Technology performs an enormous position in our every day lives. Between 2020 and 2022, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, every day common display time elevated 5 hours per individual per day. This resulted in a variety of 11.1 to as much as 17 hours on display per day for many who labored remotely. But is all this time with know-how good for us?

St. Olaf College alumnus Tyler Rice ’17 is keen about figuring out how know-how helps or hinders our psychological wellness. He co-founded the Digital Wellness Institute, which helps a whole bunch of organizations and people optimize their digital utilization to advertise psychological well being and productiveness whereas embracing a optimistic digital tradition. 

His work is quickly gaining consideration. He was invited to talk on the World Happiness Summit in Lake Como, Italy, in March, the place he offered on the ways in which digital well-being will be deployed as an worker wellness technique to enhance productiveness, retention, and cut back despair and nervousness within the office. He spoke to an viewers of happiness specialists, company leaders, professors, and economists equivalent to Lord Richard Layard, co-editor of the World Happiness Report; Jen Fisher, the chief well-being officer at Deloitte; and Lord Gus O’Donnell, former cupboard secretary and head of the British Civil Service. For International Digital Wellness Day this May, Rice and the remainder of the Digital Wellness Institute crew introduced the primary Certified Digitally Well Workplace™ and University™ and he additionally lately authored an Impact Study exploring how purposeful digital habits enhance worker psychological well being, retention, and productiveness.

Developing a profession in digital wellness
Rice took a job as a advisor at UnitedHealthcare after commencement, and he began to note specific tendencies with psychological healthcare that piqued his curiosity. “We took all of the nations’ largest self-insured companies and ran them through a predictive claims engine to show them what the No. 1 spend in their employee population was projected to be over the next 10 years — and 99 percent of the time, it was mental health,” Rice says. This statistic deeply anxious Rice. He seemed on the huge checklist of employer wellness advantages these corporations provided and requested himself, “Why then is this mental health crisis continuing to grow and gain in traction?”

To get solutions, Rice seemed inward — and upon inspecting his personal experiences, he found emotions of digital burnout. He realized that know-how performed an enormous position on this development. “When I was at work, I spent my day behind a screen. And then when I went home to live with my roommates (who were also Ole grads) we all sat in our living room, opened up our laptops and did more work for an extra four hours at night. And when we weren’t doing that? You guessed it … We were scrolling through social media on our own personal digital devices,” he says. 

Rice started to critically look at the human relationship with the display. “I think the feeling of being always ‘on’ and the compulsion to live our lives through screens is actually leading to a breakdown in community, increased rates of mental health issues, lower rates of productivity, and impaired sleep and physical health,” he says.

I believe the sensation of being at all times ‘on’ and the compulsion to stay our lives by screens is definitely resulting in a breakdown in group, elevated charges of psychological well being points, decrease charges of productiveness, and impaired sleep and bodily well being.Tyler Rice ’17

This realization pushed him to enroll in Stanford’s Idea-to-Market Incubator, the place for the following six months he created a enterprise case for digital wellness at each workplaces and colleges. Soon after, he met Amy Blankson and Nina Hersher, and the three of them ended up co-founding the Digital Wellness Institute in 2020.

Measuring the affect of know-how
At the Digital Wellness Institute, Rice and his crew are creating a brand new methodology of fascinated about and measuring digital wellness and the affect of know-how on our well being, happiness, and satisfaction. One of the ways in which they’re doing that is by creating the trade’s first set of requirements for certifying and recognizing each Digitally Well Workplaces™ and Digitally Well Colleges and Universities™. An instance of this customary is measuring the digital well-being of scholars and workers by the Digital Flourishing Survey, an evaluation that the Digital Wellness Institute created to get people — together with school college students — to mirror on their tech utilization.

“I remember when I was a first-year at St. Olaf and we received emails about alcohol abuse awareness training and sexual assault prevention training. Those kinds of training are so important,” Rice says. “We should also be teaching students how to manage their digital lives when they enter campus. How can they build community? How can they build awareness around the ways that tech is either impairing or supporting their connection, their productivity, and their well-being?”

This is just not the one approach that St. Olaf has influenced Rice’s path. He highlights that the Hill’s give attention to group was additionally a driving pressure for his work. When he graduated from St. Olaf in 2017, he discovered that he needed to be much more intentional about creating group off the Hill. “If we let our work lives and our time spent on screen completely take over our days and we choose to build a community virtually, I think we lose an important aspect of what it means to be human, what it means to be flourishing,” Rice says. “So I really credit St. Olaf for really instilling in me the importance of community and knowing what it feels like to have that support, knowing what it means to be a part of a living and learning community.”

If we let our work lives and our time spent on display utterly take over our days and we select to construct a group nearly, I believe we lose an vital facet of what it means to be human, what it means to be flourishing. So I actually credit score St. Olaf for actually instilling in me the significance of group and understanding what it feels wish to have that assist, understanding what it means to be part of a residing and studying group.Tyler Rice ’17

Additionally, Rice discovered {that a} liberal arts schooling actually ready him for all times outdoors campus. From his present position because the Chief Operating Officer of the Digital Wellness Institute to his first position out of faculty as a advisor, he’s needed to put on many hats and do issues he had by no means finished earlier than, and his liberal arts schooling emboldened him throughout his journey. “Without my liberal arts background, without that confidence to ‘learn how to learn’ and find a solution, I would have been afraid to take risks,” Rice says. “I would have been afraid to think about things in a way that’s not just binary. St. Olaf empowered me to think outside of the box, look at things through more than just one lens, and engage with uncertainty.”

Rice additionally had the possibility to check overseas, an expertise he says was transformative. While at St. Olaf, Rice was a political science main with concentrations in administration and Nordic research, and he participated in a study-abroad program in New Zealand centered on administration research. “Going to New Zealand and studying innovation there, I learned as much in that class as I did in the Stanford incubator and even some of my graduate level courses at NYU,” says Rice, who’s presently ending his Master of Public Administration (MPA) diploma at New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service. “It really prepared me to be an entrepreneur.”

For Rice, this work on digital wellness isn’t just a job — it’s his vocation. He says, “This aligns with my vocation because it feeds my drive for social impact. Through digital wellness, we are not only addressing the mental health crisis, but empowering students — and individuals of all ages — to learn how to maximize the benefits of technology while mitigating its harms.”

Rice highlights, nevertheless, that know-how doesn’t solely negatively have an effect on our well-being. “Happiness and technology are interrelated. What we are doing is bringing awareness to the ways our tech usage impairs our happiness, but also the ways it improves our happiness,” he says. “It’s not a one-directional thing.”