Health isn’t what it used to be – namely the absence of being sick.

Ask any teenager today what it means to them to be healthy, and you’re likely to hear about the vast array of areas in their lives they are “working on”.

This can include emotional health, aesthetic health, fitness, nutrition, social health, financial health, social media health, mental health, spiritual health … the list goes on.

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, health wasn’t something I or my friends thought about much. We took it for granted it was either something you had, or were unfortunate to have lost.

In contrast, today’s young people view health as something they can “grow” and should already be working on. Health has become an investment. And, through a process of expansion I call “healthization”, it has become an increasingly diverse one.

In my recent research, I asked 235 young New Zealanders aged 14–24 to talk about how they use digital technology as part of understanding their health. The results inform my recent book, Healthization: Turning Life into Health.

Some of the results were not unexpected: young people discussed googling their symptoms and self-diagnosing anything from a sore throat to a miscarriage.

They also........

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