The BBC recently had a piece on smartphone stress that’s worth a read. Two things stood out in particular. One is the work of Coventry University professor Christine Grant:

“The negative impacts of this ‘always on’ culture are that your mind is never resting, you’re not giving your body time to recover, so you’re always stressed.

“And the more tired and stressed we get, the more mistakes we make. Physical and mental health can suffer.”

The fact that we can stay connected to the workplace wherever we are in the world is feeding deep-seated insecurities, she argues.

“There is a massive anxiety about relinquishing control,” she says. “In my research I found a number of people who were burnt out because they were travelling with technology all the time, no matter what time zone they were in.”

Then there’s this recent finding from Ocfom:

61% of UK adults now say they own a smartphone, while household take-up of tablet computers has almost doubled over the past year to 44%.

Since 2010 our daily total media consumption has risen from 8 hours 48 minutes to more than 11 hours, says Ofcom, largely thanks to the rise of smartphones.

As Ofcom found earlier, though, Britons sleep an average of 8 hours 21 minutes, and 8 hours 41 minutes a day on “media devices.” So even when you don’t include television, the number is kind of amazing.