Dr. Christy Goodwin

We're designed to sigh roughly every five minutes while we're awake.

It's a natural part of our HOS that is designed to regulate our stress response.

But when we're spending hours with this very narrow gaze on our screens, our sigh rate falls off the cliff.

And so we are holding our breath.

We're having that biological response.

And so just that subtle act of looking at our screens elevates our stress.

No I often say

we have ancient paleolithic brains.

We have brains that were biologically designed for us to go and hunt and forage and get information, not to have a constant stream of alerts, notifications and pings and dings being thrust at us.

So we have got this ancient software trying to run on hardware our brains that are around 100,000 years old.

And so there's this complete mismatch between how we're living and working and how we're neurobiologically designed as humans.

I often call our brains our HOS, our

human operating system.

And I think that the way that we're living, I often say we're living in a world where we're always on, we're rarely focused and we're never recovered is completely incompatible with how our HOS was designed.

We sadly are seeing really chronic rates of stress, exhaustion and burnout in Australia and globally.

And we see this just in terms of how we operate.

A very, very simple, granular way in which our digital habits are impacting us.

And I often say, you know, let's be honest, technology has got its tentacles into every part of our lives, professionally and personally.

And its impact is often invisible, but I believe it's invasive.

And we don't even recognise some of the really subtle ways that technology can make us stressed.