How to improve your digital diet for greater well-being

Online activities like gaming, social media, and video calls have unique “nutritional” values ​​that will influence our mood, focus, and energy levels. This is how to optimize yours

By carissa wong

The year is 2032 and you are on the verge of a revolution. You have just received a blueprint for your personal digital diet. It prescribes a menu of tweaks to your online behavior that will keep “Zoom fatigue” at bay, curb mindless scrolling, and fill your social media interactions with meaning. There’s even a regular dose of games to boost attention and working memory. Welcome to a new life of digital satisfaction.

Such a future may seem implausible, but handmade digital recipes could be a reality within a decade, according to those working to understand how the internet affects our health and happiness. For many years, the perceived links between screen time and well-being have fueled widespread fears that digital technology is harmful to us. Now, there is a growing realization that quality matters more than quantity, and that our focus on screen time is wrong.

Drawing parallels between what we consume online and the food we eat proves to be a more fruitful approach. Just as salads are better for us than cream puffs, some aspects of our digital diet are more nutritious than others. However, what constitutes healthy eating differs from person to person depending on our physiology and likewise there is no universal healthy digital diet. In the future, a personalized digital recipe could take all of this into account. For now, however, researchers looking at what we consume online are beginning to distinguish between the healthy and the not-so-healthy. In doing so, they’re identifying online habits you can adopt to improve your diet and digital well-being.

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