What is digital stress?

Digital stress is nothing but an information overload and constant distraction due to the bombardment of feed data from any social media, news, and other forms of unnecessary information. It is an effect generated by your brains, processing garbage of information that is never relevant to you or your interest, skills, or other than influences and constantly seeking ways to manipulate your choices and decisions and target you to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder on the internet. It is deadly and makes you counterproductive, exhausting you with fear, depression and anxiety, yet you are very well aware of it. But constantly ignoring it. That leads to more stress and spiralling down to more and more addictions to those feeds.

How to reduce digital stress in a few easy steps?

Here is my first step. First, I must identify the distraction through notifications, emails and feeds. I started to make a mental note of how much I could process at the time and how does it impacting my ability to make judgements, how my inner voice or arguments, dialogues and chatter increased, and how is my attention span reduced for the other important things, how do I feel after reading, listening, viewing or absorbing the information, was it intense or giving me temporary pleasure but later down the line pain. If that is so,

I started to make a few drastic changes:

1. Learn to Unsubscribe
2. Learn to Unfollow
3. Remove from unnecessary groups,
4. Reduce my interest in various subjects not currently relevant to my skills or work.
5. Remove connections, and unfollow people I have never met or heard back in a while.
6. Constructive comments, if any post makes me distressed, just report it or remove it from the feed.
7. Reduce time spent on social media actively and consiously. Keep a journal about how I feel after reading, listening, and viewing.
8. Actively reduce feed items, and try to make real conversation with the network in person or physically.

Recently, I have removed myself from not-so-useful LinkedIn connections and started to declutter my interest, unfollow, and ungroup from various pages. I am doing the same thing as other forms such as google feeds.

It is important to take care of ourselves and not be a slave to any social media. We as a human should be real, not artificial.

I hope my advice to reduce digital stress helps you to become a better person and help you to regain your original form, and increase your productivity.

Thank you for your time and reading.

Happy Sunday.

Peace.

RL