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THE year is 2032 and you are at the cutting edge of a revolution. You have just received a blueprint for your personal digital diet. It prescribes a menu of tweaks to your online behaviour that will keep “Zoom fatigue” at bay, curb mindless scrolling and fill your social media interactions with meaning. There is even a regular dose of gaming to boost working memory and attention. Welcome to a new life of digital contentment.

Such a future may seem far-fetched, but hand-tailored digital prescriptions could be a reality within a decade, according to those working to understand how the internet affects our health and happiness. For many years, perceived links between screen time and well-being have fuelled widespread fears that digital technology is harmful to us. Now, there is a growing realisation that quality matters more than quantity, and that our focus on screen time is misguided.

Drawing parallels between what we consume online and the foods we eat turns out to be a more fruitful approach. Just as salads are better for us than cream buns, so some aspects of our digital diet are more nourishing than others. However, what constitutes healthy eating differs from person to person depending on our physiology and, likewise, there is no such thing as a universal healthy digital diet. In future, a personalised digital prescription could take all of this into account. For now, though, researchers scrutinising what we consume online are starting to distinguish the healthy from the not so healthy. In doing so, they are identifying online habits you can adopt to improve your digital diet and well-being.

One prominent critic of the supposed link between time spent online and poor well-being is . “The assumption was that time would be the unit of importance and that we could put limits on screen time as we have for units of alcohol,” she says. “But there is very little evidence of a clear dose-response relationship”

Orben outlined her argument in a paper published in 2021, in which she also . Since then, Orben and her colleagues have shown that – in terms of diet, equivalent to eating potatoes, they concluded, which can, of course, be eaten safely in moderate quantities. Meanwhile, a growing number of researchers now see limiting screen time as a simplistic approach to managing our well-being. “It is the equivalent to asking: is food good for you? And ignoring what exactly is being eaten, who is eating and what else they have going on at school, work or home,” says Isabela Granic at McMaster University in Canada.

To be clear, nobody denies that excessive internet use can be harmful for some people. Research shows that those most susceptible to online addictive behaviours tend to have a history of , and may even have that affect how the “happy” hormones, dopamine and serotonin, signal in the brain. Being younger and male . And social media can undermine life satisfaction : on average, males are most sensitive at age 14, 15 and 19, and females at age 11 to 13, and 19.

Also, there is no doubt that some internet platforms are designed to draw us in. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram do this through likes and positive comments, which tap into a “feels better” neural circuit in the reward centre of the brain. This reward processing brings pleasure and alleviates negative moods, but according to some researchers, it could become addictive.

However, viewing problematic social media use in terms of addiction can be stigmatising, and Orben believes that, for most people, the diet analogy is a better way of looking at the problem. She sees social media platforms as the digital equivalent of carbohydrates because they come in many varieties, with some delivering the equivalent of a sugar high. We may be tempted to overindulge in carbs, but this isn’t generally seen as addiction and the same goes for social media overuse.

Spacing out

Some researchers believe we would do better to think in terms of a mental state associated with daydreaming or listening to music. Called , it involves a narrowing in attention that excludes thoughts, feelings, memories and awareness of the external world, including the passage of time. As a result, dissociation reduces self-awareness and reflection so that people only realise they have “spaced out” after the fact.

Research by at the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues suggests that social media platforms seem to induce this state, leading some people to scroll for longer than they would like. The team recruited 43 participants to spend a month accessing Twitter using a custom-built app called Chirp.

Throughout the study, participants were asked how strongly they agreed, on a scale of 1 to 5, with the statement “I am currently using Chirp without really paying attention to what I am doing”. This revealed that 42 per cent of participants dissociated for a third of the time they spent on Chirp. Follow-up interviews with 11 of them found that thoughtless scrolling could provoke feelings of regret.

The team then tested whether adding features to Chirp could reduce dissociation. Two add-ons – screen-time notifications and statistical displays of usage patterns – worked for some people. But the most successful approaches entailed cutting news feeds into smaller portions. One tool forced users to filter content into lists such as “friends” and “sports” instead of browsing the unfiltered home news feed. Another flagged up previously viewed content in reading history lists. Used together, these significantly reduced dissociation. What’s more, although people spent just as long on Chirp, they enjoyed the app more.

“Lists allow the content you’re consuming to be in much smaller chunks, helping you to disengage from mindless scrolling,” says Baughan. “If you’re feeling unhappy with your social media use, this certainly seems to be worth trying.” The good news is that similar lists are already available on and , although they aren’t a default setting.

, a psychologist based in Sydney, Australia, also believes we can get more from our time online without necessarily consuming less. “We need to find ways to tune into our digital hunger and eat intuitively,” says Brewer. She identifies three steps to reduce the regret that people often feel from online overindulgence. The first is to be mindful – to consider your intentions before you go online. The second is to look for meaning – to only read or participate in things that align with your goals and contribute positively to your life and overall sense of wellness. “And lastly, try to moderate your actions. Before you go to comment or post something on social media, ask yourself what might happen if you refrained from doing so,” she says.

Why mindset matters

Unsurprisingly, many scientists agree that reflection and mindfulness can help us avoid mindless scrolling. But it is also important to avoid being too hard on yourself if you haven’t yet found the sweet spot. “My hunch is that the guilt and stigma we feel about using technology probably has a worse effect on well-being than any effects of the digital activity itself,” says Granic. She plans to explore how our social media experience is affected by having either a negative or positive mindset.

There is already evidence that mindset matters when it comes to online gaming. at the University of Oxford and his colleagues analysed six weeks of video-gaming data from nearly 39,000 people. They studied seven games, including Animal Crossing: New horizons and Gran Turismo Sport. By surveying the participants every two weeks, the team found that people who saw gaming as a means to relax and socialise were , while those who felt a compulsion to play, for example due to peer pressure or a need to achieve certain gaming goals, were less satisfied with their experience. “If you see it in a positive way, that will have a positive impact on your well-being,” says Przybylski.

The study also provided the strongest evidence yet that how long you spend gaming has no significant impact on your well-being. “Our study really allowed us to look for a causal link between actual time spent playing games and well-being over the six weeks and, ultimately, we found none,” he says.

Better still, there is growing evidence that playing certain video games can boost your cognitive skills. Previous studies have found links between online gaming and improvements in visual-processing skills, attention and working memory. However, most didn’t account for potentially confounding factors, such as participants’ socioeconomic status or baseline intelligence.

in the Netherlands and his colleagues controlled for these factors in a recent study, which analysed data from thousands of children to reveal that spending two years later, compared to those who didn’t game. Sauce speculates that these cognitive benefits could eventually translate to better well-being. “Previous studies have shown that IQ predicts future happiness, it predicts future marital satisfaction, it predicts future longevity,” he says.

Sauce’s team didn’t explore whether different game genres have distinct cognitive effects. However, we already know that shooter games are especially good at improving people’s ability to and , without making them more impulsive. If other genres prove to have specific benefits, Sauce believes we could use this information to help improve our digital diet. “If we could have nutritional labels on video games like we do for foods – that say how much this or that game increases attention, visual-spatial abilities or boosts long-term memory – that could be really useful to inform your choices,” he says.

People are free to decide whether or not to spend time gaming and on social media, but, increasingly, we are compelled to engage in another potentially problematic online activity: videoconferencing. Research shows that and creativity. This will ring true if you have ever experienced “Zoom fatigue”, the feeling of exhaustion associated with video calls. Recent research indicates that cutting the length of such calls or, better yet, taking more breaks between meetings, reduces related tiredness. The study, by at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and her colleagues, also suggests several .

The researchers created a scale that addressed aspects of mental, visual, social, motivational and emotional fatigue while videoconferencing. Their survey of more than 10,000 people revealed that the strongest cause of fatigue was feeling physically trapped in the camera’s field of view. Fauville suggests moving further away from your camera and using a standing desk to increase your range of movement during a call.

Another factor was “hypergaze”. “During video calls, large faces are constantly staring at you,” she says. “This hypergaze and apparent physical proximity between people is perceived by the brain as a situation that would lead typically to mating or conflict.” Shrinking the size of your video-call window can help avoid this.

Then there is mirror anxiety – the negative feeling associated with watching oneself on screen. Women are especially prone to this, which might help explain why they tended to experience more “Zoom fatigue” than men. Fauville suggests turning off the self-view pane after you first enter a video call and switching off your video when you can. There’s another good reason to do the latter. “In a video call, you have to intensify your gestures and work harder to interpret others’ non-verbal cues, which is mentally demanding,” says Fauville. In fact, she thinks that audio-only calls should be the default. “It was an assumption that being able to see each other online would make it feel more natural, but perhaps we’ve got ahead of ourselves,” she says.

The human screenome

Certainly, when it comes to understanding the wider impacts of digital technology on well-being, there is still a lot we don’t know. Filling these gaps is tricky, not least because it requires social media and online gaming companies to share more of their real-world data than they currently do.

Doubtful that this will happen, researchers at Stanford University in California have launched the , an initiative that uses specially designed software to collect data from volunteers’ phones by recording, encrypting and transmitting screenshots every 5 seconds whenever a device is on. By capturing the moment-to-moment changes on a person’s screen, the researchers in higher resolution than ever before.

Przybylski is more optimistic that online companies will be forthcoming with their data, making personalised prescriptions for healthy digital diets possible sooner than you might think. This would entail monitoring a person’s digital habits and well-being, predicting the effects of their actions and prescribing behavioural changes to maximise their future happiness and productivity. “If we fund it appropriately and treat it like the Human Genome Project, but for our online social lives, it could happen in a decade,” he says.