According to this infographic on digital stress and your brain, multi-tasking could be slowly killing you.
“Not me,” you say with full confidence, “I’m a great multi-tasker.” No, you’re not. We humans suck at multitasking, but we mistakenly think we’re quite good at it.
Take for example, the graphic called out in The Multitasking Lifestyle.
You will need to take a 5 DAY fast from email before your heart rate returns to normal.
Five days! How many of us even take a five hour break from email?
Ways to Take Action on This Information:
In addition to the “What Can Help?” section at the bottom of the infographic, consider these questions to help get in the right frame of mind:
1. What will really, truly happen if you don’t check email every 10 minutes?
2. What can you reasonably consume in the way of media? (Hint: the answer isn’t “as much as I want”.)
3. What would need to happen for me to put my devices away for X amount of time each day?
And the most important question:
What’s my health worth?
Wow. This is eye-opening…and a bit scary too!! I can’t imagine living without technology, but you remind me that I need to be better about drawing lines, taking breaks and not allowing it to take over (and kill) my brain!! Thanks so much for sharing this!
Erin,
Who knew?! I’ve seen studies that talk about the “addictive” aspect of technology, but hadn’t really seen much about the actual physiological aspects. Would not have guessed that it takes 5 days to get back to one’s baseline heart rate.
Either that, or the researchers studied some uber-stressed-out people 🙂