Sup Muses!?
April flew by. It’s May y’all, month 5 of 2020.
I’ve been particularly interested in digital wellness especially as I’ve been home since mid-march and could almost immediately identify the impacts of increased screen time. I became aware of digital wellness, the phrase, through The Quilt’s newsletter. You can define digital wellness based on how you use and absorb anything that’s digital - “electronic technology that generates, stores, and processes data.” Generally, digital wellness is observed in terms of the amount of time you spend looking at a screen (like now 😅) but for me it goes a bit deeper.
It’s about what I take in when I’m looking at screens — meaning what I listen to and watch.
My posture and body position when I’m on the computer on phone.
The reason why I like wellness is because every aspect depends on or is impacted by the other (wellness is interdependent), and digital wellness is no different. Digital wellness intersects a few other aspects for me: spiritual, physical, mental and environmental, but all these intersections are necessarily negative. For instance, some days I practice yoga or complete a Nike Training Club workout on my phone, while on Saturdays, I give a workout on IG live. All these factors drive up my screen time, but I’m participating in activities healthy for me (physical.) When I’m outdoors, I’m rarely on my phone. (environmental.) For my devotional, I only use my phone (spiritual). When I’m listening to a podcast or video chatting with friends I can be on my phone or computer (mental and social.)
Over the past few weeks I have been tracking my screen time and whoa baby…I was disturbed with my daily average. Let’s dive into it my numbers:
April 12-19: Average 7 hours 11 mins
April 19-26: Average 6 hours 45 mins
Last week: Average 6 Hours 27 mins
The week before April 12th my average phone screen time was almost 8 hours. It was the week of April 19th that I decided to make a conscious effort to use my phone less. Social networking is where I spend most time (usually Instagram and Facebook.) Social networking ours per week have been over 30 at times😳. When I’m on IG participating in an IG live coffee chat as part of my morning routine, uploading and editing content for my page or actually doing work, then that’s productive, but I often catch myself going down several social media wormholes and I get CAUGHT UP: tik tok, natural hair, estheticians, fitness videos , Tabitha and her business and cute little brown babies. Then BAM 56 minutes have gone by.
Learning about and acknowledging your digital health is important. So I’m not going to make a super long post about it, instead, I’ll have 2 posts. Next week I’ll discuss when I use my phone the most, why TV isn’t an issue and why going screen-free isn’t feasible, plus a few tips to cut down screen time.
I definitely want to hear from you! Have you heard of or considered digital wellness? What are your initial feelings about it? How are you doing with your screen time these days?
xo-JM