Technology for a Healthier Life

If you have a desk job and enjoy television and FaceBook when kicking back after work, you may spend a lot of time sitting still and being tempted, via advertising, with bad food and other poor lifestyle choices. Time can drain away quickly while clicking from one website to another or refreshing Twitter. The damage we can do to ourselves with technology might be obvious, but there are a lot of ways that the same technology can serve our healthy lifestyle goals too.

Smart Phone

When trying to get more exercise, a smart phone app seems to be a good match, since many of us always have our phones with us. I've been seeing "Nexercise" (www.nexercise.com) on my friends' FaceBook feeds, and it seems popular both for its ability to turn exercise into a game with rewards and for its social media sharing capability. There are a lot of other options, including apps that create routines for you and give you instructions for new exercises, ones that turn running into a game (www.zombiesrungame.com, for example), and ones that track your calories burned, etc.

Good sleep may be a less obvious match for the smart phone. Recent studies have shown us how bad smart phones can be for our sleep, from disrupting melatonin production to waking us up to just check our emails one more time, but if you can resist the urge to check your phone, there are some good sleep apps too. As an insomniac, I like white noise generators (simplynoise.com includes white, pink, and brown noise generators, with an optional timer) and sleep trackers. Just keep your phone on plane mode to help you resist the temptation to check your emails.

Computer

In addition to being able to look up health information online, computers can be a part of your healthy lifestyle. Share your goals with friends to increase accountability, get exercise videos online, etc.

For your mental health, consider taking computer breaks, maybe using a website like www.donothingfor2minutes.com, which gives you a nice picture and some calming wave noises with a timer.

And, of course, when you order your food from Green Earth Organics, you bring a lot of healthy organic options into your home and avoid the temptation to pick up junk food while you are shopping.

Television

Though the heyday of the exercise video might be the 1980s, there is still a lot of exercise programs available on TV, including everything from energetic cardio to fun dance to meditative Tai Chi and yoga. They are often on during the day or at other non-prime times, so a PVR might be helpful to be able to do the exercise you want at a time that is most convenient.