A ping. Then another. The email that just arrived flags itself as urgent. At the same time, a message flashes in the intranet, a colleague calls, and somewhere a smartphone vibrates. Sandra, 49, a project manager at a mid-sized company, knows this moment every single day. Digitalization used to help her work more efficiently. Now it feels like being run over.
82 percent of Germans feel stressed by the rising flood of information. That is what a 2022 study by OpenText found. In 2020, the figure was just 43 percent. Within two years, digital strain has doubled, even though the opposite was supposed to happen. The tools were meant to help, not to burden.
The Paradox of Digital Relief
The irony is hard to miss. Digital tools were developed to make work processes easier. Emails were meant to replace letters and save time. Collaboration platforms were meant to cut down on meetings. Smartphones were meant to make us more flexible. Instead, we experience the reverse. The promised relief has become a source of permanent overload.
"Digitalization has made some things easier, but it has massively increased complexity in both professional and private life," explains Annika Piecha, occupational and organizational psychologist at the Technical University of Dresden. Her research on information overload in the workplace shows: it is not digitalization itself that makes people ill, but how they deal with it.
"We had no time to adapt to the digital environment." Anastasia Kozyreva, psychologist
The problem arises when the demands on information processing exceed available capacity. Too much information in too little time. Too little distinction between what matters and what does not. Too many parallel tasks, all demanding attention at once.
When the Body Stays on High Alert
Chronic stress from digital flooding is more than an unpleasant feeling. It locks the body into a permanent state of high alert. The stress hormones cortisol and noradrenaline remain elevated. The immune system scales back. Memory performance deteriorates.
Studies by the Techniker Krankenkasse show that 17.5 percent of all sick days in Germany are attributable to psychological conditions such as stress, burnout, or depression. The numbers are rising. People under high stress suffer more frequently from sleep disorders, headaches, and increased susceptibility to infection. 60 percent of those who are rarely stressed rate their health as good. Among those who are frequently stressed, the figure drops to just 38 percent.
A study by the Robert Koch Institute (Hapke et al., 2013) found that 13.9 percent of women and 8.2 percent of men in Germany suffer from severe chronic stress. Those with little social support are particularly affected, with a rate of 26.2 percent.
Interruptions as Silent Productivity Killers
The working world of the 21st century knows no quiet. Anyone working in an office is interrupted an average of 70 times per day. Emails, calls, intranet messages, colleagues with questions. After each interruption, it takes roughly 24 minutes to return to the original task. A quarter of all work is never resumed at all.
The Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health identified four core components of information overload: the sheer volume of information, the number of tasks it generates, the quality of the information, and the interruptions caused by digital media. The consequences? Mental fatigue, frustration, irritability. People adopt a frantic pace, skip breaks, and the quality of their work declines.
"People with chronic neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, or migraine respond with particular sensitivity to chronic stress," says Prof. Dr. Frank Erbguth of the German Brain Foundation. Stress amplifies symptoms and can trigger more frequent relapses. The stress hormones cause neuroinflammation, an inflammation of nerve tissue, because the blood-brain barrier becomes more permeable.
The Sandwich Generation
Those aged 30 to 45 are the most heavily affected. According to a DKV study, only 35 percent of this age group maintain a healthy relationship with stress. Among those over 66, the figure is 63 percent. The difference is explained by lived reality: career, family life with young children, parents who need care. Add to that the expectation of permanent digital availability.
A special survey by the Initiative for Health and Work in 2021 found that more than half of mobile workers are expected to remain professionally reachable during their leisure time. 60 percent of this group feel burdened by constant availability.
Interestingly, satisfaction with digital tools fell despite their proliferation. In 2020, 63 percent of employees felt well equipped for working from home. By 2022, that figure had dropped to just 42 percent. The number of tools increased; satisfaction fell. A paradoxical effect that makes one thing clear: more is not better.
What Helps Against Digital Flooding
Research shows that resilience to stress can be trained. A study by Charité Berlin (Veer et al., 2021) involving 16,000 European participants found that appraising situations positively is essential for mental resilience. People with a positive appraisal style showed fewer psychological problems, even when exposed to considerable adversity.
Some companies have already responded. German corporations are blocking email communication after working hours. Daimler automatically deletes emails sent during employees' holidays. Such measures can help, but they only work if the company culture supports them too.
"We urgently need strategies to regain at least some degree of control." Anastasia Kozyreva, psychologist
Individual strategies matter just as much. Critical ignoring, the deliberate decision not to take note of certain information, has become as relevant as critical thinking. The goal is not to shut everything out completely. It is about selecting high-quality sources and consciously filtering out the rest.
Responsibility Belongs to Everyone
Effective communication requires the involvement of all parties, from the junior clerk to the executive. Managers must model the behavior they expect from others. Information management is not a technical question; it is an organizational and cultural one.
The sources of information overload often lie in how tasks are designed, how work is organized, and how information is handled. Who sends what to whom? And why? In a climate of uncertainty, people tend to send even more information to even more people in order to cover themselves. That only sharpens the problem.
One simple step can help: the first three lines of an email should make the request clear. Anyone who cannot manage that has not finished thinking the matter through. Less is more. Clarity beats completeness.
Digitalization is not the problem. How we use it is what counts. The tools are there. Now we need to learn to deploy them in a way that genuinely relieves us. Otherwise, the promised ease will remain exactly what it has already become for many: a burden.
