Mitigating technostress is not easy, but it’s doable

Although personal use of digital technologies is often characterised as fun and voluntary, technostress is anything but. Floods of push notifications and information from personal devices and the constant pressure to be available online can contribute to poor well-being, fatigue, and concentration problems. Markus Salo, Henri Pirkkalainen, Cecil Chua and Tiina Koskelainen explain how technostress develops over time and how users can mitigate it.

 
Technostress is a situation of stress an individual experiences due to her/his use of information technology (IT). By stress we mean the relationship between an individual and their environment experienced as taxing or straining (Lazarus and Folkman 1984).

IT use for personal and leisure purposes (e.g., social networking and consuming various types of digital content) has grown rapidly. Although personal/leisure IT use is often characterised as fun and voluntary, technostress is a common negative consequence of such use. For example, many people experience technostress when receiving floods of push notifications and information from personal devices or feeling the constant pressure to be available online. Furthermore, researchers and practitioners have highlighted that technostress can contribute to negative outcomes including poor well-being, fatigue, and concentration problems.

Previous research has not explained how technostress develops over time and how users can mitigate it in a personal, rather than organisational, environment. So, our study (freely available here) answered two questions: (1) How does technostress form in the personal use of IT? and (2) How can users change their IT use practices to mitigate technostress?

To understand the details of technostress experiences, we conducted in-depth interviews with 32 Finnish users who experienced and mitigated this type of stress. By analysing the interview data, we found that technostress tends to form quietly over time because of small actualisation costs associated with the use. For example, checking a personalised push notification is done at the cost of shifting one’s attention to the notification, often away from other ongoing activities. While users barely notice single moments of such attention shifts, repeated shifts can pile up over time and become straining. The constant flow of notifications can be highly stressful and result in the inability to focus and feel free of IT.

The actualisation costs pile up especially when users intensify their use; such intensification is often based on the short-lived moments of enjoyment, other users’ activities and the discovery of more digital content to engage with. Although users actively create their own technostress through the use of IT, this use is shaped in part by designers’ intent and peer influence. We also found that it could take a substantial amount of time for users to recognise their technostress and identify its origins.

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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk