Digital Habits: Lifestyle Apps are Taking Over My Life
Almost every other day I hear about how I should be using a different lifestyle tracking app. Whether I’m reading a magazine and they’re promoting a new app to track menstrual cycles, or a friend is telling me about this amazing new fitness app they’re using to count calories and exercise, these lifestyle apps seem like the magic key to living a #blessed life. And I fall for it. Every time.
My phone screen is cluttered with apps for tracking my spending, apps for tracking my sleeping habits, recipe apps, apps for logging the food I eat so I can count my calories. And my personal favorite is an app that’s supposed to shame me into exercising more by sending me passive aggressive reminders if I don’t log a workout session that day.
And I’m not the only one! When I talk to my friends, they too feel the pressure to use their digital habits and practices as a source for self improvement and as a way to demonstrate that improvement publicly. The most popular of these lifestyle apps are fitness trackers. According to Fitness Magazine, “your smartphone has become just as essential to your healthy living as your favorite pair of running shoes.” Going on a run is great, but did you really go if don’t have the data to back it up?
What prompts this urge to almost obsessively track our lives and then boast about it on social media? One answer might be the social pressure from our peer group. As Päivi Eriksson, Elina Henttonen and Susan Meriläinen discuss in Ethnographic Field Notes and Reflexivity, social groups are important because we “derive at least part of our identities from these groups. Identity formation in relation to groups takes place in three stages: social categorization, social identification and comparison. When developing the social identity of the group, the members construct an in-group (we) and various out-groups (others).” If your whole social group is using a fitness app, you are more likely to use it because you don’t want to feel left out. These apps are also often connected to a social platform so add in the ability to measure yourself against your friends and suddenly you’re not only working to improve yourself but also to compete against others.
But is this type of digital behavior actually healthy? Several studies have debunked the idea that downloading a fitness tracker will suddenly make you a pillar of health. In fact, according to NPR, a study showed that people who relied on tracking devices actually lost less weight than people who did not use them. They found that fitness trackers were really only beneficial to people who were already practicing healthy habits. But this doesn’t seem to matter to some of the people who use fitness apps. It appears the ability to compare your workout to your friends’, document your success on social media,and stay on trend is enough to keep people downloading the apps. Ultimately, the physical benefits to digitally monitoring your exercise might not be real, but the social benefits are definitely are.
