Technology and brain health

... friends or foes?

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?

Do you reach over and pick up your phone?

Chances are you do – like most of us – a habit that extends throughout the day as we navigate our busy modern lives through technology.

The question that health experts around the world have started to ask is: are our tech habits helpful or unhealthy? While opinions may be split on this, technology isn’t going anywhere, and if anything, we’re seeing more and more of a tech boom post-pandemic.

The solution? Seeking out the right tech to help boost – and not hinder – our health habits.

Lee Corrigan, Head of Product Development for Vitality Global, is optimistic about the role that tech plays in health and wellbeing. “At Vitality we are excited about wearable tech in particular, and how you can manage, monitor and track a range of health metrics from heart rate to how many hours of restorative sleep you get each night,” she says. “We are investing heavily in these types of insights and innovations and our global tech partnerships with Apple, Samsung, Garmin and Fitbit mean that we’re able to incentivise our members to be more proactive about their health”.

Key here, according to Corrigan, is ease. “Our Vitality members around the world just link their devices to our platform and then our integration takes care of everything – helping encourage members to get more active, for example, by rewarding them for hitting exercise goals that are personalised to their levels of fitness.”

“And it goes beyond an extrinsic reward like a coffee or discounted travel experience,” adds. Corrigan. “While immediate gratification is a great way to help us build new habits and break bad ones, long-term habits come from consistent ‘habit laddering’”. Here, you first form an easy base before you start to build intensity and the Vitality programme helps challenge members to get them there.

“Tech helps us with this, without question. It helps us to set and stick to our new habits, re-training and re-wiring our brains in ways that nudge us to ultimately live healthier, happier lives’.

That said, adds Corrigan, it is also true that constant digital distractions may change our cognitive functions for the worse — leaving many of us more prone to forgetting things and feeling more anxious.

Research from the World Health Organization has shown that extensive screen time and tech use is linked to heightened attention-deficit symptoms, impaired emotional and social intelligence, social isolation and feelings of loneliness, impaired brain development and disrupted sleep.

“We’re at an important crossroads in brain health’ says Corrigan. “Tech has made us think differently, feel differently and even dream differently and we’re altering our brain behaviour because of these new tech experiences. My favourite anecdote here is that most people now dream in colour – and many attribute this to tech advancements where we moved from black and white TV in the 50s to our modern colour TV screens. Colour dreams aside, tech through video games and augmented reality has also proven to have a good impact on our decision making and visual skills.”

Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and author of “The Stuff of Thought” adds that “healthy brain function is extremely important for living fully. If used purposefully, technology can help boost brain activity. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart”.

We’re seeing a new marketplace for ‘brain fitness’ products emerge: online games and mobile apps that aim to enhance memory, visual and spatial skills, verbal recall, concentration and brain functioning, says Pinker.

At the recent Global Vitality Conference, hosted in London earlier this year, Vitality experts and global health leaders came together to unpack the role of healthy habits and how these can help us achieve longevity – or in Vitality words, boost our “healthspan” which is the period of our life spent in good health – free from the chronic diseases, decline and disabilities linked to ageing.

One of the key health themes from this event explored building better sleep habits – and how our body’s circadian rhythms (our internal sleep clocks) are crucial for good health. Getting good sleep, every night, helps your brain to perform how it should – restoring your cognitive energy and helping your brain to function at its best.

Better brain health through better sleep habits

DID YOU KNOW that healthy sleep patterns are just as important to your overall brain health as good nutrition and regular exercise are? Read more on the Vitality Global website.

REFERENCES:

Professor Steven Pinker. The New York Times. Mind Over Mass Media. Link.