Date posted: 30/09/2024 5 min read

Six tech solutions to support your physical and mental health

These wellness apps and services will support your physical, mental, social and emotional health.

Quick take

  • You can use productivity tools to stay focused and manage your daily routines efficiently.
  • Sleep is crucial for productivity and there are apps that track sleep quality and patterns, and help integrate sleep into a structured daily routine for enhanced wellness.
  • Don’t forget about the social aspect of wellness through community engagement, like blood donation and park runs.
I have a small side table from my childhood home in my office. Every morning, I brew a pot of 96°C English breakfast tea, nestled in a knitted tea cosy adorned with a blue chicken, and select a handmade pottery milk jug from my collection. I alternate between my insulated CA ANZ travel cup and my temperature-controlled Ember Mug 2. I control the mug via an app on my phone, so my drink stays hot for hours. I place them on a tray one of my kids made in a school woodworking class. The ritual and the beverage bring a calming and orderly start to what’s likely to be a busy day.

Daily rituals that can support your wellness

Around this time, I’ll open my browser. On startup, I’ve set specific pages to open: Inbox To Do List, ChatGPT and the Momentum Dash dashboard. This Google Chrome extension productivity tool helps me feel calm, focus on deep work and complete the day’s most important task. Click on the tab and a beautiful visual landscape will greet you: ‘Good morning, Heather. What is your main goal for today?’. Answer carefully because your words become a single to-do list.

Click on the settings icon in the bottom right corner to display or hide the bookmark bar, weather, quotes, mantras and other helpful information for your workday. The dashboard has a focus tool for deep work using the Pomodoro Technique; it suggests 25-minute intervals. It monitors my progress, encouraging me to build a stronger, more resilient mind. I was initially startled by the loud white noise when I tried this feature. I switched it to aeroplane noise, which immediately started me yawning – yes, I’m one of those awful people who sleep on planes. I opted for calming campfire sounds. I switch this up with Spotify’s deep focus atmospheric playlist.

How to optimise productivity with technology

As an accountant, I love tracking data and, with a sprinkle of gamification, the fitness app trackers are happy to deliver.

The 5K Parkrunner app helps me find the Saturday morning community park run, events, tracks results and lets me know how to participate. Several other running apps track activities and monitor progress: Runkeeper, Runna and Strava, which enable you to connect and compete with friends, track the wear and tear on your running shoes, and even advise you when they need to be retired.

I use the All Trails and MapMyRun apps to help me find and navigate new routes, including dog-friendly locations, and the What3Words app in case I get lost.

How to best track your fitness and health

With respect to wearables, I’ve not ventured further than using the Google Fit app on my phone. I should mention that my work-from-home leggings include roomy pockets for mobile phone storage, so my phone is effortlessly with me all day. The health dashboard is conveniently always with me, tracking my steps, movement minutes and other health data. Plus, it syncs with popular fitness trackers such as Fitbit, Apple Watch, and Garmin smartwatches, or the Oura smart ring.

Apps to help manage your personal safety

I’ve set up my critical medical information via the Personal Safety app on my Google Pixel. It helps emergency responders access medical information from the lock screen without needing my passcode. They can see information such as allergies, medical conditions and blood type, and they can call my designated emergency contacts.

Within the app, there is also the option to control emergency broadcast notifications, turn on car crash detection, and set a check-in timer to confirm you are safe if, for example, I’m walking alone at night.

Online services that help you contribute to the community

When the Red Cross lifted its ban on blood donations from those who had spent time in England, I was eager to get involved. The Australian Red Cross Lifeblood app has an astonishingly good interface for an NFP organisation. It empowers you to manage everything associated with booking an appointment to donate, and records your blood type and health statistics. If you are healthy and are able to give blood, plasma or platelets, it’s a great way to achieve that helper’s high while feeling a connection to a larger cause. You can also volunteer to assist with park runs via the Parkrunner app.

As a family unit, we’ve found accessing a single online shopping list via lists within Google Keep to be a time saver. Whoever is near the shops can grab what’s on the list and it’s continually updated. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to sync outside lists to the Woolworths or Coles apps. You can order online if the shopping list is added to either app. However, I prefer to shop instore. If I select the actual store I’m shopping in, the list reorders by aisle number, so I can whiz around the store like a ninja.

Tech to help enhance sleep quality

I’m the queen of sleep. I’m asleep as soon as I put my head on a pillow. It was not always this way. One day, I realised sleep was essential to my productivity. I’m obsessed with productivity and treating sleep as an essential part of my routine triggered my sleep superpower.

I have a little bag of assortments to help me sleep: a padded silk sleep mask, Badger sleep balm, Laneige lip sleeping mask, and earplugs. The Whoop app tracks the four stages of sleep and other cycles, such as menstruation and menopause. The data helps you understand the quality of your sleep, so you can improve bedtime routines. Many of the popular fitness trackers can also assist in monitoring sleep.

As I’m not pumping iron and running marathons, I felt like a bit of a fraud writing this article. However, I’ve come to realise there are different aspects of wellness: physical, emotional, social, intellectual, spiritual, professional fulfilment, environmental and financial. I do broadly focus on these different elements of wellness. My robotic coaches surface data that help me make better lifestyle choices. I use HabitNow to build these new habits into my routine, and the gamification motivates me to achieve the goals I’ve set for myself.

At the end of the day, I close down all my tabs, clean my desk and wind down ready for tomorrow.

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