Take Care of Yourself, Please. Technology and Mental Health

91% of cybersecurity leaders suffer from moderate or high levels of stress, and just under 20% of them turn to alcohol or prescription drugs to cope with it.

These are some of the figures we can take from the 2019 report Life Inside the Perimeter: Understanding the Modern CISO.

If you’re not from the cybersecurity world, I think these figures might give you a bit of perspective on just how vulnerable we are technologically, and on the fact that any of us could suffer a cyberattack, whether at our companies or in our private lives.

What you probably do know about is stress, just like CISOs; it’s not for nothing that the WHO has already called it the “Epidemic of the 21st century”.

Classically, stress is the set of many adaptive responses for dealing with a threat to homeostasis, in pursuit of survival…

In other words, stress comes factory-installed so that we can react and defend ourselves against events that could kill us or leave us battered on the floor.

It seems that our modern pace of life has now thrown our nature out of balance, and we increasingly suffer the bad side of this natural stress, with our mind and body flooded by its negative version: distress.

The arrival of technology, and our failure to adapt to using it properly, is partly an accomplice to some of these deeply unpleasant episodes

Stress, Anxiety, Jealousy, Harassment, Rage, Fear, Addiction, Apathy… All kinds of sensations and feelings through a screen.

This week I had the enormous pleasure of welcoming Bárbara Diez, a friend and psychologist, to my YouTube channel, where we were able to cover the different ways in which technology and the mind intersect and can lead us into situations we would rather avoid.

▶ Video: Mental Health and Technology with Barbara Diez - Psychologist

As well as helping me explore the questions I personally had on the subject, and being great fun, becoming more aware of the “rabbit hole” you can end up down has undoubtedly helped me look after one or two habits I had been neglecting.

Today, 10 October, is World Mental Health Day, and rather than celebrating it I thought it would be a good idea to stop for a moment and ask you:

How are you doing? Are you thinking about yourself, even just a little?

Thank you for reading, and for being there.

Originally published on LinkedIn on 10 October 2024.