From mobile apps to wearable devices, technology is making it easier to take care of your health. While some apps and devices are designed for people with serious physical and mental health problems, the following tech solutions can help you with everyday health challenges.
1. Improve Your Posture
Good posture may be more important than you think. In recent years, using technology has often led to painful and sometimes debilitating conditions like “computer back,” “text neck,” and “mouse shoulder.” The good news is that technology also has some answers. For example, UPRIGHT GO’s posture trainer attaches to your skin between your shoulder blades and provides feedback in real time to help you improve your posture.
2. Meditate
The idea of meditating can seem pretty intimidating if you’ve never practiced it before. You may wonder how you can sit there quietly when there’s so much you need to do and think about. There are many different tech options that can help with your practice.
The apps typically provide guided meditations and suggestions. Meditation apps you might want to try include Headspace, Calm, The Mindfulness App, and Buddhify. Or, you can go for a wearable device like Muse, which senses the state of your brain through a headband. Then, it creates a custom meditation experience with suggestions that are just right for you.
3. Lose Weight
Not everybody needs to lose weight, but in today’s largely sedentary society, most people could benefit from losing at least a few extra pounds. If that’s your health goal, you can choose from a wide variety of apps. You can track your eating through apps like Weight Watchers, Lose It! Or MyFitness Pal. Noom is a weight loss app that’s marketed to millennials and features both tracking and a social chat feature.
Another option is to use your internet-connected device to log onto a weight loss site like SparkPeople, which makes tracking easier with a barcode scanner and a feature where you can input a recipe and find out the nutrition facts of each serving.
4. Exercise More
In this technologically-advanced society, it’s easy to let appliances and other machines do all the work for you. But moving around is essential to good health. Of course, when it comes to exercise, the Fitbit physical activity tracker is perhaps the most popular tech device around. It tracks not only how much you move, but how your vital signs are responding to that movement.
5. Reduce Your Stress
Although meditation is one way to de-stress, there are many other techniques you can use. If you want to practice diaphragmatic breathing, try Breathe2Relax. You can also get guided deep breathing along with muscle relaxation exercises with Pacifica. Stress Doctor not only guides you through deep breathing exercises, but it shows you how your body is responding to them. Happify is a cool app that uses brain-training to help you develop traits like gratitude and empathy and decrease your stress.
Being in the best of health isn’t always easy. Even if you have no serious medical conditions, poor habits and daily stress can make you feel achy, sluggish, anxious, and even cranky. Get on the tech train with the new health-promoting apps and devices that make sense to you. You’ll feel much better, and you may even avoid medical and mental health problems in the future.
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