You wake up to your phone alarm jolting you awake. The first thing you do…

Check your notifications.

Being surrounded by technology makes you feel more productive, and part of a bigger culture. A global culture. But this feeling of connection can be limiting.

With technology, you’re always on the go. We have the power to do anything anywhere. So you’re pressured to keep busy and connected 24/7.

Don’t even think about leaving your boss or significant other on read these days. Trust me.

From sunrise to sunset our technology is helping us get through the day. But at what point does our dependency on our technology stop enhancing our life and start jeopardizing it?

Let’s look at 6 ways technology can impact our quality of life.

1. Your health is the number 1 priority

Advancements in technology have improved our health immensely over the years. When talking about health we need to talk about both mental healthand physical health separately.

Let’s start with mental health.

Mental health has been an area in the health care system that has greatly lacked attention in comparison with other health concerns.

Positives:

Social Media:

— Technology has helped us spread more awareness of the importance of mental health.

— People are more accepting of mental illness and open to talking to one another using social media outlets to offer support and connection.

Apps:

–Mental health Apps provide people with the support and information they need from anywhere.

–Mental health apps are also great for medical professionals to gather more data to help take better care of different mental illnesses our population is facing.

–Make your mental health a priority and check out a list of mental health apps here.

Treatment:

–Throughout our medical history, the one organ we treat without fully understanding the problem is the brain.

–Technology has given us the ability to see how different illnesses impact our brain through brain scans.

—Brain SPECT scan has made incredible advancements in how we can properly treat mental illness. Check out Daniel Amen’s Ted Talk here.

Negatives:

–The dark side of social media is how addictive it is. It’s how we build connections and do business, but we’ve developed a society that is obsessed with being connected.

–We’re constantly on our phones that we’ve lost the ability to be with each other in person.

–People use social media as an outlet to be mean to others because they feel safe behind a screen. No one is accountable for their actions.

–We only use social media to show our “best lives”, causing people to constantly compare themselves to others.

Physical Health

Positives:

Fitness apps such as 8Fit bring personal training sessions and exercise routine to you wherever you are.

–Devices like the Fitbit can help monitor your daily habits, such as sleep patterns and how much movement you need per day. This can help motivate you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Negatives:

–Literally, everything can be delivered these days, your groceries, your clothes, your food. We can do almost all of our daily tasks from the comfort of our couch.

–This access has brought us luxury but has also made us more sedentary and lazy people.

2. Happiness should be simple

Positives:

–Computers take over life’s mundane tasks for us to have time to do what we care about with the people we care about.

–When technology is used as a tool to improve our happiness we can get back to the basics and enjoy the simple moments we love.

Negatives:

–Our growing obsession with technology has caused an increase in depression rates globally and made people feel more alone than ever

—A study in the US stated that in 2018 almost half the population was lonely, with the highest percentage coming from our younger generations.

–As a population, we’ve been overusing technology to replace what we as humans need to be happy.

3. Relationships should be treasured

Positive:

–With the rise in immigration, technology has given us access to our loved ones from anywhere in the world.

–If we didn’t have apps like Skype or Whatsapp we would completely lose contact with the people that matter most.

Negative:

–Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram are great at connecting people. But what kind of connections are we making? Many people are saying that their Facebook friends aren’t really our friends

–We’re getting obsessed with having a “cool image” on social media instead of actually building meaningful relationships.

4. The battle fo work-life balance

Positives:

–When we look at how technology has impacted our lives over the years we look at our productivity.

–Technology at work is our best friend. We can spend our time actually getting things done.

–Creativity and innovation are higher than ever thanks to our gadgets looking out for us.

Negatives:

–Technology makes work accessible all the time anywhere. So finding that balance between work and play is harder than ever.

–We all have to be efficient, working machines to keep up with the competition. This often means people are sacrificing their downtime to stay –relevant at work.

5. Education is universal

Positives:

–Technology makes good education accessible for everyone no matter their income. And also helps us provide more engaging learning methods.

–We have online schools like Edx or Coursera that offer free classes from high-end universities.

–Apps like Kahoot are transforming the classroom into a more interactive learning space for our younger generation.

Negatives:

–In today’s tech age, students attention spans are getting smaller. There are so many distractions because of the internet and our devices it hard to keep them focused on learning.

–There are so much content and games to entertain us on the internet it’s much easier to waste time than it was before.

6. We are constantly on the move

Positives:

How we travel and commute has improved our quality of life drastically thanks to technology. We spend less time getting places, giving us more time to use our time how we want.

–Fast-moving trains are growing in countries like Japan and China saving us from traffic-jams

–Electric cars, bikes and scooters are the new trends to get us places quickly while also protecting the environment.

–Transit apps keep us informed of any accidents or delays so we can plan our trip accordingly.

Negatives:

–The easier we can transport people and goods from country to country the more gas emission we produce, harming our natural environment.

–Technology is improving the efficiency of transportation but if we don’t focus on how this impacts the Earth we can negatively impact our health.

It’s time for tech therapy

Technology has the power to truly improve our lives but we tend to take advantage of technology and create bad habits.

Just because we can be attached to our devices 24/7 doesn’t mean we should.

We need to change the mindset that keeping busy and connected is what makes us successful.

We need to stop overdosing on technology and focus on how technology can help us live a more balanced lifestyle.

The simplest way to get started is to prioritize your “me time” like you would your job and disconnect from your devices on a daily basis.

Technology can both improve your life and ruin your life. But that choice is up to you.