Club Med on CrackBerry

JONATHAN JAFFE NEEDED a library card. ASAP. It was the only thing that could save him from a fate worse than an IRS audit: vacation without an Internet connection. Trapped at a Club Med near West Palm Beach, Fla., cut off from the universe as he knew it -- his job -- he was near meltdown.

When the librarian told him that he had to have a card to plug in, and be a resident to get a card, fight-or-flight chemicals kicked in. “Well, we just put a bid down on this house in the neighborhood,” he said. Thus began a twice-daily, 20-minute run from the resort to the library. “I had to get on the Internet and check my e-mails,” said Jaffe, who heads a public relations firm in New Jersey.

Had the librarian been trained to recognize the signs, she would have spotted the symptoms of Connection Addiction Syndrome, a compulsion that’s turning tranquil lakes and wooded glens into field offices.

A Boston College study found that 32% of employees and 58% of managers worked on “vacation.” Many were wired for business on their time off via assorted laptops, cellphones and, most ominously, BlackBerrys. The e-mail pager’s street handle -- CrackBerry -- testifies to the dynamic at work here.

Some have found the urge to message so overwhelming that there is a special glove to protect injured CrackBerry thumbs, and others seek treatment for uncontrollable sending and receiving at clinics normally reserved for drug detox, according to the Times of London. Used obsessively, the devices become a kind of digital meth, feeding the high that comes from vanquishing the anarchic forces of nonproductivity.

When you are programmed to believe that all value in life comes from production, stepping away from that shuts off the adrenaline that so many hard-drives-with-hair live to buzz on. “When they stop working, they get anxious, depressed,” says Gail Bates, a Los Altos, Calif., psychologist who works with burnout cases in the Silicon Valley. Bringing work tools on vacation helps keep the smack flowing, so you can blitz through the trip to your return flight.

The impulse behind Connection Addiction is the fear of missing out on something, of being out of the almighty loop. Social animals that we are, we’re suckers for attention. The dinging, buzzing and bonging of e-stowaways are sounds that we are needed, wanted, connected -- to a colleague’s hare-brained marketing scheme, projects due when we get back, the latest pitch for Cialis and other matters that could wait a week or two.

All of this fuels a growing disconnection with our real lives. In the frenzy to be where we’re not, what winds up missing is us -- from our own vacation, the one shot we have at being who we really are. The recuperative benefits of holidays are well-documented: they reduce the risk of heart disease, cure burnout, improve mood. To get all that, however, you actually have to be there, in mind as well as body, distanced from the source of stressors and to-do lists. A real vacation is about input -- the experience of living -- not output.

To kick the e-contact habit, we need to set boundaries. Let’s start by viewing e-access during nonworking hours as electronic breaking and entering. Pagers, beepers, laptops and e-mail-checking devices should be impounded by a neighbor for safekeeping until your return. Book your trip well in advance, and let everyone know you will be out of reach.

Cutting off digital contact cold turkey may take a few nights of chills and crawling skin, but if you’ve booked the right hotel, at least you’ll have clean sheets.