If you're noticing signs of impending burn-out among any of the workaholics (including yourself) at your organization, it may be time to put technology to work to improve health. In an in-depth look at the causes and consequences of job-related stress, CIO magazine's Meridith Levinson examines ways in which technology can help alleviate the pressures.

Levinson relates the story of Dave Asprey, who worked 60 hours a week at a Silicon Valley startup, traveling regularly cross-country, and seemingly thriving on the frenetic pace. By the time he reached his early 30s, however, he was overwhelmed by the pressures and the technology. He tried to get away from it all by trekking through China, Nepal and Tibet for three months, but he wasn't able to leave his laptop behind.

"When I got to remote parts of China, I was getting so much spam that it came in faster than I could download my email," he recalled. "Spam forced me to not be connected for a couple of months."

Asprey found that the technology hiatus made him both calmer and more alert, but when he rejoined the routine back home in California, the pressures returned, along with headaches, back pain, fatigue, forgetfulness and irritability. When he went to the doctor, he found out from a brain image that his prefrontal cortex, where the brain processes logic, had turned off.

"Even though I was high-performing, I could tell it was costing me," he said. "The cost here might have been my life."

A tech guy through and through, Asprey turned to technology to help him determine if he was making progress in improving his health. He bought a machine called emWave, which measures heart rate variability and indicates via blinking lights whether someone is stressed or relaxed. 

"Being an IT professional, I'm trained in how to deal with complex systems," he said. "I started managing my body as a complex system, just as a hacker or systems administrator would. The emWave gave me a daily process I could run, just like a Cron process on a Unix server. I was able to apply systems monitoring techniques to my body. I would look at, what is my performance today versus yesterday, and can I optimize it?"

The human body does not operate efficiently under great stress because the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are operating out of sync. "It's like driving a car with one foot on the gas and the other foot on the brake," said Catherine Calarco, a vice president at HeartMath Inc., maker of the emWave. To optimize performance and maximize our cognitive ability, we need to aim for a non-stressed state.

For more, see:
- Meridith Levinson's article at CIO

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