Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
TwitThis
When Do You Quit?
"There's a strong tendency for humans to do everything they are able to do," says architect Richard Saul Wurman, author of Information Anxiety 2. Combine that compulsion with constant connectivity and the workday need never end. For many people, wireless devices like cell phones (243 million Americans own one) and BlackBerrys are the main culprits. They just make it too easy to contact anyone, anytime. And with information always available online, you can keep clicking forever. Complicating matters, says Wurman, is the explosion of what he calls noninformation -- the Internet's jumbled mass of raw data, which fuels anxiety because you can't digest it all, yet feel compelled to keep trying."If you give in to it, the searching will never end," Dr. Hallowell explains. "You have to reconstruct the boundaries that technology has taken down."
O'Connor remembers when the boundaries were clear: "Years ago, I was forced to stop working at a point. It simply got too late to make more phone calls." Now, for a break, she hides behind a mountain, literally, at her Pennsylvania country house.
"There's no cellular signal out there," she says. "If they ever put up a tower, I'll probably sell the house."
A Nation of Grazers
We humans are natural-born suckers for anything that lets us escape the tedium of work. And the wireless age has opened the floodgates of momentary distractions. The barrage of e-mail, phone calls, text messages and new info from websites provides a steady flow of interruptions we can tap -- or that can tap us -- at any given second.
We've developed what Dr. Hallowell and his colleagues term pseudo-attention deficit disorder. Our brains are trained to constantly flit around the universe of messages and information, seeking brief hits of excitement. Grazing ceaselessly, we never dig too deeply before moving on to the next distraction.
E-mail may be the worst offender. And it has a more sinister effect than just wasted time. It ratchets up our stress levels in ways we're only starting to understand, experts say. Each message requires multiple judgment calls that tax the neural network: How quickly must I reply? Why did she CC me? Why did she CC the CEO? Why didn't he reply? Is she angry or am I misreading her tone?
Each of those questions causes stress. Talking in person or by phone is different; vocal cues and body language give context that's absent online.
Advertisement 
feeds instead
