If you're fortunate enough to have good health insurance and are reasonably diligent about staying on top of health issues, you've probably had a general physical in the last few years.

Physicals are pretty basic things that just check for major or obvious problems. You'll usually get a temperature check, have your blood pressure tested, have your heart and lungs listened to, and get your abdomen palpated. Maybe, if your doctor's cautious, they'll run a panel of basic bloodwork to check for things like cholesterol and vitamin D levels. For the most part, though, a physical is no big deal, and you're in and out pretty quickly. 

Just like your physical well-being, your digital wellness needs a checkup every now and then. Like a physical exam, a digital wellness checkup is nothing major--certainly not a process that will require an entire week of inventorying and monitoring and sifting and sorting. At most, you’ll need an hour or so of time to take a peek at the things you use most and think about how you use them. 

But wait, you might be saying to yourself, why do I need to do a digital wellness checkup if I already engage mindfully with my technology?

Well, it's really easy to experience digital creep over the course of time. A carefully curated list of accounts you follow on Instagram can grow slowly over time until, before long, you have a massive mountain of people you follow and no idea who any of them are. In a similar way, your email subscriptions can multiply with every purchase you make, discount you claim, or contest you enter. Eventually, your inbox is exploding with newsletters you don't actually read and have no interest in, and they are drowning out the stuff you actually care about. 

Like physical ailments, digital wellness issues can happen so incrementally that we don't notice them. Small changes don't register, at least not until they add up and become something that causes pain. The goal of the annual digital wellness checkup is to catch those issues before they become a pain point for you. 

How to Do a Digital Wellness Checkup

Here's the process we use here at Myrth for doing a digital wellness checkup. 

1. Check your screen time. If you're like us, you're probably using an app to monitor how much screen time you spend on your phone. Take a look at your trends over the last few weeks or months. Are you happy with those? If not, how do you want to change them? What steps will you take to make that change happen? 

2. Review the apps on your phone. Which ones do you actually use? How often? Are any of them duplicative? Think about which ones actually bring utility or happiness to your life, and which ones end up being mindless time sucks for you. Delete the ones that aren't serving you well. 

3. Clean out your email inbox. Emails are one the nemeses of digital wellness. Take a look at the newsletters you're receiving, and unsubscribe from the ones you're not actually interested in. This is also a good time to look at the email notifications you receive from the social media platforms you use and adjust the settings for those notifications accordingly. 

4. Spend some time in self-reflection. We recommend taking a little time to brainstorm or journal about your feelings around the role of technology in your day-to-day life. This is perhaps the most important part. Just like bodily signals of just not feeling good might tell us something that basic tests during a physical won't turn up, our emotional response to thinking about our digital lives can tell us something about how we're using technology that the other checkup steps might not reveal otherwise. When you think about how you're using the technology in your life, do you feel content, or do you feel a vague sense of unease? Do you feel like your time is used productively, or do you feel like it's wasted? Do you feel like the technology adds something to your life, or do you feel like it takes things away? Spend some time engaging critically with the role of technology in how you live your life, and then think about how you might make any necessary changes going forward.

Schedule Your Checkup Annually

Just like medical professionals recommend getting a physical or so, we think it's a good idea to check in on your digital life once a year or so. The start of the new year is always a good time to do things like that, but the new year doesn't have to be the time you for your digital wellness checkup. Whenever you decide is a good time, just set a reminder on your calendar to ping you once a year or so after that. 

Maintain Healthy Digital Habits

A digital wellness checkup is a great way to catch burgeoning problems in our technological lives before they become crises, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in both the physical and digital world. We all know that, to keep our bodies healthy, it helps to eat nourishing food, get enough sleep, and make regular movement a part of your life. 

Similarly, it's important to build healthy digital habits that we use everyday. Before downloading a new app, think intentionally about how you're going to use it, how it will fit into your existing digital life, and what you might give up by installing it. Before you follow a new account on social media, think about why you're following that person and whether their content is really going to bring anything to your life. With all of these, think about how they fit into your screentime goals (or, perhaps, how they don’t fit). 

We recommend having a set of criteria you use to decide what new apps or accounts to invite into your life, because we are big believers in boundaries giving us freedom. Using those criteria will also help slow the process of digital creep, though it probably won’t stop that creep altogether.

Have you implemented digital wellness practices in your daily life? What techniques are you using? Let us know in the comments below.

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