Being stuck at home all day during lockdown means many of us will have become even more attached to our screens – regardless of whether we’re working from home or not, many of those long hours at home will be spent checking phone, tablet and computer screens.<\/p>\n
And that’s before we even get onto the box-set binges.<\/p>\n
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If you do happen to be working from home, things can be made even worse by the working day starting earlier and finishing later – a blurring of the work\/life boundaries can really exacerbate tech stress.<\/p>\n
Are you continually scanning your devices for messages, emails or social media updates?<\/p>\n
Does a dead battery send you into a blind panic, especially if your charger is nowhere to be found?<\/p>\n
Does the amount of time your laptop takes to boot up send you into an apoplectic rage? A rage that’s intensified when the application you’ve been impatiently clicking on suddenly opens dozens of windows?<\/p>\n
Then you could be suffering from tech stress.<\/p>\n
More and more of us are developing a tech dependency. Thanks to the proliferation of ‘must have’ devices available, and the multitude of functions they each perform, many of us simply can’t get through the day without them.<\/p>\n
If your smartphone is hooked up to our social media applications, email and calendar (and whose isn’t?) the phone then forms the hub of your business and social life. Then there’s the photos stored on it, the music stored on it, the videos stored on it and it’s easy to see why you would feel lost without it – it’s a dairy, calendar, event planner and photo album, not to mention a music and video library.<\/p>\n
And you can also call and text people on the things too.<\/p>\n
So it’s hardly surprising people were losing it when the recent iOS 7 update completely wiped their iPhones, this wasn’t merely about losing some contact numbers, there probably memories and a potentially expensive music library on there too.<\/p>\n
And then there’s the fact that we’re always available, connected to the outside world 24-hours-a-day – something psychologists have labelled the ‘always on’ syndrome.<\/p>\n
This means we never switch off from work life or social life; if no-one is getting in touch we turn to social media to see what everyone’s up to; if there’s an issue at work, we can all too easily take it home with us.<\/p>\n
And if we’ve got problems outside of these spheres, they can be exacerbated by the fact we can’t switch off and have a constant stream of data coming at us.<\/p>\n
So what can we do to stop it? Follow our seven-step plan to make sure you’re not ‘always on’…<\/p>\n