The sun is setting on my Indian hippy holiday and the scents of jasmine and incense mingle in the air. Yet here I am, hunched, fingers busily working their way across my iPhone screen, opening 200 unread emails. ‘What if there are urgent messages from my boss that only I can deal with?’ I wonder (with incredible arrogance) as my boyfriend skulks off, ignored.
I can’t help it – I like to keep a clean inbox; everything neatly flagged, filed and replied to. Paradise is lost. On me at least. I’d ignore heaven a hundred times over to check my email – and a flurry of recent stats show I’m not on my own.
First came a study by My.com, which found that 90 per cent of us admit to checking emails obsessively – 75 per cent of us log on before we do anything else in the morning, 27 per cent regularly lose sleep mulling over our inbox, and nearly one in 10 (and I am definitely one of those) even check emails straight after sex.
Ofcom revealed, last week, that all this adds up to a full day a week spent online – while a separate study suggested the average Brit checks their phone 50 times (is that all?) a day, coining the term ‘nomophobic’ for those who fear having no mobile constantly on hand.
We’ve clearly reached breaking point. Checking emails on our mobiles is tantamount to being switched on to work 24 hours a day – and experts believe that instead of signalling our ambition and helping us get ahead, it’s actually killing our productivity, leaving us aggressive and exhausted in both our professional and personal lives.
‘When the lights go down, we start to create a hormone called melatonin,’ says psychotherapist and life coach Eva Speakman. At which point, we should be checking out, not checking in. ‘It’s been proven that the light emitted by mobile phones and PCs disrupts our circadian rhythms – aka our sleep cycles – and means we don’t produce as much melatonin, or sleep as well. It causes irritability and lack of concentration, producing too much adrenaline.’
The next day, you’re taking these things to the office – meaning for every email you’ve rattled off when you should be nodding off, your performance will be that bit worse. ‘Sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture, it’s that serious,’ Speakman says. ‘Your body needs time to rest and repair. There’s a reason the working day is roughly eight hours long – if you don’t stick to that, over time, you’ll burn out.’
But despite these detrimental effects on our state of mind, Speakman is seeing a growing number of clients who believe they’ve got an addiction to their emails. As an ex-smoker, I can feel that repetitively swiping down to make more emails magically appear at 2am gives me the same uncanny thrill as lighting up a cigarette. But why does this habit feel ever harder to quit?
‘We all like to be liked and want to be wanted,’ Speakman explains. But being contactable and on top of things, 24/7, is not a sign of efficiency, but insecurity, according to Speakman. ‘Self-esteem is an issue,’ she says. ‘If you’re confident you’re doing a great job, why would you email someone back at 10pm rather than wait until the morning? If anything, it shows you feel inadequate and too worried about what others think of you.’
Checking my emails is like holding a mirror up to my life. If I’ve had a good day, it’s full of praise. If I’ve had a bad one, it’s terse conversations. I feel the compulsion to keep track of this and immediately fix any problems to make sure that people still like me. You could put me in ‘It’ restaurant Chiltern Firehouse on the same table as Taylor Swift and I would still need to know what’s going on in my inbox every five minutes. I once left a house party at midnight, glass of Prosecco in hand, because I’d spotted an email from an editor in New York chasing me for an attachment that was on my laptop. At the first sign of failure nagging me in my inbox, I was incapable of enjoying the rest of my night with my friends.
The problem is not just about the frequency with which we’re checking in, but the way in which we respond – as anyone who has ever overcompensated for a rushed, slightly abrupt email with three kisses and a smiley face on the next message will understand. The thing is, we are much more likely to offend people if we rely solely on email for our communications in the first place.
How often do you skip through spam, phishing and promotional messages but miss out on the important ones? Or get so distracted midreply that you forget to press send, then wonder why someone hasn’t got back to you?
I would argue that email is the least efficient form of communication. You can’t convey tone, or move forward with your work until you’ve had a reply. Firing emails at your colleagues – instead of wandering over for a quick chat – can sound like barking orders, only making your relationships worse.
Conquering email related anxiety isn’t easy, but I’m getting better at making face-to-face contact and phone calls my go-to forms of communication. I started a new job in January and have deliberately not learned how to log in to my work webmail from home. It feels liberating to not be constantly on tenterhooks.
Next step? When I’m on a night out, I won’t look at my gmail under the table. I’ll try to save it for loo breaks. Well, it’s a start.