In 2025, We’re Healing From the Inside-Out. Will Technology Help Us or Hurt Us?

It’s never been easier to get under your skin, but are we going deep enough?

Wearable health trackers like smart watches and rings of wisdom continue their exploration of how our bodies work. Gluco monitors are continuous – which hit the “normal” market in the US in 2024 with a license for people without diabetes – offers a closer look at our metabolic health, still elevated. to be ignored aspect of health for many Americans.

But as we fill our carts with technology and invest in programs in the name of good health, are we becoming healthier? In others cases, yes. But it is possible, or perhaps, that what we want to pursue most, we cannot. At least, not at this point.

Dr. Dave Rabin, a psychologist and psychiatrist, has spent 20 years studying stress and what he calls “chronic fatigue.” He has experience in non-therapeutic areas such as psychedelic research, and is currently the executive director of Apollo Neuroa wearable company that aims to improve your health by sending vibrating pulses through your skin. His work has led him to believe that chronic trauma is at the root of many of our health problems, both mental and physical. They describe unrealized risks as one big or important problem, after which you are not helped.

According to Rabin, the way most people use technology at the moment is not in our favor, and more work is needed to solve our health problems. Here’s why: the purpose and goal of most technology and software on the market is to sell us things and “distract” us from our thinking. In addition, we may have programmed ourselves to respond to stress after response to stress under the pile of information from our cell phones, health tracking apps and everything else that dominates our head and time. Yes, even in the name of good health.

“Ultimately we teach ourselves to have too much anxiety – people are not being taught how to use it properly,” Rabin said. “Everything about healing starts with hearing your feelings, facing your pain and not avoiding it.”

An argument can be made that we experience pain (physical or psychological) every time we open an app or a belt on a piece of clothing that is meant to help us manage our health or improve our health. But being “healthy” requires us to connect our dots and make sure we’re focusing on the health benefits that match our version of “good” — whatever that may be.

As we look forward to a healthy 2025, we must continue to ask ourselves whether our technology is changing our lives or taking us away from them. We should also think about asking a few questions about the technology available to help us stay healthy and a lot of questions about it Why? and either use it first. Fortunately, we have some good health tools that have already been developed.

“A lot of people think of their phones and their technology as something that forces them, but that’s not what technology is supposed to do,” Rabin said. “Technology should be useful to people.”

Here are some of the most exciting things to watch out for in 2025 and how you can make a difference in your health.

Healthy brain, healthy ageing: can technology connect the dots?

Interest in “healthy ageing,” the term for spending more time in good health rather than just living longer, was palpable in 2024 — it was a whole group. In 2025, we can expect healthy aging to enter the mainstream additionsbut one area we need to focus on to keep the Joneses healthy is brain health. Dr. Daniel Friedmanneurologist at NYU Langone Health and director of the Division of Epilepsy, called the technological advances in the name of brain health “an interesting area of ​​research” but one that has not been fully developed.

In particular, Friedman pointed to research on how people use phones and consumer devices — how quickly they type, how they communicate with each other and the complexity of their text — as “predictors” of mental health problems like dementia.

Researchers at Dartmouthfor example, they developed an app called RealVision that monitors how users interact with their phone through eye contact and quick response time, which can detect dementia in its early days. Another study published in 2024 also looked at data collected from mobile phones, finding older adults at risk of dementia based on navigational methods (ie, walking).

It may take time for technological developments to touch consumer devices in a way that will benefit people’s lives in terms of health advice.

“You’d probably be frustrated and scared if your phone told you, ‘Hey, by the way, you have a 20% risk of developing dementia in the next 10 years,'” Friedman said.

Meanwhile, he emphasizes the importance of staying on top of the variables we know can contribute to the development of dementia or the risk of brain health. This includes enough sleepmove your body more often, exercise more often to hear and vision health making sure your brain receives the kind of information it needs to stay active and eat healthy foods.

Fuel for the mind and body: an ongoing focus on nutrition

The need for a balanced diet full of essential nutrients is as old as time, but 2024 saw a special focus on nutrition and an increase in interest around the concept of “food as medicine.”

2025 will only build on this. This year, for example, we will see a to renovate of the dietary guidelines in the US, which is often the sample food shown support a healthy heartand less foods such as red meat and highly processed foods. New instructions focus on plant-based proteins, such as beans and lentils, vegetables and fruits.

Another area of ​​nutrition and health that will continue to build in 2025 is the gut microbiome. This area continues to grow due to its connection to metabolic health, skin health and more. Genetics, medications and lifestyle affect gut health, but the most important factor is diet and the foods we eat.

Federica Amati, a clinical research scientist and nutritionist for a health science and home gut testing company. ZOEtold us that research coming in the pipeline will help seal the deal by increasing people’s awareness of what they eat and how it affects their gut health (and therefore, their overall health).

“We’re getting to the point where we can use gut microbiome information to understand what people are eating,” Amati said. ZOE’s upcoming collaboration with Mass General Hospital will investigate potential links between specific types of gut bacteria and risk factors colorectal cancer in adults. These results may have significant implications for the development of people who experience this disease.

Gut health also has a direct relationship to inflammation, which, month after month, continues to morph not into a buzzword but an important negative that, in many cases, leads to or is accompanied by autoimmune diseases or chronic, worse than necessary. They say that they explained that inflammation is important to help us when we are sick, to catch diseases or, to a lesser extent, to perform other daily tasks. The problem is when it is chronic and continues to freeze for months or years, and it stays has been associated with cancer, heart disease, diabetes and infertility.

“When we think of metabolic health we think of chronic disease, inflammation and the fire that causes it,” he said. There is a direct connection between good health and solid food, along with reduce inflammatory foods such as processed oils found in store-bought cooking, alcohol and red meat, Amati gave as examples. Fiber, as it is, benefits the gut microbiome and is anti-inflammatory.

Although it does not have a cover and does not correspond to the technical definition, the focus on fiber and getting more of it in our diet through whole foods, will only increase in 2025.

“It’s not rocket science, but it’s not happening.”

Overall health: how to be healthy in 2025

Rabin, who works with mind control through his company, says the new in vagus nerve impulse control stimulator space may be in 2025. Perhaps most interesting, Rabin said that technology will soon continue to close some of the health gaps wearing data can create.

“You’re going to see a lot of things coming out that will use closed-loop AI,” Rabin said.

This means that in the future, we will see modern technology that “creates a signature” of our bodies, directly explaining how our health data looks like when we feel good and when we are depressed. This can be added to A combination of Apollo and Oura Ringwhich are already available to integrate the mind and body by incorporating sophisticated health information such as heart rate variability and stress-reducing products.

Another thing to keep in mind in 2025 is how you’re letting information into your life or how consumer technology fits you. Dr. Ryan Sultana psychologist who runs a bioinformatics lab at Columbia University, said that one way to reduce stress around tech is to remember if it helps you stay healthy. It looks simple enough, but the way the software is designed doesn’t make it look good.

“Many programs are very information-heavy,” Sultan said.

But should we rely on technology to help us stay healthy in 2025? The answer may depend on whether it actually helps us achieve our health goals by ultimately getting us there. The idea that we should look at the source of disease from a holistic perspective, rather than symptoms, is new in Western medicine but comes from healing from Eastern culture. For example, hygiene practices such as leisure activity continue to capture and expand the growing body of evidence for their potential in managing stress.

In 2025, we may have a lot of technology that promises to benefit our health, but that doesn’t mean it’s a miracle cure or that we should use it all. Although health technology is widely developed and offered OTC, health is still very personal, and what you use to supplement should be based on what is best for your body. and thoughts.

In other words, in a world full of things that fight for every inch of our eyes and every inch of our brains, we don’t have to be selective. We owe it to our health.