It is interesting how much time we spend talking about being healthy. We discuss healthy food, weight, sleep, exercise, mental wellbeing and healthy ageing. Yet despite having more health information than any previous generation, living healthily still seems difficult.
Health advice is everywhere. Doctors, dietitians, trainers, social-media influencers, wearables, health apps and artificial intelligence all tell us what may be good for us.
Yet one message remains remarkably consistent: move more.
The World Health Organization recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each week. Yet around 31% of adults worldwide — about 1.8 billion people — were insufficiently active in 2022.
So the question is not whether we know exercise is important.
We already know.
The real question is why knowledge does not always translate into behaviour.
Physical activity once happened naturally. People walked more, climbed stairs, had more physically demanding jobs and children spent more time outdoors. Modern life has gradually removed much of this movement. We drive instead of walking. Food and shopping arrive at the door. Meetings happen online. Entertainment comes through a screen. We have created an interesting situation: we removed movement from daily life and then created a separate industry to put exercise back into it. Gyms and organised exercise are valuable, but perhaps movement also needs to become part of normal life again.
Another major change is the amount of information competing for our attention. Ofcom's 2025 Online Nation report found that UK adults spent around 4 hours and 30 minutes a day online on personal devices, excluding work-related use. That is more than 31 hours a week. Not all of this time is wasted. We work, communicate, learn and manage our lives online. But it raises a question:
How much of the information we consume actually changes anything?
We can spend hours following conflicts, elections, markets and global events over which we have little direct control. Meanwhile, small actions can influence our own health — activity, sleep, diet, alcohol intake, weight and blood pressure. Sometimes we know more about what happened thousands of miles away this morning than what has happened to our own health over the last six months.
Health has joined this information explosion. Search engines provide instant medical information. Social media multiplies health advice. Wearables generate continuous data. Artificial intelligence can answer health questions within seconds. But there is a difference between information and useful information. Repeatedly searching every possible explanation for a symptom may increase rather than reduce anxiety. Research on cyberchondria shows an association between excessive online health searching and health anxiety.
The same principle applies to health data. Knowing that you walked 4,732 steps is data. Knowing your heart rate every few minutes is data. Knowing every disease associated with a headache is information. The important question is:
What are you going to do differently because you know it?
The next stage of digital health should not simply be about generating more data. It should help people identify the information that genuinely matters and turn it into action. For one person, that might mean noticing that blood pressure is rising. For another, recognising that physical activity has fallen. For someone taking several medicines, having an accurate and accessible medication history may be more useful than another stream of wellness statistics. Health information becomes valuable when it helps us understand, decide or act. Perhaps we should ask three simple questions:
Is this information relevant to me?
Can I do anything with it?
Will it improve a decision, behaviour or outcome?
Technology has brought enormous benefits. The challenge is using it without allowing information to replace action. Perhaps the measure of a healthy modern life should not be how much health information we collect or how many statistics our devices display. Perhaps it should be simpler.
Did I move enough today?
Did I sleep reasonably well?
Do I understand the conditions and medicines that actually affect me?
And most importantly:
Did the information I consumed help me do something useful for my health?
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