Dr. Christy Goodwin

So, for example, when we're looking at our screens, you know, we're scrolling on our phones, we're looking at our laptops or our desktops, which we're spending hours a day doing.

That very narrow gaze that we adopt when we look at our very relatively small surface area of our screens elevates our stress because we do not sigh.

When we look at our screens, we hold our breath.

There's been a study done to look at a phenomenon called email apnea.

And when we go into our inboxes, we literally...

hold our breath, we dump a whole lot of cortisol, our pupils dilate, our heart rate accelerates, and it causes that physiological stress response.

Now, because we're spending hours a day doing a lot of this near distance work on our screens, that absence of sighing means that we elevate our stress levels because 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 I mentioned.

And so just that subtle act of looking at our screens elevates our stress, let alone the stressors that we consume through social media, news sites that can add to our stress, back-to-back virtual meetings.

All of these things accumulate, but

And I often say they're micro-stressors, but those little micro-stressors are those pebbles in our shoe that really play havoc on our biology.

What does that mean?

Look, I work with a lot of, and I see incredibly accomplished people who achieve their, you know, hit their KPIs.

They achieve from an optics perspective, all the traditional measures of success.

But along the way, they sacrifice their physical health, their mental wellbeing, their relationships, or sometimes they hit the trifecta and they compromise all three in their relentless pursuit of success because we're living and working in ways that are completely incompatible with our human operating system.

I had an experience myself that made me realise I almost paid the ultimate success tax.

At the height of the pandemic, like many people, I contracted COVID.