If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Why it pays to declutter your digital life. Share using Email. By Kelly Oakes 7th January But researchers are finding that having too many digital files could be the problem, too.
So how can you tell if you have a digital hoarding problem? Around the BBC. In some situations, you might even feel like you are addicted to your devices. While technology addiction is not formally recognized as a disorder in the DSM-5 , many experts believe that tech and device overuse represents a very real behavioral addiction that can lead to physical, psychological, and social problems. While people often feel that they can't imagine life without their tech devices, research and surveys have found that technology use can also contribute to stress.
For many, it is the ever-present digital connection and constant need to keep checking emails, texts, and social media that accounted for the majority of this tech stress.
One study conducted by researchers in Sweden found that heavy technology use among young adults was linked to sleeping problems, depressive symptoms, and increased stress levels.
Evidence also suggests that heavy device use, particularly prior to bedtime, can interfere with sleep quality and quantity. One study found that children who use digital devices at bedtime had significantly worse and less sleep. The study also found a connection between nighttime tech use and increased body mass index.
Researchers have also found that in-bed electronic social media use has adverse effects on sleep and mood. The results found that using social media when you are in bed at night increases the likelihood of anxiety, insomnia, and shorter sleep duration.
A study published in the journal Child Development found that heavy daily technology use was associated with an increased risk for mental health problems among adolescents. More time spent using digital technologies was linked to increased symptoms of ADHD and conduct disorder, as well as worse self-regulation.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania recently published the first experimental research linking the use of social media sites such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to decreased well-being. The results revealed that limiting social media use decreased symptoms of depression and loneliness. That feeling of always being connected can make it difficult to create boundaries between your home life and work life.
Even when you are at home or on vacation, it can be hard to resist the temptation to check your email, respond to a text from a colleague, or check in on your social media accounts. In a study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life , researchers found that technology use played a role in determining an individual's work-life balance. The study suggested that the use of internet and mobile technologies influenced overall job satisfaction, job stress, and feelings of overwork.
Doing a digital detox may help you establish a healthier, less stressful work-life balance. If you spend time on social media, you have probably found yourself comparing your own life to your friends, family, total strangers, and celebs. You might find yourself thinking that everyone else seems to be leading a fuller, richer, or more exciting life based on the tiny, curated glimpse you see on their Instagram or Facebook posts.
As the saying goes, comparison really can be the thief of joy. Fear of missing out, known as FOMO, is the fear that you are missing the experiences that everyone else is having. Constant connectivity can feed this fear.
FOMO can also keep you constantly checking your device out of fear that you are going to miss an important text, DM, or post. Doing a digital detox is one way to set limits and reduce your fear of missing out. Some might suggest that a true digital detox would involve predefined abstinence from any and all digital devices and social media connections, but it is important to make your device usage work for your own life and demands.
Detaching from your devices can benefit your mental well-being, but doing a digital detox does not have to involve a complete separation from your phone and other tech connections.
The process is often more about setting boundaries and making sure that you are using your devices in a way that benefit, rather than harm, your emotional and physical health. But these days, who needs to meet in person? We interact mainly through electronic media anyway.
The sim you and the bio you represent two fully functional, interactive, capable instances of you, competing within the same larger, interconnected, social and economic universe. You could easily find yourselves meeting over video conference. At the simplest level, mind uploading would preserve people in an indefinite afterlife. Families could have Christmas dinner with sim Grandma joining in on video conference, the tablet screen propped up at the end of the table — presuming she has time for her bio family any more, given the rich possibilities in the simulated playground.
Think of how you interact with the world right now. If you live the typical western lifestyle, then the smallest part of your life involves interacting with people in the physical space around you. Your connection to the larger world is almost entirely through digital means. The news comes to you on a screen or through earbuds. Distant locations are real to you mainly because you learn about them through electronic media.
Politicians, celebrities, even some friends and family may exist to you mainly through data. People work in virtual offices where they know their colleagues only through video and text. Each of us might as well already be in a virtual world, with a steady flow of information passing in and out through CNN, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and text.
We live in a kind of multiverse, each of us in a different virtual bubble, the bubbles occasionally merging in real space and then separating, but always connected through the global social network. If a virtual afterlife is created, the people in it, with the same personalities and needs that they had in real life, would have no reason to isolate themselves from the rest of us.
Very little needs to change for them. Socially, politically, economically, the virtual and the real worlds would connect into one larger and always expanding civilisation. The virtual world might as well be simply another city on Earth, filled with people who have migrated to it.
But what happens when the older generations never die, but remain just as active in society? Think of the jobs people have in our world. The latest research offers some lessons. Over time, people who do this constantly end up with greater error rates on tasks, perhaps linked to poorer working memories. Even the mere presence of a phone can limit your engagement with work and your ability to build relationships with others.
This will give you the best chance to think about complex tasks without interruption or to engage more fully with those around you. Putting down our phones completely seems neither realistic nor desirable: Society has moved forward, phones in hand. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.
Festival of Social Science — Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom.
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