Your smartphone can help you lead a healthy life.
Our busy lifestyles often lead us to ignore our health. Most of us try to make resolutions to switch to a healthier lifestyle every new year, but it's forgotten within the next few weeks. The good thing is that since we spend most of our day with a smartphone and smartphone brands have now integrated tools and features to help the users focus on health. Here are some of the features you should start using to stay healthy:
Tack and Limit Usage
We often don't realize how much time we spend on our phones. Using the phone for long hours restricts your physical activity and therefore increases the chances of diabetes and heart disease, among other things. You can easily keep track of your smartphone usage by going to Settings > Digital Wellbeing.
In this section, your phone shows you're a graph of the time you spent on your device categorized as per the apps that you use. Once you understand your usage, you can set time limits for your apps so that you spend less time on your phone. It also offers a focus mode – when enabled, it blocks notifications from all apps to not get distracted while doing any physical activity.
Guided Breathing
Breathing properly has multiple health effects, including reducing stress, lowering blood pressure and bring your heart rate down. While there are numerous apps available to install on your device for guided breathing, only Oppo offers the feature preloaded in its ColorOS operating system. You need to launch the Oppo Relax app on your phone and go to the Breathing section. From here, you need to follow the onscreen instructions guided breathing instruction to inhale and exhale. Once you complete the guided breathing, you will immediately notice feeling calmer than before.
Bedtime Mode
This is another feature that is available on all Android smartphones. Almost all of us have the habit of checking our smartphones before going to bed. This impacts our health as using a phone at bedtime has been linked to fatigue and impacts sleep quality. You can go to Settings > Digital WellBeing and tap on this dedicated mode called Bed Time or Wind down in some devices to enable it and set a schedule for it. Once enabled, it turns your phone screen into grayscale (black and white), which reduces eye strain and mutes all incoming notifications so that you can get a distraction-free peaceful sleep.
White Noise Generator
White noise is used for ambient and natural sounds that can help you relax your mind and get calm. This leads to an overall improvement in health as you can focus better and get a peaceful sleep. Again, several apps offer you the option to play white noise on your smartphone. However, if you are an Oppo smartphone user, then the feature comes preloaded on your device with the Oppo Relax app.
You can choose from various ambient noises to play in the background, such as jungle, seashore, stormy night etc. With the updated Oppo Relax 2.0 app in ColorOS 11, you also have the option to play the sounds of various cities across the world. These sounds can be used for focusing on work, meditation or sleep.
Track Your Activity
One of the most recommended methods to stay fit is to be active. Being active does not mean that you have to go to a gym to exercise; walking every day also counts as an activity, and your smartphone can help you keep track. Most smartphones today have multiple hardware sensors that can be used to track your daily activity. Some smartphones integrate the step counter feature in the phone's OS, such as Honor, Samsung, Oppo etc. You can enable this feature on different phones through their method.
In Samsung phones, you need to enable it from the Samsung Health app, while for Oppo phones, users can enable it through Smart Assistant built-in ColorOS. Once enabled, you can set a target goal and view how many steps you walk every day – this also acts as a motivation to do more physical activity to meet your activity target.
