Info-anxiety: the biggest cause of stress may be your laptop

(ThinkStock Photos)If college kids are showing record levels of high anxiety, as a recent report suggests, the rest of Americans-balancing jobs, kids and mortgages-can't be too mellow either. Before you blame the financial crisis or the job market for your panic attack, take aim at the internet.

"The amount of data we take in each day has jumped dramatically...and some neuroscientists believe that our brains simply weren't designed to handle this kind of volume," writes Taylor Clark on Slate.com.

That's true not just for co-eds, but for anyone juggling the use of a laptop, a cell phone and television. Being viral citizens of the internet is like a second job. First we're required to keep up with constant streams of personal and international news online, through blogs, email, and social networking. Then we're required to filter and disseminate that information ourselves. The constant input-output creates a frenzy of distraction that makes it harder to focus on our other job, you know, the one we're paid for. "All the information that comes our way requires we do something with it and it often feels like it controls us rather than we control it," says New York-based psychologist Brett P. Kennedy.

That out of control feeling gets worse with every tweet or email you don't to respond to. "We are becoming more and more conditioned to respond to these communications as quickly as we receive them and that can be overwhelming," explains Kennedy. Remember when two days was a perfectly acceptable amount of time to wait before responding to an answering machine message? A two-day lapse between an email correspondence now requires an introductory excuse. And as Wi-Fi access expands, that excuse is harder to come up with if you've already used 'shipwrecked'. With co-workers, excuses are fruitless. "In employment and work situations, there is no longer the concept that work is a nine to five venture," he says. Your job could be at risk if you don't respond to an email in a period of hours, minutes even.

Concerns over losing work or friendships are obvious stress-inducers, but there's also a neurological aspect to info-anxiety. "Our poor brains are definitely suffering information overload," Felix Economakis, a London-based stress psychologist told the London Times. "Our brains' attention levels are finite...Information overload makes it feel under threat and it shuts down higher brain regions that deal with empathy." One study suggests all that data-processing triggers our fight or flight reaction, reserved for moments of defying death.

Maybe it's because our brains are in danger. The Sleep Disorders Center at JFK Medical center found that kids who logged-on to the internet and text message devices after bedtime are far more prone to sleep disorders. The constant barrage of information creates an inability to rest our minds, which makes it harder to hone our thinking skills during the day. Another study from Stonybrook University researchers suggests the nature of constant communication begets obsessive behavior. With so many channels of communication regurgitating our minute problems, it's harder to compartmentalize our problems. If you're stressed out about your biological clock, logging on to Facebook and seeing a photos of former classmates with kids kicks up your stress level another notch.

So how do we relax? The quick fix seems obvious: log off. But the longer you're away from your PDA or laptop, the more buried your are in to-do's when you log back on. So Kennedy, who wrote about the topic of online anxiety for Psychology Today, suggests setting clear boundaries for yourself and your peers.
"Give yourself an 'email amnesty' where you delete unread emails older than a week," he says. "Take time with friends and family to have 'tech free time' where all gadgets are turned off," he advises. To enforce it, find no-cell phone restaurants in your neighborhood for regular meet-up retreats. There are also 'de-interneting' applications, like 'Freedom' which disables the internet on any Mac for three hours at a time.

Streamlining your communication is major a stress-reliever. Before you leave work each night, set your email with an auto-response that says you're only available by phone for emergencies during evening hours. If you're not big on Facebook or Twitter, note that on your profile or provide an email address (spell it out to avoid spam) for people who want to contact you directly. If your phone messages are piling up, leave an outgoing message telling people to text or email instead. Every-time you shut down for the day, make sure you close out of all your IM accounts (that includes OKCupid, Facebook and Gmail) so it doesn't automatically start up the next time you log on.

Think of it as organizing your virtual office space: the urgent stuff goes in one box, and the rest goes in a drawer so you don't have to look at it constantly. "Most of the answers to managing the anxiety that comes with information overload is really about getting comfortable with saying no and setting limits," adds Kennedy. "Just because something is instant doesn't mean its urgent."


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