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Microprocessing
What a Compulsive Email Habit Does to Your Mind and Relationships
Workaholism is just the start
Every morning when I wake up, I roll over and check my email.
Usually there’s nothing that can’t wait: some press releases about new studies, the occasional email from an editor, and plenty of spam. The checking is a compulsion I’ve adopted in the past several years — one that only adds to my already significant anxiety, with few upsides (if any).
It is, in effect, making me something of a workaholic, or someone who is driven to work “excessively and compulsively,” according to psychologists at Norway’s University of Bergen.
Despite making attempts to create emotional boundaries between myself and my work, including quitting my full-time job last year to go freelance, the habit creeps back in. Nothing can erase the fact that I work in a culture that dictates that I’m always on, always connected, and always available. My entire life is inundated, in one way or another, with work. And it’s exhausting.
For millions of people, specifically white-collar American workers who spend their days tethered to a desk, workaholism is activated, in part, by the expectation from managers that employees constantly check and respond to email. This expectation has drastic, negative health effects on both employees and their families. And while it’s worth encouraging individual employees to learn how to decouple their leisure time from work time, it’s crucial that we place the bulk of the task on managers and workplaces. We might even think to implement laws regulating the practice.
A 2012 McKinsey analysis found that American professionals receive approximately 120 emails per day and spend 28% of their workday, or about 2.6 hours, tending to their inbox. (It seems fair to assume that number has risen since then, now that smartphones have become ubiquitous.) That much email is not great for your health: A 2014 study compared how 124 adults felt after a week of limited email-checking versus a week of unlimited email-checking and found, perhaps not surprisingly, that subjects were less stressed out when they checked their email less. That lack of stress translated into greater general well-being.
