Conditions Surrounding Digital Stress among Adults

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, human mobility became limited as response to the curbing of the coronavirus disease.The traditional way of providing services were transitioned to digital methods, employing online work operations and even work-from-home schemes. Through a purposive sampling method, this study employed a Sequential Explanatory design to determine the experiences of employed adults on digital stress, strategies to cope with their digital stress, outcomes of their coping strategies, identified causal conditions, and desired recommendations to aid their stress. Results showed that majority of the participants are digitally stressed and the conditions leading to their stress include dealing with technical difficulties, distractions, anxiety, and intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts. These conditions result to indolence, skewed sense of identity, and misconceptions among peers in the digital sphere. Participants employ various coping strategies to deal with these negative experiences, and these include multitasking, engaging in physical activities, and regulating their emotions. The outcomes of employing these coping strategies included regained focus in doing their tasks, productivity at work, and better emotional responses. Despite the stress and negative experiences they come across using digital technology, results also reported that it also somehow assisted participants in various positive ways especially in maintaining social connectivity, flexibility and accessibility for information at work, and overall improvement of the quality of their work outputs.