age. Constant notifications, information overload (colloquially referred to as 'infobesity'), and the pressure to stay connected can elevate stress levels, leading to burnout and decreased productivity.

Micro-Habits to Enhance Your Stress Tolerance & Resilience:

• Deliberate Cold or Heat Exposure: Engaging in activities like cold showers or saunas can help condition your body to handle stress more effectively.
• Breathing Exercises: Practice sighing to quickly calm the nervous system and reduce stress.
• Connection: Make time to connect with real people in real-time to produce oxytocin, which helps counteract stress.

2. Optimise Your Focus Quotient

Today, we face a constant barrage of digital distractions. Pings from messaging apps like WhatsApp and dings from email notifications have become the soundtrack of our modern days. Our attention spans have dwindled with the rise of instant notifications and endless scrolling. This is why the superskill of the 21st century, which trumps both our IQ (intelligence quotient) and EQ (emotional quotient), is our FQ: our focus quotient.

If you want to thrive in the digital world that’s been deliberately engineered to be distracting, then mastering the skill of orienting, controlling, and sustaining your attention is critical.

Micro-Habits to Improve Your FQ:

• Work in Sprints: Utilise 90-minute work sprints followed by short breaks to align with your body’s natural rhythms, known as 'ultradian rhythms,' which are cycles that govern periods of high and low energy throughout the day.
• Build a Fortress Around Your Focus: Disable notifications during your most productive hours.
• Manage Notifications: Bundle notifications or create VIP lists to avoid unnecessary distractions.

3. Reframe Recovery

The final pillar addresses the essential need for recovery, specifically sleep and rest. In a digital landscape, where we can be always-on and where we often glorify busyness, we can overlook the importance of recovery time. However, if we want to achieve sustainable performance, then we need to adhere to our hOS’s biological need for effort and recovery.

Micro-Habits to Promote Recovery:

• Good Sleep Practices: Maintain a consistent sleep schedule and seek morning sunlight to regulate melatonin production.
• Take 'Piccolo Breaks': Short, restorative breaks of 2-10 minutes can significantly enhance well-being.
• Allow Mind-Meandering Time: Block out regular time to digitally disconnect and allow your mind to wander, which can lead to increased creativity and problem-solving by activating the brain's 'default mode network'.

By prioritising recovery, you not only enhance your physical and mental health but also improve your ability to engage with technology positively.

To thrive in our digital world, we must align our habits with our natural human needs. Building stress tolerance, improving focus, and embracing recovery can reshape our relationship with technology, fostering a balanced approach that ensures our well-being and helps us lead fulfilling lives. This is not merely a pursuit of productivity, but a journey towards balance—one that lets us harness technology's benefits while ensuring our well-being is protected, allowing us to lead genuinely fulfilling lives.

Sources

• Gallup - State of the Global Workplace
• Infinite Potential - The State of Burnout 2024
• Women's Agenda - An Overlooked Secret to Women’s Health: Friends

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