How to Use Your Phone to Improve Your Health -

How to Use Your Phone to Improve Your Health

By Matilda Davies

Phones get a bad rap. They can become a major distraction from healthy activities like exercise and social life. They can eat into our time and kill productivity. The blue light emitted from their screens stimulates the brain and can make it difficult to fall asleep. Our ever-connectedness can mean there’s no line between work and home life.

But there are plenty of ways you can use your phone to the benefit of your health. Here are four of them.

Get better sleep

Getting good sleep can fight stress, anxiety, and depression, it can improve your mood, help maintain heart health, aid in fighting off illness, and help you maintain your waistline. While you should limit use roughly an hour before bed (that blue light really will keep you awake), you can use your phone to get better sleep. Apps like Bedtime and NightShift (for iPhone) can limit those blue light waves and can help you monitor your sleep routines and provide advice on getting more and better sleep.

Use your phone to lose weight

Physical exercise is good for both mental and physical health. There are apps that provide free guided workout routines, discounts on exercise classes, and even guided running and hiking routes.

Check out apps like MindBody, which can connect you with yoga classes anywhere in the world, or Asana Rebel, which offers custom workout coaching for a small fee. No matter where you are or how little time you have, you can use your phone to help you get in some solid exercise.

Meditate

Maintaining a meditation practice to your life can help you fight stress and anxiety, and long-term practice has even been shown to produce a general feeling of wellbeing. There are plenty of guided meditation apps that can offer short meditation routines for beginners and those experienced in their practice as well.

The great part about this mindfulness practice is that meditation can be done from anywhere, in as little as five minutes.

Use your phone to eat better

There are plenty of apps that can help you track your diet and find healthy menu items while eating out and reading food labels at the grocery store. Not only is diet important in physical health, but Harvard researchers have also linked food intake to mental health as well. Bonus points for using your phone to care for your body and mind!

Author bio

Matilda Davies is a health and wellness writer based in Raleigh, North Carolina.