The sense of self shapes the impact of environmental factors on technostress and mental health: a two-wave longitudinal study

Limited access to nature in densely urbanized environments together with technostress are recognized as significant mental health burdens in students. However, how draining environments influence mental health under high digital pressure, and what are the involved psychological mechanisms, remains unknown. The sense of self is conceived as the experience of being a temporally coherent, agentive person, grounded in a bodily relation with the environment. We propose that the sense of self may constitute a central pathway through which lack of environmental restorativeness and technology-related pressures are associated with mental health. A two-wave psychometric survey comprising satellite-based measures of residential greyness was conducted in a large sample of students from 22 Italian universities. Data were analysed using iterative structural equation strategies, including longitudinal, cross-lagged specification. Results show that the sense of self and situated affect may mediate the relationship between home environment features, and both technostress and mental health. Our results further suggest that self–environment processes and well-being may shape each other over time. By elucidating the potential importance of self-experience as a central psychological process, these results provide insights in individual vulnerability variables and to inform environmental health interventions aimed at prevention and resilience in educational and residential settings.