Insights · Technostress
Do you know that feeling when your day flies by, but you can't quite say you finished anything meaningful? You were busy the whole time: meetings, emails, chat messages. But by the end of the day you can't immediately name what you actually accomplished.
That feeling has a name: technostress. And it's not a matter of insufficient discipline. Every interruption costs an average of 23 minutes to return to deep concentration, and that adds up all day long, without you noticing.
Curious how much technostress you're experiencing? Take the free self-assessment, 15 statements, 3 minutes, an instant personal breakdown.
Take the technostress self-assessmentTechnostress is stress caused by the constant use of digital technology at work and in daily life. It's not a vague catch-all term: research identifies five concrete causes (Kumar, 2024):
In practice, with leaders and teams, we mostly see the first two: techno-overload and techno-invasion. A Belgian study by IDEWE, in collaboration with KU Leuven, surveyed 1,027 employees and self-employed workers on this. More than one in five (21.6%) reported 'techno-uncertainty' as a result of constant technological change. A figure that shows this isn't an individual problem, but a structural pattern.
Three factors reinforce each other. First, always-on culture: constant availability is silently expected, even outside working hours. Second, information overload: information arrives faster than we can process it. Third, hybrid communication friction: email, Teams, and WhatsApp blur together, so no one's quite sure where a message belongs anymore. As a result, valuable time gets lost searching and switching between channels.
Most people first point to what interrupts them from the outside: a notification, an email lighting up, a message that "just quickly" needs attention. External interruptions do have a clear impact: every time you're pulled out of a task, you have to reorient yourself, and for complex work that cost isn't linear, it's exponential.
But that's only half the story. According to behavioral scientist Nir Eyal, ninety percent of distraction results from internal triggers: a thought that drifts back to an earlier meeting, mild frustration about something that didn't go as planned. Your brain never really stops scanning and thinking ahead, even in a quiet room.
Research on 'online vigilance' (the degree to which people stay mentally connected to their digital environment) confirms this: it's not so much actual smartphone use that drives mental fatigue, but the mental attention that digital communication keeps demanding, even when you're not actively scrolling (Van Gaeveren et al., 2024).
For individuals, technostress shows up as mental exhaustion, difficulty concentrating, and, if it persists, burnout. Physically, we see sleep problems, fatigue, and heightened stress responses in the body. Work-life balance suffers too: people find it harder to disconnect from work, leading to conflict between work and personal life.
At the organizational level, this translates into absenteeism, reduced productivity, and turnover. Prevention is structurally cheaper than the cure here: a team that learns to handle technostress before it escalates into burnout costs less than a team that only intervenes after people drop out.
Technostress isn't solved with a one-off "digital detox" day or a vague call to "spend less time on your phone." It requires a structural approach, at the level of habits, environment, and team culture together.
That's exactly what I work on with leaders and teams: in a keynote, I unpack the mechanism behind technostress; in a team workshop, we translate that into concrete agreements and habits; and in a 1-on-1 coaching program, I work with individual leaders on a sustainable rhythm of focus and recovery. You'll find more on this in my book 'Digitale Fitheid voor Leiders' (with Anouk Doore, Lannoo Campus).
Technostress isn't a personal failure. It's a predictable consequence of how we work today. The organizations and leaders who handle it best aren't the ones avoiding technology, but the ones learning to work with it consciously and structurally.
Curious how technostress plays out in your team, and what you can do about it?
Book a free strategy callIs technostress the same as burnout?
No, though they're closely related. Technostress is a specific stressor that, if it persists, can contribute to burnout. Burnout usually has multiple causes; technostress is often one of them, but not the only one.
Can technostress also develop at home, outside of work?
Yes. Technostress results from the constant use of digital technology, not just at work. The boundary between work and personal life often blurs precisely because of that same technology, think of checking work emails on your personal phone in the evening.
How do I recognize technostress in my team, not just in myself?
Watch for signals like meetings that consistently run over because no one's fully present, employees still responding to messages late in the evening, or a noticeable drop in the quality of delivered work despite busy schedules. These are often signs of fragmented focus at the team level.
Sources: Kumar, P.S. (2024), Technostress: a comprehensive literature review. Eyal, N. (2020), Indistractable. Van Gaeveren, K. et al. (2024), research on online vigilance. IDEWE & KU Leuven (2023), technostress research among 1,027 Belgian employees and self-employed workers.