Digital wellness
Overview
Digital wellness is a general term for efforts to keep your relationship with digital devices and online services healthy and maintain your physical and mental health. While a digital detox focuses on "stepping away," digital wellness aims for "getting along well." Instead of quitting social media completely, you find a way of using it that feels comfortable for you, enjoying the benefits of technology while keeping its harms to a minimum.
Digital wellness for question box owners
Running a question box is an activity where practicing digital wellness matters. A question box is fun, but it also involves things that threaten your mental health, such as emotional labor, dealing with negative questions, struggling with the need for approval, and more screen time.
Running a question box with digital wellness in mind means practicing the principles of "enjoy it when it's fun," "take a break when it's hard," "keep your own pace," and "don't let the numbers push you around." These sound obvious, but keeping them up amid the addictiveness of social media and your followers' expectations is not easy.
Digital wellness checklist
We recommend regularly checking whether running your question box is harming your health. If several of the following apply to you, take it as a cue to rethink how you run it.
You check every hour to see whether new questions have come in. You can't get a nasty question out of your head, and it's getting in the way of daily life. You worry so much about the like counts on your answers that you can't focus on anything else. You're cutting back on sleep for your question box. You want to close your question box, but you can't because you're afraid of how your followers will react. These may be signs that your relationship with your question box has become unhealthy.
Running a question box sustainably
From a digital wellness point of view, the goal is to run your question box "sustainably." Instead of burning out in a short time, you create a state where you can keep it up happily for months or years.
To do that, it's important to treat your question box as a "hobby," not an "obligation." You do a hobby because it's fun, and when it stops being fun, you can take a break. Put what you enjoy ahead of living up to your followers' expectations.