How your E-mail is affecting your mental health (and what you can do)
We’ve all been there — you wake up in the morning feeling relaxed and ready to roll…. right until you open up your phone and see all those emails just crying out for your attention.
Suddenly, the sleep you just had seems to have vanished into the air and all that before you’ve even made it out of bed. So now you feel overwhelmed by the avalanche of spam emails in your inbox. This piling of emails continues during the whole day, cluttering your headspace and your inbox.
Turns out there is a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect going on in the background, its the same reason why your favourite pop song just won't get out of your head or why you can't stop thinking about that next season of Game of Thrones.
The Zeigarnik effect was discovered in the 1920s by a Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik when she gave 138 children tasks to solve puzzles and half of the group was interrupted during the process while the other half was allowed to finish the tasks. In one hour their memory of the tasks was checked and the results were SHOCKING. From a group that was allowed to finish the task, only a tenth of the people (12%) could remember tasks that they were doing in detail. While a whopping 80% of the individuals who had been interrupted remembered their puzzles in detail.
In several repeated experiments, this contrast between the two groups was confirmed with the conclusion that people of all ages remember things better than they have yet not finished or have been interrupted from doing.
WAIT but how does all of this relate to my emails and my mental health?
According to psychology since uncompleted tasks stay with us much longer in our active memory. This makes you not be present at the moment, leading to unhelpful thought patterns that can affect your sleep, create anxiety and consume your mental and emotional resources. This can lead to a vicious cycle on self-generating anxiety where the things left undone create negative thought patterns that are applied even to new actions that are taken, creating a self-fulfilling loop of tasks being left unfinished because of the anxiety and then anxiety being created from not finished tasks.
The GOOD side of the never-ending email and what YOU can do
Turns out that nature is not just messing with us and having an evil laugh somewhere in the corner.
Since we have through our evolutionary development been programmed to complete tasks instead of leaving them hanging by — then we are greatly rewarded once we actually deal with the problems we face and take action. We receive a sense of accomplishment which increases our self-esteem and confidence. Leaving us more mental and emotional capacity to deal with more productive with the things we really care about.
For email this could be unsubscribing from all the spam lists that have gained your email, getting a mail organizer, deleting or blocking all irrelevant emails on your devices whether you use iPhone or Android.
Also, we should not forget to mention that thanks to the new data protection regulation all companies have to make unsubscribing from their mailing lists as simple as possible. If there is no direct button, then by emailing the message sender and saying “Unsubscribe me” the company needs to comply within 30 days or they face substantial fines of 10 million for smaller companies and up to 20 million for bigger ones. So this makes the dream of an anti-spam inbox very realistic.
