During your vacation, you often check your phone frequently. In the morning, as soon as you wake up, the first thing you do is check your work emails. You get stressed when your tablet or smartphone battery runs out. You get annoyed when a hotel doesn't have Wi-Fi. And you feel a little bit handicapped if you go somewhere where there's no signal.
If all or most of these are happening to you, consider that they are considered typical signs of a syndrome that experts call “always on stress.” That is, a chronic dependence on portable electronic devices, which keep each of us always connected, but also always on the… edge.
One of the victims of this modern "disease" is American programmer Kevin Holes from Pittsburgh. But when he realized that he was spending almost all his time in front of his smartphone screen, devoting less and less time to his family and friends, he decided to literally take matters into his own hands.
He created the Moment application, thus enabling himself and other users to record the time they spend in front of the screen of a portable electronic device and finally set limits on... abuses, e.g. by receiving notifications when they exceed them.
Even large companies are now recognizing the need for such a hedge. The German car manufacturer Daimler, for example, recently launched a program to automatically delete company emails from the accounts of its employees who are on leave. In practice, it was the management itself that decided to turn off the "switch" in these cases. And there is a good reason for this.
"The negative effects of the 'always on' syndrome are that the mind never rests, nor does the body, so the sufferer is in a state of permanent stress," explains Dr. Christine Grant, a psychologist at the Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement at Coventry University in England, to the BBC.
"And the more tired someone is, the more easily they make mistakes," he points out, as in these cases "one is sick both mentally and physically. Anxiety, in turn, is magnified by the feeling of loss of control.".
The result, adds Michael Rendell - an executive at the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) - is that all this volume of information related to the workplace "is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. And so, decision-making becomes more difficult, many become less productive and even more feel trapped in the office.".
These findings are recorded in the latest PwC survey "The Future of Work - A Journey to 2022", which involved 50,000 workers from all over the world. Of course, there are also cases of those who have been effectively undone by technology, mainly the self-employed or those who work outside the office.
Indeed, "smartphones and tablets serve flexible forms of work, benefiting employees and employers equally," observes Graham Long, a senior executive at Samsung's British arm. So is there a middle ground? There is, advises Dr. Grant, as long as one finds the "key" to the balances that serve and serve him, setting - where possible - his limits.
Source: tro-ma-ktiko.blogspot.gr
