5 ways to deal with email anxiety
“How does it feel?” he asked.
“It feels like…” I paused for a second, in search of the adequate words. And it clicked. I remembered how it feels. A few days earlier I talked to my friend from Spain about their custom of bull running. That’s how.
“Can I tell you a story?”
“Sure,” he said.
“During the summer festivals in Spain, they have a tradition when several running bulls are let loose to run through the towns and villages. And people are running away from them. I know…crazy Spanish. I don’t get it either. Anyway. That is how it feels. When I receive an email, I feel as if the bull is released and I have to RUN.”
This is how I’ve described an email anxiety to my counselor a few months ago.
Bulls running. I have no idea where did this comparison come from, but I burst into a hysterical laughter. I felt as if I said too much.
“Interesting. What is the emotion there?” he asked.
I started thinking. Discomfort? Anger? Rage? No.
“I know. It’s fear. Existential fear,” I said confidently.
Existential fear? Seriously? It felt as if I am referring to a real bull running, not the process of receiving an email. It did not seem reasonable at all. But it felt so true. Emails triggered a fight-or-flight response in me. Which is the basic consequence of the most primitive fear. Existential fear.
We analyzed this fear a bit. Fear of what?
Fear of not being able to answer. Fear that I did something wrong. That I forgot something. That client complained about whatever. Fear that there is something urgent I have to deal with right now and drop everything I’m currently doing. Fear that I’ll have to solve a problem ASAP and I’ll have no idea how. Fear of someone else’s idea about what I should do and what my priority should be.
My inbox was like Pandora’s box. If I open it, who knows, many evils might pop out. But I’d better open it. And I’d better do it frequently. Because who knows who got pissed today and where somebody else thinks I should jump next.
I felt as if the person who sent me an email is standing at my front door, having absolutely nothing to do, being blocked because I haven’t answered that email and waiting. Of course, this is not true. It is actually a completely unrealistic exaggeration.
We all rationally understand that emails are nothing like a bull running or Pandora’s box and there is nothing to feel the “existential fear” about. Yet, in our busy lives, governed by emails, notifications, and to-do lists, we often forget the true purpose of these tools. We use them automatically, reactively and our anxiety builds up.
Here are the ideas on how to deal with email anxiety that helped me greatly:
1. Look into your anxiety
How does it feel? Do the same exercise as I did with the counselor. What is your scary story? Paint it as vividly as you can. Feel it in your body. What emotions are associated with it?
Don’t worry if your story is ridiculous. Mine was, too. But once I looked into it and saw how crazy and unrealistic it is, I could let it go.
Byron Katie gave an outstanding example: Imagine that you’re walking in the woods and you see the snake. You intermediately freak out, your heart starts beating like crazy, your palms sweat and all you want to do is run. But then you realize that the snake does not move and when you look once again, you figure that it’s not a snake but an old rope. If I ask you in that moment to get scared again, to forget that the “snake” is actually a rope, you won’t be able to. Because once you know the truth ( the snake is just a rope, there is nothing to be scared of), you cannot un-know it and go back to the old way of thinking.
2. Give yourself time
Emails (particularly work-related) can introduce a sense of urgency. Full inbox makes us uncomfortable and we want to do something about it. Plus, emails are a perfect busy-work that makes us feel productive when in fact, we’re just procrastinating on what’s really important (and difficult). All of these factors will make us dive into our inboxes and start to frantically declutter. Or, even worse, these tendencies will make us keep the email open for the whole day and deal with emails as they come. Which means we’ll be in a reactive, distracted mode of thinking all day long.
In his book Originals, Adam Grant says that (good) procrastinators are actually more creative than the people who deal with everything right here, right now. I think the same goes for email responding. Too many times I have responded an email as quickly as I could, only to find out that I missed an important piece of information, or attachment (God bless those automatic attachment reminders), or that I did not fully understand what the other person asked me. It is so vital to give ourselves time.
Sit, think, carefully craft your response and send it. I bet a huge portion of email anxiety is due to people frantically trying to send everything out as quickly as possible.
(Alex Franzen has created THIS great guide for writing better emails.)
3. Stop thinking of emails as of the question of life or death
Here is a big truth:
In 99.999 % of cases, nobody will die if you don’t respond that email right now.
The world won’t stop spinning and the birds will not fall from the sky. In other words, what we wish to present as urgency is usually not that urgent. We want to believe that we are doing something crucial to saving the planet, but let’s be honest, most of the time it’s not. We have created our own sense of urgency, our own little drama and now we’re anxious. Solution: let’s stop the insanity. Let’s see the things for what they really are. Email is the way of easy communication, not the omnipotent tool that will save the human kind.
4. Don’t be too available
We teach people how to treat us. We are setting our own boundaries. It is simple, yet hard. We want to show up as good colleagues, friends, responsible business owners. But in our desire to be helpful, we often say ‘No’ to ourselves, to our work and our focus. And the anxiety creeps in. We don’t have to do things that way.
The other day I brought a broken scale to the technician and he told me he will see if he can do anything about it. He got back to me a week later. I imagined that he would drop everything and examine my scale within the same day because that’s probably what I would do. That was an important lesson to me. And you know what? I did not get upset about it at all. I figured he probably has a lot of work and he’s doing things one by one. And I appreciated his effort much more.
5. Unsubscribe
Although the rest of this post is about work related emails, I think it’s also important to think about the clutter in our inboxes with newsletters, updates, promotions and all that jazz. I would like to encourage you to massively unsubscribe. You haven’t opened last 10 newsletters from someone? Chances are you won’t open the following 10. Unsubscribe. Also, ditch the updates that Amazon, Ebay, Twitter, Facebook and all the other stores, sites and social networks are sending. Use services like Unroll.me, put all the remaining newsletters into it and receive 1 email per day. These actions may seem insignificant, but the truth is they can open much more of our mental space, otherwise blocked with emails. “Outer order contributes to inner calm,” said Gretchen Rubin and I couldn’t agree more.
Your turn. Any tips on how to deal with email anxiety? Let me know in comments below.
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