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Embracing a Modern Digital Lifestyle

A modern lifestyle comes with plenty of challenges. In this day and age, no one can really escape the fact that life doesn’t stop. People used to have a clear path through adulthood: Get a job, move up through the ranks, start a family, buy a house and a car, and eventually retire to enjoy your old age. That’s pretty far from describing the way in which people live their lives today.

More than one recent study has shown that Millennials and Gen-Zers are far more likely to experience mental health struggles due to lifestyle changes than their baby-boomer parents were. They hop from one job to the next or work at many jobs at the same time. The gig economy is on the rise, with more and more freelancers or entrepreneurs flooding the market than ever before. Millennials and Gen-Zers are less likely to own property and are more likely to have kids later, too.

All of this goes to say that the modern lifestyle is a lot more chaotic than older family members might remember. If you’re a Millennial or Gen-Zer who is trying to figure out how to work two jobs (plus a side hustle) and fit in time for physical activity or mental health check-ins, you’re not alone. Goal setting is hard! Plus, no one prepared you for a world defined by tech innovations and social media—because no one could have imagined it. Thankfully, the same tech that makes it hard to live a modern lifestyle can also make it easy to tame the beast that is modern life. Let’s take a look at how to wrangle the chaos with some digital additions to your everyday life.

Use Telehealth innovations for your mental health.

Everyone needs at least a little bit of therapy, especially during the era of COVID-19. Life was chaotic enough without adding the risk factors that come with just performing activities of daily life, like going to the supermarket or the pharmacy. It’s safe to say that, across the United States and the world at large, everyone’s quality of life (and mental health especially) took a nosedive in the last year and a half or so.

Thankfully, there are tech innovations to make sure that you don’t have to neglect your mental health just because you’re trying to keep up with the social distancing guidance the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) issues. The best Telehealth options definitely apply to mental health treatments, like meeting with a psychologist or lifestyle coach. The truth that no one tells you when you’re young is that having a good baseline of mental health will make everything about your quality of life.

When you’re able to talk to a psychologist on a regular basis, you’ll find it easier not to binge on fast food, not to spend all your time in a mental comparison game with your peers, and just to manage the generalized anxiety that so many of us feel. For those who feel more comfortable with a text message conversation instead of talking, well, there’s a Telehealth app for that, too.

These apps will cut down your social media time and help you stay productive.

Have you ever kept scrolling through your social media apps, even though you knew you were supposed to be doing something productive? How about checking your mobile phone notifications over and over, even though it keeps distracting you from work or going to bed? A recent study showed that spending too much time on social media can actually contribute to chronic stress and depression. Plus, there are plenty of studies that show how being on your mobile phone right before bed impacts your quality of sleep. Lack of sleep can lead to weight gain, fatigue, and all kinds of other health problems.

Okay, so we all know that it’s not great to be on your mobile phone or scroll through Instagram and TikTok, but how do we stop? The good news is that there are plenty of different ways to break this habit. Digital technology may have given us social media, but it also gave us these great (free!) apps to help keep tabs on how much time you spend scrolling. These activity monitor smartphone applications have different ways of tracking and incentivizing less time on the phone, but they all can have a major impact on your chronic stress, sleep quality, and all the other health benefits that come from that.

Make eating a healthy diet and getting physical activity every day easy with these services.

You spend a long time managing your startup or freelance career, or just running back and forth between your job and your side hustle. The point is, you don’t need the headache of figuring out when to cook healthy food, like whole grains or leafy greens. That’s why you end up eating fast food instead, even though you know it’s bad for you. This is the story of so many people, but it doesn’t have to be your story.

Weight loss can seem like a mountain that’s too high to climb, which is one explanation why there are so many obese adults in the United States today. Unfortunately, obese adults may also suffer from other wellness issues, like heart disease, kidney disease, prediabetes, high blood pressure, and hypertension. A combination of eating a healthy diet and working a little bit of physical activity into each day can make a whole lot of difference when it comes to weight management or weight loss. Don’t despair! Here’s how to make it easy.

First, make one of these food delivery services a part of your digital lifestyle. Boom! You don’t have to worry about grocery shopping, and you’ll be eating healthy food at the same time. Next, download one of these fitness apps onto your mobile phone. All of these smartphone applications are designed to have only short workouts—seven minutes or less. If you can shave a few minutes of scrolling and turn that into a new habit of physical activity, you’ll be amazed at the major impact it has on your quality of life and overall wellness. These are two small changes that make a big difference.

Make your mobile phone into your goal-setting coach.

Now that you’ve got your healthy eating sorted out, your physical activity managed, your mental health under control, and have gotten that social media habit under control, it’s time to look at your life goals. The average person has plenty of goals they’re not reaching—and that makes sense! There are a ton of obstacles standing between you and your goals, and more than enough variables that can wreak havoc on your life and motivation to go get your dreams.

The first thing to do is to make a list of goals and aspirations. You don’t need the use of technology for this, a paper and pen will do just fine. Do you want to get a college degree? Great! You’d like to turn your passion for video games into a career streaming those video games online? Wonderful! Whether you want a career in medicine or as a writer with a book with a review in the New York Times, the first thing to do is articulate your goals.

Next, use one of these stellar, user-friendly schedule organization apps to block out time for each of the items on your goal-setting list. Be honest with yourself, and remember to schedule in time for eating a meal of healthy food and getting that physical activity. New technologies are only as great as we make them, so don’t make a schedule you can’t stick to.

Some of these smartphone applications are for making lists, so use those to keep track of everything you need to do. Some are for scheduling appointments, while others still are for timing your actual time spent on projects. You may need to use a bunch of these to combat the negative effects that a modern lifestyle has on the average person’s wellness.

Finances were a drag until you started using these three mobile phone apps.

Who likes taxes and financial planning? Probably not most people. There’s a reason these topics aren’t favorites—they’re confusing and we aren’t really taught about them. Plus, recent research has only bolstered the idea that there’s a disparity when it comes to access to financial information across genders, racial divides, and social classes.

All this means that even the thought of finances may cause you fatigue. The good news is that this is another area in which small changes or minor behavior changes can have a positive impact on your financial future. Artificial intelligence and other digital technology applications allow us to invest with ease, and automatic browser extensions help save us money by finding coupon codes for us. That’s the kind of digital technology that really creates a meaningful positive impact on your life.

It can be hard to live a modern lifestyle and make it into a healthy lifestyle, too. It would be so easy to just order unhealthy food or extra dessert on Grubhub and forgo the savings apps. That said, it’s just as easy to eat healthy food (and boost your immune system at the same time), find an online support group or lifestyle coach, and get your life organized. It doesn’t even take a major lifestyle intervention to get it done! Just use the digital technology options out there, with all the wonderful help they present. You’ll be amazed at the positive impact they’ll have on your life, even if you’re just trying them for the first time.