Physical Well-being
For physical well-being, I have actually just recently started using a phone app called Pikmin Bloom, which counts all of your steps and puts the total toward goals such as maintaining daily activity and participating through in-game play. The artistic aspect of this phone app is present in the “log” feature, which is a personalized diary page representing each day. Logs are automatically created for every day and includes your cumulative step count for that 24-hour period with cute graphics of new digital plants that you grew or picked, and any photos or text you may want to add onto its collage-like form.
As someone who loves journaling of all kinds, but is often too fatigued to engage in it more frequently, this feature of the app has served as an excellent way for me to digitally journal with ease while also getting physical exercise! If anything, I can always come back to the diary pages—for any specific days—at a later time to add more images and/or text. It also makes it much easier to both track and compare this information over time (ie. seeing your step count average for the current week versus last week), which can be digested quickly with simple visuals.
Moreover, contained in these logs is an opportunity to make a ritual of outdoor activity (mainly walking) by transforming my current unproductive phone usage into a much greater and practical habit that directly influences the improvement of my health. In this case, the phone app has not only given me the impetus to start exercising outdoors again, but it has also pushed me to explore new walking routes and nearby neighborhoods, get vitamin D from the sun more consistently, and continue finding increasingly healthier means by which I can challenge myself. I have also noticed my passion to take photographs has returned, heightening my awareness of every little treasure on these walks that beckons to be captured as a digital snapshot. This alone restores me in ways that no medicine can.
Credits:
(Ray Mendoza, 2022)