The house can be a surprisingly stressful place. As somewhere that we get to completely design ourselves, you’d think that wouldn’t be the case – but actually we often find ourselves returning to an environment more stressful than the one we left at the end of the day which can of course result in an endless cycle of stress.
That’s not the way it should be, and it’s especially wrong when what’s causing that stress is our technology: the very technology that is meant to make life easier and help us to get more done more quickly so that we can relax.
Here then we’ll take a look at where things tend to go wrong with tech around the house, how that leads to stress, and what we can do about it to create a more relaxing and pleasant environment to spend time in.
Mobile Phones
Your mobile phone isn’t an item that is tied specifically to the home, but it’s one that can bring you the most causes of stress when in the home. How is a phone a source of stress? In many ways, including:
- The fact that it creates too much light in your bedroom and prevents you from sleeping properly
- The fact that it can go off at any moment with an e-mail/call from work or someone else you don’t want to hear from
- The fact that you feel constantly compelled to check your e-mail/texts etc. to see if you’ve received an update
- The fact that light from your phone and many of the apps prevent you from ‘settling down’ in the evening to relax.
So what’s the solution? One important tip is to simply take your phone out of your bedroom when you’re going to sleep: it has no place there. Another is not to check e-mail until an hour after you’ve woken up, and likewise you can take a break from your phone an hour before you’ve gone to bed.
Breakdowns
Not mental ones, but anything that breaks down around the house can be a huge source of stress. The biggest culprit here is the boiler, but broken washing machines, toilets, ovens and fridges are all big ones too. Imagine coming home from a hard day only to find you have no water and there’s a funny smell of gas…
The solution is to get regular check-ups to try and catch issues before they become more serious and lead to complete breakdowns, and it’s to have contingency plans in place so that you can keep life running as normal even without your tech. Use tech to make life easier, but don’t make the mistake of becoming completely dependent on it.
Slowing
Almost more frustrating is when your technology slows down to a crawl due to various issues. This might mean the computer taking hours to load, or it might mean having to wait an inordinate amount of time for the spin cycle to finish.
The best way to avoid waiting around on your technology which should make life quicker is to keep updating it with newer and improved devices on a semi-regular basis. If that sounds extravagant, then remember that you can sell off your old devices as the new ones come around.
Dirt and Grime
Just like everything else, tech gets dirty and grimy. And just like everything else, this can be stressful. If you have marks all over your television then that’s going to impede your enjoyment of watching it, just as dust between your keys can make a computer keyboard feel old and less slick than it otherwise would. The solution? Use a service to ensure that your tech and everything else around the home stays looking great.
