#Stressed: Covid-19, chronic illness and technostress

The use of online resources, particularly search engines and social media, for health-related information is on a steady upward trajectory. With its accessibility and ease of use, the Internet has founded a new era of information gathering and society has naturally gravitated towards the use of internet-based resources to find out more about all aspects of our own health (West et al., 2020). This has had rather unsurprising results for the way in which consumers engage with their health and with healthcare professionals, with many consumers armed and ready with some level of online-sourced health information prior to engaging with their local GP or specialist. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its sudden onset and widespread ramifications, gave many people yet another reason to pick up their smartphones and utilise online health resources to understand something that came to affect almost every person in one way or another, and became a pervasive part of our everyday lives. Indeed, with COVID-19 necessitating a reduced amount of travel and face to face contact with healthcare professionals, online platforms have become an essential way of accessing this information.