Reading Fewer Emails Means Less Stress
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iStock/Thinkstock(VANCOUVER, British Columbia) — Want to reduce stress at work? Try checking your email inbox less often.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia conducted a study of 124 adults from various careers and instructed half the group to limit checking email to three times daily for one week. The other participants were told to check their email as often as they normally checked it prior to the study.
After the instructions were reversed for the participants during a subsequent week, the researchers conducted a brief survey.
“Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often,” says Kostadin Kushlev, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at UBC’s Dept. of Psychology.
Kushlev says most participants “found it quite difficult” to change their email behavior and only check it a few times a day.
“This is what makes our obvious-in-hindsight findings so striking: People find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress,” Kushlev notes.
He suggests that companies try to help reduce worker stress by encouraging staffers to check their email in chunks rather than constantly responding to messages.
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