Technology Wellbeing Ltd

Would you like to win back an extra 30 minutes every day? Dive into the strange world of why we love to be distracted, how the environment and digital habits trigger our behaviour, why being busy is not the same as being productive and how attention management allows you to get more done and with less stress. Let digital detox and wellbeing expert, thought leader, keynote speaker and coach Colin Corby be your guide in exploring the strange world of distraction and attention in his updated 2025 webinar and live talk. Get key insights and easy to implement practical strategies to improve your focus & productivity and reduce the cumulative build-up of stress. This webinar is ideal for organisations with remote and hybrid employees. Watch his TEDx talk with Ana Smith ‘Are we losing our human identity to technology’. To find out more just send me a message. Colin Corby

New Year’s resolutions – A chance to break with the past? I love the idea and process of making New Year’s resolutions. They encourage us to reflect on our current lives and spend time with our own thoughts, however uncomfortable it might feel. Importantly, they are inherently hopeful and optimistic, and focus on actions we can personally take to improve our lives, and those of others, for the better. However, in a recent YouGov poll, the top three New Year’s resolutions for 2025 in the UK were: save more/spend less, get fit/exercise more and lose weight. However only 27% of adults said they plan to make a resolution, and if 2024 is anything to go by, only 33% will stick to them all. Younger adults are much more likely to make new year’s resolutions.  So are the people who don’t make New Year’s resolutions right? I would argue that, regardless of whether we stick to our New Year’s resolutions, the process we go through in making them is inherently valuable. Being honest with ourselves, however uncomfortable, requires us to think about what we value most and consider aspects of our lives where we feel we could do better. It’s a chance to be mindful of the past, to pay attention to the things that we can control and to plan to move forward. However, keeping our New Year’s resolutions requires motivation, focus and effort, and this makes them difficult to achieve. We must really want to do them, rather than them being nice to haves or something we think other people will want us to do. In sport and coaching, a useful motivation technique is to regularly visualise achieving your goal and create a deep impression of how you will feel, what you will be able to do, how your life will be improved and a sense that all the effort in getting there was worth it. Yet it’s much easier to keep ourselves busy and avoid being left alone with our thoughts. In this respect our smartphones are a great comfort blanket, as is binge watching TV series and gaming. But in busying ourselves with instant gratification we are foregoing longer term benefits to our happiness, health and wellbeing. I encourage all those with New Year’s resolutions in 2025 to enjoy the journey as much as achieving success.

How are your energy levels? When you wake up in the morning, how do you feel? Are you looking forward to the challenges of the day ahead, what you might achieve and learn, what problems you might solve? Or do you have to motivate yourself to get up to start another day? It’s interesting that we don’t tend to notice gradual changes in our energy levels until, after a while, we realise that many of the things we do are out of habit and we are just going through the motions, rather than being fully present. For me, 2024 is the first year since the start of the Covid pandemic in early 2020 where I’ve felt that my energy has finally returned to pre-pandemic levels. As I train regularly, have a healthy lifestyle and have been lucky with my health, I get frequent feedback on where my fitness and energy levels are. But I think having the huge challenge of swimming the 11 miles of Lake Windermere in August gave me the extra focus I needed. Everyone’s circumstances will be different and the way you think and feel will be unique to you. However, if you are in reasonably good health and feel that your energy levels are not where they once were, then it may be that a limiting belief is holding you back. Here is my top mindset tip: Self-care is a strength not a weakness! It’s as important for leaders as it is for employees, and especially carers. As biological animals our brains and bodies are fully integrated. If you don’t get enough good quality sleep, have a healthy diet and exercise, you will not perform at your best or have good energy levels. In my talks, podcasts and workshops I encourage organisations and individuals to reframe self-care as a strength using the analogy of athletes, and stress the importance of rest and recovery breaks from screen activities. It might seem counterintuitive, but why wouldn’t you want to be your most productive and creative? Remember, changing your mindset will take time and requires many small positive steps to update your brains predictions about the world and your own capabilities. So, in the words of the late and greatly missed Dr Michael Mosley “if you were going to do just one thing to transform your health, what would it be?”  If you want to have more energy, then adopt the mindset of a business athlete and get some good quality sleep. #Coaching #mindset Ana Smith Technology Wellbeing Ltd

Digital Sustainability There is a growing unsustainability between how we have evolved as biological beings to survive and move about on earth, and the mostly unintended consequences of what we are creating through advances in science and technology. With so much of our personal and working lives spent interacting with screens, we are 20% less active than the 1960s and projected to be 35% less active by 2030. Inactivity accounts for 1 in 6 deaths (the same as smoking) and is responsible for over 20 chronic diseases. So we now have the challenge to invest in moving about more and exercising. We are the most connected people in history, but according to the US Surgeon General there is an epidemic in loneliness. And, with the widespread adoption of generative AI, we may not even be using our own words online. So we now have the challenge to invest in physical human connections. We are continuously being bombarded with external stimuli and this means we have less time to think and be connect with our internal selves. And it’s very easy to end up being a follower, rather than curating our own lives. It also depletes our ability to focus and our ability to pay attention. So, we now have the challenge to regularly disconnect and create the space to think for ourselves. But to do this is hard and takes conscious effort. A digital detox is simply a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets or computers. It’s an opportunity to reduce stress, restore focus and interact with the physical world. It can be as short as 20 seconds if you are resting your eyes from staring at a screen, a 10 minute rest and recovery break at work or a long weekend retreat in nature, and everything in-between. However you choose to use your online technology, regular digital detox breaks are an essential ingredient for our physical and mental health. If you want to be more productive and digitally sustainable, please contact me or visit https://lnkd.in/e-eBP4T3.

Cultural blindness in the age of AI I’ve always been fascinated by how familiarity with the world as we experience it can act like an invisibility cloak hiding things in plain sight. We might think that we pay attention, but so often the assumptions that we use are untested and outdated, and have more to do with the environment and culture that we have grown up in. In my 2019 article I used a slightly wider definition for Cultural Blindness which is as follows: Cultural Blindness or Bias is the inability to see something or understand how particular matters might be viewed because your culture and/or personal experience either blocks it out, or because it is sufficiently limiting to make it difficult to see alternatives and other perspectives. Not only does this apply to people with different cultural backgrounds, but also those whose place within a society is different due to gender, disability, neurodiversity, wealth, religion, social, ethnic or historical background. Interestingly, these effects can also be applied to organisations.  However, the cultural environment we experience is also being shaped by our online interactions, so can they now be applied to algorithms and AI? We already know that biases within generative AI automated decision-making systems can result from imbalanced training data, where subsets of the population are under/overrepresented, and the training data used is itself a product of past discrimination and cultural bias. The training data may also be incomplete, aged to the point where its validity might be questionable or generated from synthetic sources. However, how organisations and individuals interpret outputs from these systems might also have the potential to amplify existing cultural blindness, or even create new ones. For example the output of an AI system might be trusted without having any information on its quality or the system probability that it is correct. Similarly some health insurance requires a smartwatch to measure exercise in order to qualify for a discount/reward, however you are limited to the range of exercises that can be measured. Algorithms and AI are incredibly useful tools, however the more they replace human decision making, the more we should hold them to account. #Coaching #mindset  #AI Technology Wellbeing Ltd Ana Smith

The embodied language of moving forward Several years ago, I had arranged to go for a short run with a good friend of mine who had recently gone through a really tough time, and his mental health had suffered as a result. When we met it was clear something was amiss. He was upset, stressed and reliving some of the events that had made him so unwell. I persuaded him to still go for a short leisurely run, so that we could talk along the way. After just over a mile and at the top of a farm track surround by fields, hedges and the occasional oak tree, he stopped to take in the view. He was now feeling much calmer and more relaxed. It was as if by reconnecting with his body and physically moving, he had created distance between the issues and stresses that had weighted him down. He had literally put his problems behind him. Have you ever noticed that we express many ideas and concepts through the language of movement? For example, I’m feeling a bit down, I want to move forward, I’m up for the challenge etc. I’m sure that you can think of many more. It’s not an accident. The most complex thing that humans and other animals must do is to interact, move about and make sense of their environment. It’s an essential survival skill. We have evolved to have embodied cognition, which means that our brains and bodies are not separate like hardware and software, but inextricably linked. We see the world from our own embodied perspective, and predict and anticipate how our interactions with the environment will play on our senses. Our bodies influence how we think, feel and behave, and the physical experience of a brisk walk or run, particularly in nature, can not only reduce stress, but can also help us to create the perception of distance from our immediate situation. It enables us to feel that our problems are behind us, and that we are taking steps to move forward. In my talks and workshops, I use this idea and the analogy with endurance sport to enable individuals to consistently perform at their best. So, the next time you feel stressed, why not move to a much better place. #Coaching #mindset #stress #exercise Ana Smith  Technology Wellbeing Ltd

How we talk to ourselves matters In my TEDx talk with Ana Smith ‘Are we losing our human identity to technology?’ we used the expression ‘our past not only informs the present, it also informs our expectations of the future’. One of our references was the work of Anil Seth and his amazing book ‘Being You: A New Science of Consciousness’. It feels intuitive that all our life experiences should play a part in shaping how we think and behave in the present, as well as how we imagine possible futures. Camilla Nord’s book ‘The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health’, a must-read for anyone interested in wellbeing, also highlights that one of the functions of the brain is to predict the future, as well as the role of prediction errors in how the brain learns about the world. Similarly, Dr Charan Ranganath excellent book ‘Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How it Shapes Us’ further explores how we are shaped by our past and but won’t necessarily be aware of it. However, once we are aware of how our actions in the present and our expectations of the future might be limited by our past experiences, we have the opportunity to think differently. One of the tools we have is how we consciously talk to ourselves, often referred to as self-talk. I recently ran the Maldon half marathon, but my training only started in earnest at the end of August and was hit by a two-week Covid rest break. The course is undulating through the countryside, so I decided to start cautiously running at a slower pace than usual. After around five miles, and feeling comfortable, I picked up my pace. At around ten miles I remember thinking that it was going really well, and so I amplified these positive thoughts and feelings through self-talk and finished the race beating my last years’ time. Although I had an expectation that I would be able to finish the half marathon, having run many in the past, I’m sure that my self-talk played its part in the better-than-expected result. Technology Wellbeing Ltd Leadership Wellbeing Institute Ana Smith https://lnkd.in/ePpZnJZ4

Digital wellbeing – the long view Can you remember when the idea that spending long periods of time looking at screens was thought to be harmful to your health and wellbeing? Would it surprise you to know that it was before 1992? To put this into context Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989, the first SMS text message in the UK was sent on 3 December 1992 and the iPhone was launched in 2007. However, by 1992 such significant numbers of workers were using terminal and computer screens that it became necessary to introduce the ‘Health & Safety Digital Screen Equipment (DSE) Regulations’ of 1992. This was implemented in1993, amended in 2002 and still in force today. It states that incorrect use of DSE or poorly designed environments can lead to pain in the neck, shoulders, back, arms, wrists and hands as well as fatigue and eye strain. The regulations place a duty on employers to protect their workers from the health risks of working with display screen equipment, such as PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones. It applies to fixed workstation, mobile, home and hot-desking workers who use DSE daily for continuous periods of an hour or more. This means that employers need to carry out assessments, ensure that workers take breaks or changes of activity, provide training and provide an eye test if requested. A digital detox is simply a period of time during which a person refrains from using electronic devices such as smartphones, tablets or computers. It can be as short as 20 seconds if you are resting your eyes from staring at a screen, or as long as going offline for a weekend retreat in nature, and everything in-between. For organisations, having a strategy for digital detox can not only assist in meeting the DSE requirements for regular screen breaks and provision of training, but can also improve productivity, sense of belonging and increase resilience to stress and burnout. In 2018 I created The Digital Detox Coach to assist organisations and individuals in creating a healthier, more productive and sustainable relationship with technology. Please contact me if you need expert assistance. 

Why we should challenge ourselves - Reflection Eleven miles is an incredibly long way to swim, and six and a half hours is an awfully long time to be in a lake, but I completed one of my biggest endurance challenges so far and swam in the Aquasphere Chillswim Windermere 11 miles end-to-end 2024. It was much tougher, physically and psychologically, than I had imagined, and I had to call on some very deep reserves to get to the finish line. It will probably take some time to process all that I have learnt and how this will shape the things I do next, however here are my initial reflections: • The experience of twelve months of training is just as important as the final event. • It doesn’t matter how well you prepare, there is always more that you could have done, so you have to be flexible and adapt to changes on the day. • When the going gets really tough, remember why you are doing it and take one small step forward at a time. • And finally, challenges help us to grow and feel more alive, and what we think might not be possible might just turn out to be a self-limiting belief. The really good news is that with the generous donations of many friends and the Beeleigh Abbey Lodge, I have raised enough money so far to plant approximately 300 saplings as part of the National Trust ‘Plant 20 million trees by 2030’ appeal. Trees do so much to improve our lives. They are home to thousands of species of wildlife; they help to purify the air by taking in carbon dioxide and providing us with oxygen, and being in nature is essential for our mental health and wellbeing. We can all do something positive to leave the world in a better place for future generations. If anyone would like to donate, please use this link to my JustGiving page https://lnkd.in/eQE-F2d2 Image credits: @Chillswim.com @uk.Aquasphereswim.com @mickhall-photos.com If you would like to swim Coniston, Ullswater and/or Windermere in 2025 check out Chillswim.com. #Coaching #mindset National Trust Ana Smith Steve Smith Technology Wellbeing Ltd #climatechange

Live Longer by Taking a Digital Detox Colin Corby & Paddy Dhanda - Superpowers School Podcast It was an absolute pleasure to be the guest of Pardeep (Paddy) Dhanda on his excellent Superpowers School Podcast which promotes self improvement for technology professionals. In episode 152 we discussed the importance of digital detox as an enabler for us to live a healthy and sustainable life with technology. Check it out on https://lnkd.in/d5Ky_bdY #TechnologyLeadership #DigitalDetox #FutureOfWork #SelfRegulation #DistractionEconomy #Podcast #MentalWellbeing Ana Smith Leadership Wellbeing Institute Technology Wellbeing Ltd