The Internet is becoming more and more prominent and central in everyone's lives. According to the Digital 2021 annual report compiled by We Are Social in cooperation with Hootsuite, average users spend around 7 hours a day online, a figure that has increased by 4 per cent since 2020. In other words, by an extra 15 minutes a day. This means that, considering about 7-8 hours of sleep per night, we are connected 42 per cent of the time we are awake. It is clear that technology is crucial in many aspects of our lives, for work, entertainment and organising everyday things. However, the omnipresence of technology and the need to be always connected can, in some cases, have negative psychological, physical and social consequences, which is why the concept of digital wellbeing has emerged in recent years.
What is digital wellbeing?
What does it mean? On the digitalwellbeing.org website, psychologist Paul Marsden, a member of the cyberpsychology section of the British Psychological Society, collected a set of thirty-four definitions of the concept of digital wellbeing by influential organisations and scholars. Summing up the answers, Marsden defines digital well-being as “a state of personal well-being experienced through the healthy use of technology”. According to Unesco, digital wellbeing is “the enhancement and improvement of human well-being in the intermediate and long term, through the use of digital media”, while for Google it is “the act of finding a balance with technology, that feels right for you”, but also a process by which “a healthy relationship with technology is created and maintained”.
Time spent online
There are several strategies to improve our relationship with technology and turn it into an opportunity instead of an addiction. A starting point could be to monitor your screen time. There are various apps and programs for monitoring how your time is spent on your smartphone and an action plan can be established accordingly. For instance, if you see that you have spent an average of two hours a day on Instagram the last week, you can download an app that alerts you when you have spent an hour on this social network so that you can try to halve your usage time. The next step can be deactivating unimportant notifications. According to the research entitled An in-situ study of mobile phone notifications, an adult receives 63.5 notifications per day on average, and 50 per cent of them click on a notification within 30 seconds of receiving it. This can generate a state of anxiety that must be fought.
Technology and work
On the subject of technology and work, expert Alessio Carciofi, author of the book Digital Detox and founder of Digital Wellbeing suggests setting times after which you need to disconnect from work-related matters (emails, documents, online meetings) and identifying at least one hour of the day in which to work in focus mode, i.e. without checking notifications or your smartphone. In general, he recommends sequences of 25 minutes of focus and 5 minutes of break.
Setting rules
A healthy relationship with technology, however, depends not only on the time we spend online but also on the quality of this time. It is important to block negative accounts and profiles, not to use social media to vent frustrations, to remember that there are rules to follow even online, but at the same time not to let your digital reputation and credibility online become more important than your real life. It is precisely the establishing of boundaries between your online life and your real-world life, however interconnected the two are these days, that is one of the keys to digital wellbeing. That is why you can force yourself not to use your smartphone when you are spending time with family or friends and set rules for yourself together with the people you share your time with, taking detox moments or days and giving preference to in-person interactions whenever possible.Technology and the Internet are formidable tools. We must learn to handle them with awareness.
