Why Multi-tasking is Bad: The Digital Stress and Your Brain

Our brain is a marvelous organ. It helps us to become creative and perform tasks. However, there are certain activities that we are doing online that could be damaging our causing it to have digital stress.

The following infographic from OnlineUniversities explore the possible causes of digital stress or how our online activities could affect our brain.

Limits of Multi-tasking and Key takeaways

Our human brain can only manage two tasks at once. Having a third task causes considerable drop in accuracy.
- People who read email change screens twice as often. They’re in a steady “high alert” state with more constant heart rates.
- Multitasking takes a toll on our brainds. Some neuroscientists believe that our brains weren’t designed to handle the amount of information they’re currently processing.

How to Avoid Stressing Your Brain

1. Focus on Tasks – Start by limiting the number of times you log on to your email and designating a specific time to check your social networking sites. Yes, that includes avoiding hitting the Refresh button every minute.
2. Complete Similar Tasks Together – Send messages in batches and read blog updates at once.
3. Take a break – The world won’t probably end tomorrow. Take a break every once in a while. Study shows that micro breaks actually help improve productivity.

Do you think that multitasking helps improve your productivity? Share with us through the comments below why you think it does, or does not.