8 Ways Your Mobile Devices Could Help Boost Your Mental Health
Written by TYE Medical on Nov 6th 2023
Despite some of the negative press, tech has probably enhanced your life in many ways, whether helping to organize your life or keeping you on schedule. Truly, there is an app for everything! But it might surprise you to realize that tech, like your mobile devices, can also boost your mental state when used in specific ways.
Your smart watch, tablet, or phone might cause you grief from time to time, perhaps keeping you “too connected”. But some of the latest features included with top brands can actually help you focus on your well-being and prioritize your mental health.
1. Mood Tracking: a.k.a State of Mind
Some brands, like Apple, boast a feature that lets you record your daily emotions and moods, which can allow you to pinpoint what may be emotionally affecting you. Many therapists and psychologists will tell you that self-awareness is the first step toward unearthing issues that are affecting you.
For example, if you suffer from anxiety symptoms, tracking your emotions can help you learn to recognize negative emotions, determine an underlying cause, and deal with what you’re able to deal with the triggers.
Such device features can make it easier to keep tabs on your emotions and stay current with your emotional experiences. This means you’re more likely to notice patterns and take steps to address the issues.
But this doesn’t mean that the goal is to “wallow” in your emotions. Rather, it encourages recognition of patterns that point to underlying causes. Taking steps to deal with the situation helps you to manage your emotions and self regulate. According to a recent study, this allows you to avoid suppression and decrease worry which is very positive for mental health.
2. Mental Health Assessments
You may prefer to check up on your mental state before the doctor does at your next visit. Some mobile devices now feature mental health assessments that give you access to the same depression and anxiety screenings used in clinics.
What’s most helpful is the history logged over time that includes benchmarks with short- and long-term overviews. This can help you identify positive changes in your state of mind or catch negative trends before they become a problem.
But it’s important to realize that such assessment tools are only a first step toward prevention and treatment. It’s important to seek professional help if your symptoms continue.
3. Mindfulness
Popular brands like FitBit, Samsung, and Apple offer a feature that encourages you to take a few minutes each day to break away from your routine and stressors to just breathe, clear your mind, and focus on the moment. For some, it’s a matter of bringing your scattered mind to focus on a single point, and for others, it is a time of meditation or prayer.
You can set your device to remind you to take mindfulness breaks throughout the day. What’s the benefit? It can effectively reduce symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. This is why the mindfulness and mood tracking features can work together.
As you take time for mindfulness at certain points in the day, you have an opportunity to become aware of your internal experiences and address issues in those still moments. These moments of still are also known to calm the sympathetic nervous system, bring a calming effect over your body and mind.
4. Sleep Experience
Major brands also offer a “sleep experience” feature that goes beyond simple sleep tracking. Not only can you track sleep duration and quality, but you can also manage your sleep schedule and set reminders to start winding down for bed.
Most sleep trackers measure heart rate, body movements, and other metrics that are helpful in analyzing sleep quality and duration.
But with a feature like sleep experience, you can create bedtime routines, reminders, schedules, and even goals for your sleep. And this is significant because quality, restful sleep is necessary for maintaining good mental health and brain function. You’ll notice improvements in learning, memory, and problem-solving abilities when you get the rest you need.
5. Activity Management
Smart watches and mobile apps are well-known for their role in managing physical activity. FitBit made these features famous, and soon Apple and Samsung raised the bar. But activity management is about more than your physical health: it’s also beneficial to your mental health.
You can track activity by duration, intensity, and type. And of course, you can manage your entire workout through the device’s body metric tracking. Heart rate and body movements are key features in determining metrics like calories burned and zone minutes (i.e. activity that qualifies as fat burn, cardio, or peak zones).
However, your doctor will tell you that it’s about more than just your dedicated daily workout. It’s also key that you remain reasonably active throughout the day rather than stationary. You can set your mobile device or smart watch to remind you to move a minimum number of steps per hour. This keeps you from sitting for long stretches, which isn’t good for your heart or spinal health.
Exercise and regular activity improves cognitive function and mood, boosting your brain’s serotonin levels.
6. Gaming Benefits
Gaming isn’t just for PC or consoles. Mobile devices, even wearable ones, offer gaming features. While there is a downside to gaming, on a casual level it can be a great way to boost mood-enhancing serotonin as you engage in interactive entertainment. It gives you a mood lift and helps fight off bouts of depression.
But light gaming also provides a much needed break to destress for a few minutes during your busy day. You might not be in a position to leave your work area or home responsibilities and walk or exercise, but you might have a few minutes to escape and enjoy a mental break through an enjoyable game.
Additionally, some game options include brain teasers or games that stimulate cognition and improve thinking and memory.
7. Nutrition and Diet Tracking
You are what you eat. In a sense, this is true physically, mentally, and emotionally. Diet and nutrition affect your entire system, including your brain. This means your mood, cognitive function, and general state of mind can be affected by your overall nutrition. Ever notice that certain foods affect your energy levels or mood?
Mobile devices, including smart watches, allow you to track what you eat as well as the calorie count and nutritional value of those foods. While you manage diet and nutrition information to help meet your physical health goals, it’s also beneficial for understanding what foods affect your energy levels and moods. When you couple this with the mood tracker feature on many devices, you can easily get a fuller picture.
8. Monitoring Stress Levels
Stress isn’t always obvious to us, especially if we’ve been living with chronic, high-stress levels. And high stress or chronic stress has only negative effects on your mental health. Many mobile devices, especially smart watches, can now monitor your stress level and make you aware of the problem. Most of the time, your body will have physical reactions to stress. Tight muscles, increased heart rate, poor sleep quality, fatigue, shallow breathing, and more.
Some smart watches monitor several aspects of your health including sleep quality, heart rate, and physical activity to determine a “stress score”. The device gathers data from these areas throughout the day and night to give you an overall understanding of how your body is recovering from the day’s stress.
And most smart watches include mindfulness and deep breathing exercises to help you regulate your nervous system if you do get too stressed
Drawbacks to Mobile Device Monitoring
Not everyone is on board with using mobile devices like smart watches to monitor mental health (or any type of health at all). An argument can be made that we become more dependent on the device than on our own self-awareness. Some believe that rather than cultivating self-awareness and better health habits, these devices actually enslave us to their numbers.
New York Times opinion writer, Lindsay Crouse, shares her own experience with smart watch dependence and addiction. She wrote in a 2022 article,
Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours. The data stands in for self-awareness. We let a gadget tell us when and how to move, when we’re tired, when we’re hungry.
It’s true that at some point it becomes about a quantifiable number, and our wellbeing can’t be so neatly packaged. In fact, some research suggests that when it comes to things like calorie tracking and weight loss, smart watches and tracking apps can actually cause weight gain. People may eat when they’re not hungry (not listening to their bodies) and eat to reach their minimum calorie count.
Similarly, tracking your stress levels down to a number glowing on your wrist can actually make you more stressed. And sleep can be an issue too. When your device says you got plenty of sleep, but you still feel tired, it can be tempting to just dismiss how you feel. But it’s entirely possible that your body is trying to tell you that you need more rest.
If you find that your mobile device or smart watch is wielding a bit too much control over your days, then perhaps the benefits don’t outweigh the negatives.
