Emails Really Stress Us Out

Many of us never take a break from work emails for long, even during what’s supposed to be downtime. In a 2011 Harris Interactive poll of about 3,300 U.S. adults, more than a third admitted to checking work emails while on vacation.

Yet maybe more of us should take an email holiday, based on a study presented at a May 2012 meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery. For the study, researchers from the University of California, Irvine, and U.S. Army teamed up to ask a radical question: What happens when you shut off employee email for a week?

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Less Stress, More Focus

The study included 13 professionals and managers for whom information was an indispensable tool of their trade. For five workdays, these volunteers agreed to do without email. During that period, as well as during a baseline period beforehand, they wore heart rate monitors to track their physiological state. Meanwhile, special software recorded how often they switched from one computer window to another.

When using email, the volunteers switched windows an average of 37 times per hour. Without email, that rate was cut in half—an indication of more sustained attention.

But the heart rate monitors told the most compelling story: On email days, heart rates stayed at a more constant rate. This absence of normal variability in heart rate occurs when the body is in a steady state of high alert due to stress. In contrast, on email-free days, volunteers showed more normal, variable heart rates. In short, they were less stressed.

When researchers talked with the volunteers afterward, their comments backed up these findings. Almost all described the email-free pace as more relaxed, using adjectives such as “liberated” and “refreshing.” They also said that they spent more time interacting with other human beings, either face-to-face or on the phone. The biggest downside they reported was a fear of being out of the loop.

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The Tyranny of the Inbox

In a separate study, researchers from Stanford and Boston University found that the more time people spent handling email, the more burdened they felt. In fact, email seemed to be singled out as the ultimate symbol of work overload, maybe because the bottomless inbox was a constant, nagging reminder of never-ending job demands.

Smartphones may just be exacerbating the problem. Research suggests that it’s particularly easy to become compulsive about checking email that way. And because most people carry their phones with them 24/7, the constant checking cuts not only into work hours, but also into playtime.

Given the mostly positive results of the week-without-email study, maybe more of us should try shutting off message alerts and carving out some email-free workdays—or, at the very least, taking email-free vacations.

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