Technical difficulties can stress us out even at the best of times. However, ongoing computer problems during the COVID-19 pandemic can take a serious toll on your mental and emotional health. Study finds that computer problems spike stress levels by a lot.
Bad technology causes ingrained deterioration in wellness and work performance with lasting consequences. There are ways to destress from good and bad tech while working from home.
There’s nothing more frustrating than your computer not cooperating and having no one around to help you fix it.
Technical difficulties are a sure way to bring on stress and anxiety and put the pressure on productivity.
If this sounds like your life working remotely for the last year, you’re not alone. “The extraordinary times we’re living in exacerbate the effect.
Companies and schools rapidly shifted to remote work, displacing people from their colleagues, teachers, offices, schools, and IT support,” Cile Montgomery, customer experience lead at Dell Technologies, told Healthline.
“We are more reliant than ever on our computers to engage with the outside world. Bad technology only isolates us further, adding to an already stressful situation.”
To uncover the emotional toll of computer problems, Dell Technologies and neuroscience company EMOTIV conducted a study that analyzed people’s brain waves.
The research found that at the onset of computer problems, the stress levels of participants spiked significantly.
In fact, researchers reported that the anxiety level was comparable to asking someone to sing in public or being forced to hold their hand in an ice bucket while doing mental arithmetic.
Moreover, it took participants three times longer to relax and recover from the stress peaks.
Additionally, the study found ingrained deterioration in wellness and work performance with lasting consequences if the stress levels weren’t addressed.
“Many of us have the expectation that technology is going to work, so when something out of the ordinary happens that interrupts our relationship with technology, it’s not surprising to see a negative, emotional impact,” said Montgomery.
“This is exacerbated when someone is under a deadline, or when bad tech causes them to lose the time and effort they’ve put in.”
