Stressing over checking your email — or texts, which have become even more common — has only increased since I first wrote about how to deal with email stress five years ago. We have become an always-on society, with the expectation for many employees to be available 24/7… Even when most people’s jobs aren’t so important that a person’s life will hang in the balance if we were unavailable.

It’s a shame, really. Technology was supposed to help us have more leisure time and free us up to be able to spend more of our lives with things that really matter — like family, friends, and experiences. Instead, it’s tying us down to our devices in ways their inventors never imagined.

So if you’re feeling stressed out being always connected to your device to check email and texts, here are three more tips for helping to cope.

I am one of those few 20-somethings who would prefer a simple Samsung model over an iPhone or Blackberry when shopping at AT&T. And yes, I do get the odd stare from the sales associate who isn’t sure why I wouldn’t pine for that touchscreen. I typically shrug and convey how I prefer to keep it simple, and will gladly purchase a phone that has an ideal keyboard for texting.

Texting has become an everyday facet of our lives. The feature serves as a platform that absolutely allows us to stay connected to others with instant communication. However, there is something to be said about the ways in which it has the potential to diminish our social skills, if we choose to allow it to do so.

Texting has the ability to reinforce ineffective communication. Individuals can ‘hide behind a screen’ to escape confrontation in friendships or romantic relationships.

A year can’t go by now without some pundit, writer, or researcher weighing in on how the more technology infiltrates our lives, the lonelier we’ve become.

Stephen Marche, a novelist writing in the May 2012 Atlantic, weaves together a bunch of anecdotes to suggest that Facebook is making us lonelier.

Renowned MIT researcher Sherry Turkle, who bases her conclusions on an endless stream of in-vitro interviews with teens and young adults, suggested over the weekend in the New York Times that technology is certainly making us more connected… but those connections are more shallow and less rich that traditional face-to-face connections.

These are interesting observations, but are they offering us a false dichotomy? Or suggesting a causal relationship where none has yet been established?

Today, as I was walking across the Rite-Aid parking lot at my local strip mall, I saw something peculiar.

Peculiar to me, at least.

I saw three boxy red cars in a row. Two SUV’s an an old Geo Prism.

Now, let me explain: red cars are everywhere. There’s nothing remarkable about them and there’s truly no good reason to stare at them, almost achingly, when they’re parked in perfect alignment in a parking lot.

Unless you play Bejeweled.

Online crisis services have proven to reach young people in crisis that will not reach out for help in any other way. Every day, we know of hundreds of people who turn to the Internet for suicide support and crisis help. A service called CrisisChat is run by a group of local crisis centers. It is a free online crisis service, and it needs your help.

We are currently in a time-limited campaign to increase the funds raised to $10,000 by the end of March! Any amount you can contribute to making this happen would be appreciated… $5, $10, $30, $50, $100 or more.

You can also make the contribution in memory of someone lost by suicide, just post a comment at the end of your contribution.

If you haven’t already seen the video, I encourage you to watch it. A handful of dedicated and courageous people came together to make the video happen and I know you will be touched by the stories and music:

CrisisChat Promotional Video from Emotion Technology on Vimeo.

The campaign is specifically to expand hours on CrisisChat into the overnight hours, a time when many chat visitors have told us we need to be open — when suicidal support is most needed (but also most difficult to find).

I recently had the pleasure of appearing on a SXSW panel organized by Dr. John Grohol called “Online Therapy… Naked?”

Joining me were Audrey Young and Julie Hanks, along with Dr. Grohol. The topics discussed ranged from the kinds of clients we’re all seeing online to the software we use to the differences between in-person and online therapy to the details of my practice, Naked Therapy.

Besides describing their own online work, there was a vibe from my co-panelists that Naked Therapy, while cute, had come from another planet. And in a way they are right — it has come from the Internet planet with a history very different from their psychotherapeutic backgrounds.

The current definition of NT (now just over a year old) is a form of talk therapy in which the client and/or the therapist gets naked. This is a new kind of therapy bred from new ground and I am in the early stages of assessing its possibilities.

If you’re feeling suicidal, don’t rely on Siri.

Today, I decided to play around with my fiance’s new iPhone. Siri, the iPhone’s “digital assistant” is capable of handling all sorts of tasks: sending text messages, scheduling reminders, determining directions, searching Google for answers to questions, and using Wolfram Alpha to compute math problems.

She’s clever, though. Ask her if she’s male or female and she’ll answer frankly: none. Ask her about the meaning of life and she cracks a snarky joke about writing a “very long play in which nothing happens.” Ask her about which religion is correct and she’ll mention something about being a “Siliconist.”

But try to ask her about suicide, and you might as well consult a freshly-mined chunk of elemental silicon instead.

I sat down with Siri for twenty minutes and pretended to be suicidal. Here’s what she had to say:

Transcript follows.

Many of us couldn’t imagine our lives without books. We remember the books we read as kids and the books that were read to us. We remember our favorite quotes, our favorite characters.

We remember the books that became our friends, the ones that supported us through adolescent angst, first loves, breakups, friendship or family fiascoes, lonely days and other tough and joyful times.

We remember the books that gave us the inspiration to scribble quotes in our journals, to write stories and to follow our dreams.

Books have the power to open up perspectives, to take us places we otherwise wouldn’t be able to go.

Soaking in their words and fastening our own helps us express ourselves, communicate quality information to others and connect to the world. Words give us the strength and know-how to make smart decisions and chart our own lives.

Thankfully, for most of us, reading is as natural as seeing or speaking or brushing our teeth.

Unfortunately, for millions of people around the world reading isn’t any of these things. At least 793 million people worldwide can’t read and end up missing out on the sheer joy and valuable lessons and opportunities that reading brings.

That’s why I’m honored to share an important upcoming date with you along with an amazing organization.

Last October I saw a Prezi presentation by a colleague of mine.  The material in the presentation was stellar, but it nearly took a back seat to the dazzling, engaging and, yes, spellbinding mechanics of Prezi.  It is a new zoom-style presentation platform that makes PowerPoint look like a moped up against a Ferrari.

And it is free.

Like anything worthwhile, there is a learning curve that needs to be dealt with, but it is worth the time and trouble to learn it.  Since December, every presentation I have done has been Prezi-based, and literally every person I have shared it with was eager to learn how to do his or her own.

It was developed by Adam Somlai-Fischer, a Hungarian architect, as a tool to help with visualization.  But instead he has developed one of the more interesting storytelling devices yet created.  It follows the speaker with a visual narrative of the material.  True to the developer’s mission to “make sharing ideas more interesting,” this presentation tool does just that.  What it does is give the user complete freedom to exploit the visual experience by using a zoom feature. The techies among you will recognize this as a Zooming User Interface, cloud-based SaaS, (Software as a Service) presentation delivery model.

I recently ran across two different, new apps in development for smartphones and iPhones, both of which purport to measure a person’s mental health, happiness and even depression completely passively. (“Apps” are tiny pieces of software that run most commonly on portable devices.)

This, of course, is a Big Deal, since one of the major stumbling blocks of the thousands upon thousands of health apps are their need for something or someone to input personal health data. Without personal health data, health and mental health apps are generally pretty useless.

The method to measure one’s psychological well-being (or, as we more commonly refer to it, one’s happiness) passively is to use whatever metrics are available through the phone. Since phones generally only have a limited amount of inputs — voice, video, geo-positioning (GPS), and an accelerometer — your choices as a researcher interested in personal health data are pretty limiting.

Using only these four physical measurements, is it really possible to accurately and reliably measure a person’s well-being? Let’s find out.

If you give people the opportunity to leverage their personal social networks online to play a game, you should probably think long and hard before you shut down that game.

Of all companies you’d think might be smart enough to “get it,” Google would be at the top of my list.

But in a demonstration that apparently some companies don’t really give much thought to such things, Google decided to shut down the popular SuperPoke Pets game, after buying the company that owned it. (Which begs the question — why buy a company only to shutter its popular products?)

The real problem for users of SuperPoke! Pets (SPP) is that the game featured a virtual economy full of virtual goods. Virtual goods that people paid real money for. And of course with pets, one can become emotionally attached to them (yes, even virtual pets).

A new lawsuit just announced features a group who are suing Google over the game’s shutdown — and the loss of meaningful interaction with their virtual pets.

I live in a college town.

In fact, I live in the college town in which I used to attend college.

I moved back here a few months ago and I pass my (er, the college’s) library daily. It brings back plenty of academic memories — and, surprisingly, they’re not the stressful ones. In the six years that have passed since my graduation, the memories of stress and panic and due dates and overwhelming projects has faded.

But the positive stuff remains: the nights spent in a library study nook with my Intro to Communication textbook and a highlighter. (I loved that class.)

The satisfaction of applying a concept I learned in my 9 a.m. Intro to Logic class to my 2 p.m. Composition class. (I could point out all the major logical fallacies in our assigned reading.)

The scent of the pages of a brand-new textbook. (Am I the only one who thinks that new books sort of smell like cucumbers on the inside?)

I hit the peak of wistful sentimentality last week and found a way to re-create a portion of the academic college experience (without the stress!): watching actual college lectures on Academic Earth.