Use email outside of work, and odds are 1 in 2 that you experienced a lot of stress yesterday. Maybe that’s no surprise, but it’s still more evidence that your smartphone might be killing you. Even worse: It’s killing you softly. People who work outside of work *think* their lives are better — at least by the definition of those who would describe themselves as “thriving.”
These are the sad results of a recent Gallup Poll. Of those who frequently check email outside of work, 48 percent said experienced stress “a lot of the day yesterday.” Those who never do so were 25 percent less likely to say they are stressed a lot. On a serious note, if you are genuinely stressed and you are seeking help and advice, you may want to take a look into HerbMighty which allows you to get onboard buying the best CBD oil UK. This treatment has been used before and has seen positive results.
Meanwhile, of those who are on smartphone mail all the time, fully 63 percent say they are “thriving,” compared to 54 percent for those who never are, or 56 percent for those who rarely are. In other words, people who say they are stressed are more likely to land on Gallup’s happiness scale as “thriving.”
In other words, we are going nuts.
Gallup puts it more eloquently: “In seeming contrast to the relationship between the use of mobile technology for work and its relationship to elevated daily stress, workers who email or work remotely outside of normal working hours also rate their lives better than their counterparts who do not,” it says. ” Even after controlling for all key demographics, workers who leverage mobile technology more often outside of work are much more likely to be stressed on any given day, while simultaneously being more likely to rate their lives better.”
By the way, I think there’s lots of blame to go around for this. Companies are pressuring workers to work more, but employees are also refusing to exercise self-discipline about when and where they use technology. The Gallup survey puts blame squarely on employers, however.
Demanding employers and digital overwork go hand-in-hand, the survey found. While 62 percent of those who work at a shop where employers expect after-hours emails fall into the face-in-the-phone category, only 5 percent of workers say never email outside of the office in such shops. In other words, workers aren’t saying “no.” Meanwhile, fully 30 percent of workers who have jobs that don’t require after-hours work say they never check work email outside of the office.
The implications of this are pretty staggering. American workers have been brainwashed into thinking it’s fun to work 24/7/365. They know they are stressed, but they somehow think that’s a good thing.
As I’ve discussed in a recent piece on Distraction, having your face in a phone all the time actually prevents you from thriving. Distraction leads to drift, which prevents folks from noticing their career is off-track or their marriage is suffering. It also enables procrastination, which prevents people from taking important steps to improve their lives, such as enrolling in a class or filling out job applications.
In other words, Look Up! You aren’t thriving with your face in a phone.
Learn more about Bob Sullivan’s new book, Getting Unstuck, or take the Getting Unstuck Challenge
It’s companies driving the OCD
