22 Jun A Digital Detox Will Lift Your Mental Health
Your relationship with tech may be having a negative effect on your mood. It may be negatively impacting your sleep, increasing your anxiety, and making it difficult to find time for the things you love. Therefore, putting away your digital devices could have a positive effect on your lifestyle, and may lift your mood by giving you a more positive outlook on life in general. Try a digital detox for mental health.
Removing screens from your leisure hours will give you time that you can put into activities which are nourishing for both your mind and body. In May, for Mental Health Awareness Week, we posted a series on how getting away from screens and connecting with nature can boost your mental health. Hence, a digital detox will also give you more to look forward to as you can make time to do the things you enjoy.
Our digital devices are not good for our sleep patterns. The blue light causes us to struggle to fall asleep and disrupts our natural sleep rhythms, whilst the luring call of social media can also wreak havoc with our bedtimes. A digital detox will also improve your sleep – and good sleep is crucial for good mental health.
Many of us are guilty of grabbing our phone and checking social media first thing in the morning. This is a terrible way to start our day. You may not realise it, but we are constantly making comparisons between our own lives and that of others. This is especially dangerous when viewing social media, because you will only see the high points of others’ lives. Whereas we would like to wake up and feel grateful and excited for the day ahead, this instead causes us to feel negative about our own realities,. The feeling of reduced self worth will also likely linger subconsciously throughout the rest of our day.
Similarly, staying away from tech can preserve your positive mood by keeping us from unpleasant news and stories. It is good to check the news, but sometimes our need to consume story after story can get obsessive. For example, in the last year, most of us have spent time doomscrolling – endlessly scrolling through social media and news sites to read disheartening and depressing news. We work ourselves into states of panic and despair, and the constant stream of bleak content means we struggle to see the positive in our lives.
Reevaluate your relationship with tech, and what your digital devices do for you. Identify where they are having negative effects on your life – whether through keeping you from sleeping, or gluing you to news sites – and try to remove these habits from your routine. This will lift your mood. In fact, a frequent digital detox for mental health will help us to protect our mental health by reducing sources of distress, resulting in a less negative outlook on life in general.
If you feel you need someone to guide you through a digital detox, or that you cannot manage yourself alone, check out our digital detox course which will guide you through the process.
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