Are You Addicted to Email?

You finish up dinner and check your work email. You brush your teeth before bed and check your work email. Your alarm goes off in the morning and you check your work email. Are you guilty of this? It seems a lot of us are. With email access always at our fingertips because of smartphones, it's hard to disconnect and separate our work and personal lives. What's adding to the problem is the sheer volume of emails being sent each day.

According to a report by research firm The Radicati Group, about 269 billion emails were sent per day in 2017, with email users globally receiving 72 emails a day on average.  The number of emails that employees have to process on a daily basis is forcing people to be "on" all the time. Because email is so easy to access, many employers have developed an "always on" expectation. This is causing people to feel the need to respond to emails as soon as possible, no matter the time of day or day of the week. It's putting pressure on employees and creating stress. And it's well known that stress is a huge problem in the workplace.

Before we dive into tips for dealing with email addiction, it’s important to understand why you are addicted in the first place. It’s pretty simple actually. It starts when you get an email with good news, which produces dopamine in your brain, causing a feeling of excitement or pleasure. As a result, we continue to check our email hoping for more gratifying emails and more dopamine. Studies have even shown that just the thought of getting rewarding emails can release dopamine. It’s also worth mentioning the brain’s “completion bias,” in which we get a small dose of pleasurable dopamine simply because we’ve accomplished something (even as simple as deleting or archiving emails). Before you know it, your email checking habit is a full-on addiction, not very different from an addiction to gambling or even drugs. With that said, checking email may be a very necessary function of your job or business, and not a negative addiction (like drugs or alcohol).

So what can be done? To start, business leaders and managers need to recognize that employee physical and mental wellbeing directly impacts productivity. Steps should be taken to reduce the pressure to feel "always on" and help employees create a little distance between work and home. By promoting health and wellbeing, employees will be happier and more productive overall.

We suggest setting a limit to how many times per day you check your email. Try 5. Organize your inbox and unsubscribe from junk mail to reduce your notifications throughout the day. Lastly, don't charge your phone next to your bed at night. You're less likely to peek at your phone once you're in bed if it is downstairs or somewhere you have to walk to.

 

 




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