However, you can take advantage of your devices and platforms to reduce stress and support good mental health. Here’s how technology can help you treat five of the most common causes of work-related stress:
Distraction
Contain distractions with tools such as Rescue-Time (track how you spend your time on the internet), Focus (blocks distractive sites) or Freedom (keeps you completely offline). Your best bet to get blocks of time without distractions is to block parts of your calendar and close the door (or leave the office), turn off your work chats and emails from your customers.
The demanding boss
Do you have a manager who sends you an email at any time and waits for an answer before the next business day? Install an email filter that sends you a text message when you write it (so you can stop constantly checking your inbox manually). If you want to strike a balance between reinforcing your behavior with immediate responses and putting your work at risk by ignoring your messages at odd hours, use a tool such as the delayed Outlook delivery, to schedule your response a few hours after his boss wrote him.
The exhausting transfer
Long periods of transfer are one of the main reasons why people feel dissatisfied with their work. However, your transfers can be a productive, energizing or restorative part of the day, if you have the right tools. For a productive transfer in public transport, install a news reader like or Flip-board and use it to follow the news of your field and related industries; link your news reader with Buffer or Hoot-suite and schedule a day or a week of tweets and updates from LinkedIn while you are on your way to or from work.
Fear of losing something
Professionals have long suffered anxiety linked to what they are missing – conferences they do not attend, meetings they do not invite or news from the industry that they are the last to hear. Social networks make that fear even more difficult because we are constantly subject to tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn updates about everything we are not doing. If you want to improve your character and your mental endurance, you can take each of those moments as an opportunity to develop your character and transcend your own jealousy
Lack of sleep
Listening to an Audible audiobook – typically something light and fun – usually keeps my mind away from work long enough to allow it to sleep; Audible even offers a clock that automatically shuts off your phone after 15 or 30 minutes. If I am too stressed for a simple audiobook, I use a recorded meditation or an application to meditate, such as Stop, Breathe & Think.
Your anti-stress tool kit does not need to be limited to these five points. Once you start thinking of invention as an ally in combating stress, instead of just as another source of stress, you can identify the tools and workflows that will help you address each of your major sources of stress.