“Hello? Hello? I can’t hear you. I’m in a tunnel”. The sketch to flee an overly pressing interlocutor makes you smile. Everyone adapts it: an emergency meeting (“we’ll talk about it again?”) or cut (“no more battery”). But as the mega-speedy manager in hypercontrol immediately calls back, we let it ring thinking we’re saving time. However, he doubles his emails with SMS and phone calls to flush out the one who is hiding at the bottom of his burrow to get some oxygen. A leader so tenacious it would take training with a survivalist to escape him. Do not open his message on WhatsApp so that he does not see that he has been seen. Why is my new colleague bringing his laptop? I forgot to give him the instructions, the workaholic boss went another way. Big sigh. “Yes, yes, I was going to call you back. I’m listening…”. The digital ogre has struck. A cyberaddiction among dozens of others. “It’s Lilian who goes down the “bottom up” series or even Michel who shoots online purchases” describes doctor Alexis Peschard, addictologist, specialist in addictions in the workplace, and founding president of GAE Consulting.
The risks of hyper-connection
At the start of confinement, more than one in two French people increased their screen time and 38% of adults increased their time spent on social networks (Odoxa-GAE Conseil study, 2022). “These figures express a reality of which we do not measure all the danger or the extent: the omnipresence of screens in our lives, and the pathological disorders including the behavioral and psychic damage caused by this new form of addiction”, analyzes the author of All addicted to screens. Cyberaddiction: what to do and how to get out of it? (Margala, 2022). From how many hours is the use of the telephone excessive? “The question of duration does not really make sense”, replies the doctor. No subject for those who live all day with screens but who know how to stop and move on. But 28% of French people, or 14.5 million adults, present a risky practice of cyberaddiction such as feeling obliged to connect every day at fixed and regular times, underestimating the time spent on their smartphone and abandoning the real life for the benefit of a virtual world. It is painful when 40% of French people declare that their online activities have negative effects on their personal life and 24% on their professional life (ibid). The gold medal for risky practices goes to TV series and “Binge watching”, followed by smartphones and social networks and compulsive shopping. Hyperconnection can lead to negative mental and physical consequences: sadness, anxiety, impaired sleep, vision and attention disorders, even burnout and stroke… This is “telepression”. to talk about “thinking about messages from ICTs [technologies de l’information et de la communication] with a pressure or urge overwhelming the subject to respond” (Barber and Santuzzi, Please Respond ASAP: Workplace Telepressure and Employee RecoveryJournal of Occupational Health Psychology, No. 20, 2015).
Come out of denial
Get out of denial, the famous “I stop when I want” or “I’m not at the stage of…”. “It looks like alcohol addiction,” says the expert. You feel a sense of well-being by reading your emails during your vacation, you receive congratulations for your professional conscience. However, it is a vicious circle: we are reassured when in reality, we are sinking. In his book, the doctor concocted questions to assess himself. Answer yes or no (without cheating): “I feel impatient and irritated when I don’t have my smartphone”… And for workaholics: “I find it hard to relax when I does not work”. They tried to make me go to Rehab, But I said no, no, no confessed Amy Winehouse. A few ways to anticipate your holidays by entrusting your files to colleagues and warning your interlocutors; set up an absence message on the e-mail box and the mobile; disable notifications on the phone (LinkedIn, Twitter). For those who only have one smartphone, uninstalling the pro box avoids the temptation. A “detox” is staying in “white areas” without coverage by a mobile operator or using a “digital detox” agency. Read, draw… To start now? “Activate the “airplane” mode to take a break during the day,” advises Alexis Peschard. We thus consciously avoid this damn tunnel!