Technology is Advancing at an Alarming Rate, Are We?
Dr. Vanessa Harding is a neuroscience-informed performance coach and founder of Ayla Life Performance Coaching. She trains executives to strengthen resilience, decision-making under pressure, and achieve sustainable high performance. Her mission is to cultivate authentic leaders who respond, not react, and prioritise long-term health.
Within my twenty-year career in engineering, I saw robotic arms being implemented on production lines with a level of precision and repeatability that felt almost miraculous. I worked alongside design engineers using stress analysis software built to more accurately indicate where and when a component was likely to fail and how long it would last, cutting the cost and time of testing before a product reached production. Technology, at that stage, felt like a gift, there to do the safety-critical work, protect people, bring precision, and reduce time, freeing up attention for the judgement calls that actually needed a human brain.
So why does it feel like the opposite is happening now? Why, with more technology in our hands than any generation before us, is the workforce more stressed, more overloaded, and more exhausted than ever? Somewhere between the factory floor, information technology in the office, artificial intelligence (AI), and the iPhone in every pocket, something shifted. We have drifted from smart working to simply speeding up and doing more, when speed without capacity is not progress. It is overload wearing a progress costume.
The good news is that the answer is not to do more or reject technology altogether. It is about learning to expand our own capacity so we can keep pace without burning out, and that starts with understanding what is actually happening in our brains and bodies when the pace picks up.
What twenty years in engineering taught me about smart machines
Before I founded Ayla Life Performance, I spent two decades in high-pressure engineering environments, working in materials engineering, manufacturing implementation, and installation on projects that automated production lines to increase volume while improving quality and accuracy. I marvelled at what robotics could do, a machine that did not get tired at 3 p.m., that did not lose concentration after the tenth repetition, and that did exactly what it was engineered to do every single time, freeing the humans on that line to focus on the decisions machines could not make.
Alongside that, I worked closely with design engineers using stress analysis software, a tool built to help predict the stress, failure, and lifetime of a product before it was ever built. Its purpose was to help designers create structurally sound products that would last their full lifetime in service while cutting out the endless hours and cost of physical testing. In doing so, it also enabled a faster time to production, provided greater precision, and took human error out of the places where a mistake could be catastrophic. Across medical devices, defence, aerospace, automotive, offshore, and renewable energy, technology was not there to replace judgement. It was there to sharpen it.
That is what good technology does. It does the smart work with us, taking the parts of a task where precision matters most and making them reliable, so our attention, energy, and thinking capacity are freed for the parts that genuinely need a human brain.
The question leaders keep asking
Fast-forward to today, and from the research I have gathered, leaders are telling a strikingly similar story. They have invested heavily in technology to improve productivity. They have followed the growing wellbeing and sustainability agenda now shaping the workplace, putting more than ever into wellbeing initiatives to support their people, and yet none of it adds up. Stress has not gone down. Why, as a leader, am I still stressed? Why are my teams still burning out at alarming rates, despite everything we have put in place?
Most leadership advice on stress focuses on mindset or resilience, alongside leadership training and wellbeing initiatives. To be clear, these are on the right lines. They are not wrong. They are simply not enough. On their own, wellbeing initiatives only touch the surface. They are great maintenance, but maintenance is not the same as change.
Why the calm never lasts
Here is what the research and my own work with clients keep confirming. A breathing session, a wellbeing day, a mindfulness app, or a holiday, these things genuinely work. They can lower stress in the moment, but that calm rarely lasts. Within hours, sometimes minutes, of returning to daily life, most people drift straight back into an alert, stressed state, and they do it more often than they realise.
Part of the problem is that we are fixated on quick fixes, the five-minute techniques we can fit into a busy day with little effort and without really changing the body too much. This is exactly what our brains are wired to do. Changing a pattern uses a lot of energy, so the brain avoids it where it can and instead releases a small hit of dopamine as a reward for the low-energy quick fix. It feels good in that moment, but it rarely moves us forward. It is more like Groundhog Day, the same reset on repeat, without ever addressing what is driving the stress in the first place.
Real change requires a lot more effort and time than that, in the same way learning any new skill does. It takes repetition for new neural pathways to fire, connect, and strengthen until what once took conscious effort becomes a habit, something the brain can do efficiently without having to think about it. The encouraging part is that this is not as hard or as time-consuming as most of us have convinced ourselves it is.
Almost everyone I speak to tells me they are too busy for this kind of work. But being too busy is exactly the point. It is the signal that something needs to change, not a reason to keep putting it off.
Think of it like the brakes on a bike freewheeling downhill. You apply the brakes to control your speed and stay steady. The nervous system’s job is much the same, to slow things down and keep us steady rather than overconsuming energy reserves that are needed elsewhere. The trouble is that when we spend too much time on high alert, those brakes are barely used, and over time, they become less responsive, a little seized up. We then creep into a slightly elevated, more anxious baseline without ever noticing the shift. Left unaddressed, that has a real effect on our health over time.
This is also why behaviour change initiatives, on their own, so often fade. Changing our minds and then our behaviour takes a significant amount of brain energy. When most of our energy is already tied up keeping the body in a higher-energy, stressed state, there simply is not enough left over to sustain the change we intended. Despite the best intentions, we revert to type.
It is not only the technology
I want to be clear because this is not simply a case of technology being the villain. The world itself has become more volatile. Costs are rising. Competition is fiercer. The pace of change in almost every industry means that success itself, the very thing we are all striving for, now raises the stakes and, with them, our fear. When there is more to lose, our nervous system responds the way it is designed to respond, moving into a more defensive, more protective state. That is not weakness. That is biology. But it means that even without a single new app or platform, most of us would already be carrying more internal pressure than we did a decade ago.
Layer rapidly advancing technology on top of that already elevated baseline, and you get a nervous system working overtime on two fronts at once, bracing against a less predictable world while also trying to keep pace with tools that move faster than we can process them.
Technology in everyone’s hands, are we being left behind?
Here is the part I find most interesting. Technology that was once reserved for advanced engineering labs and manufacturing lines is now in the hands of every single person, every single day. Anyone can access tools that would once have seemed extraordinary, and yet, unintentionally, I think many of us are being left behind by our own creations. This is not because the technology is against us, but because we have not been trained or given the time to catch up with what it now demands of us.
I put this question out on LinkedIn recently, and the response confirmed what I was sensing. One comment reframed the whole debate for me. Most of the conversation around AI treats it as either a labour-saving device that performs tasks for us or a companion that keeps us company and holds our attention. But that misses the more powerful and largely undiscovered role it could play as a cognitive extender, a reflective scaffold that lets a person think in structures they could not previously hold alone. We are so focused on what technology can do instead of us that we are barely exploring what it could do alongside us.
The response also raised two connected points worth sitting with. As AI capability expands, roles and organisational design need to evolve with it. Some people will thrive with an expanded scope, while others quietly become overloaded, cast as the default AI operator on top of their existing job. Meanwhile, our brains are still running on old software. Many of the tools now shaping our day are built to keep us engaged rather than finished, feeding a rising baseline of expectation and a steady stream of context switching. As a result, the sense of completion our nervous system needs in order to properly stand down rarely arrives. Taken together, this is a meaningful part of why burnout risk keeps climbing, especially when paired with less genuine human connection.
Training ourselves to keep up
So where does that leave us? I do not believe the answer is to reject technology, any more than the answer earlier in my career was to reject robotics or stress analysis software. The answer is the same one engineering taught me then. Use technology to do the smart, precise, reliable work alongside us and free our energy and attention for the thinking only we can do.
But that only works if we train ourselves to meet it. We need to expand our own capacity to cope with more, not by pushing harder, but by lowering our baseline stress so there is actually room to take more in. We need to build our tolerance for uncertainty because the pace of change is not slowing down. We need to create more available energy so our brains can do their best thinking rather than running on the leftover fuel after a day of alertness and reactivity. We need to learn to divert our attention away from distraction and manufactured urgency and back towards genuine focus. We need decisions that come from a clear, resourced brain, not from the defensive, protective, knee-jerk responses that a chronically stressed nervous system defaults to.
This is not a soft skill. It is a physiological one, and it is entirely trainable, but only if we are willing to put in the same kind of focused effort and time we would give to learning any new skill rather than reaching for the next quick fix and hoping it holds. Wellbeing activities remain genuinely effective as maintenance. They keep us going, but they will not create lasting change until we do the deeper work of retraining and changing the system underneath them.
The Ayla Life Performance approach
This is exactly where the Ayla Life Performance approach comes in. I work with leaders and their teams to super-boost brain capacity, create more available energy, and lower baseline stress, so performance becomes sustainable rather than something borrowed from tomorrow. The body leads, the brain follows, and performance rises, not so we can simply do more, faster, but so we can think more clearly, decide with confidence, and actually enjoy the benefits of the success we are working so hard for.
Technology will keep advancing. That is not going to change. The question is whether we advance our own capacity to work with it or keep letting it set a pace our brains were never trained to sustain. If you want to explore how this applies to you or your organisation, start with a conversation with Ayla Life Performance Coaching.
Read more from Dr. Vanessa Harding
Dr. Vanessa Harding, Mental and Physical Performance Coach
Dr. Vanessa Harding is a neuroscience-based performance coach who trains business leaders and sports professionals to shift into calm, think clearly, and perform at their best under pressure while sustaining long-term high performance. With a PhD in Materials Science and two decades of corporate leadership, she blends scientific expertise with human-centred insight. She specialises in neural rewiring to break limiting thought-emotion-behaviour patterns, strengthening stress regulation, confidence and cognitive resilience. Through her mentoring programmes and signature AYLA method, she integrates brain training and nervous system optimisation to elevate mental and physical capacity while securing long-term health.
