Yesterday was my last full day before taking off on vacation. It was a busy day, as usual. I wrapped up a story for FORTUNE, hosted a webinar for Greenbiz, wrote a blogpost, pushed through my email, which now arrives at a rate of 100-200 a day, and ran a couple of errands.
In between, by coincidence–or perhaps not–I stumbled across a couple of NPR interviews. Diane Rehm talked with Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School about his new book, Relaxation Revolution, and Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed Matt Richtel of The New York Times about his excellent series of stories, called Your Brain on Computers, which explores how digital media is changing our lives, our culture and, yes, our brains. The interviews were so compelling, and so timely, that I listened to both programs, in full, this morning. (They’re available on iTunes.)
Both were, in a way, about the same thing: how stressing the brain affects health. And while many things are more stressful than being “always on,” facing tight deadlines and being nagged by that feeling that you haven’t checked your email, oh, in the last 45 minutes, most of us will never go to war or perform surgery, so these are the of stresses that touch us every day. They can literally be deadly–Richtel won a Pulitzer Prize this year for his terrific series of stories, Driven to Distraction, about the risks of talking and texting behind the wheel. (One of my very top pet peeves is people who talk on the phone while driving.) [click to continue…]
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