5 facts about email that often cause stress

Feeling stressed, overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted are some of the common reactions caused by emails. Here are 5 email facts that indicate emails are having major impact on your stress-level:

1. Many unread emails:

Approximately 92% of employees show elevated blood pressure and heart rate when handling emails at work. Especially many unread emails serve as a stress factor for workers.
Studies show that employees get a burst of anxiety when waking up and seeing hundreds of unread emails in their inbox. The reason employees feel anxious and overwhelmed is that each message represents another demand of their time and decision. Even if they are ignoring emails, it often bothers their consciousness, and both sorts cause immediate stress and draws attention away from actual work.

2. Too much time spend on email:

The more email there is to handle, the more employees experience stress. Since a lot of emails take up a lot of time, it often results in less work getting done. Employees might feel they have had a long day answering emails, but at the end of the day realizing that they have not accomplished anything of significance. This causes the feeling of not having a fulfilling work day with less productivity and checking email thus serves as a distraction from other work tasks and causes stress because it takes up too much of the employees’ time at work.

3. Workers handle email off duty:

Studies show that checking emails early in the morning and late at night is one of the most stressful habits for employees. When employees feel, they should check and respond to emails in their spare time, they become emotionally exhausted, partially because they cannot detach from work. This is found to have a negative impact on employees’ emotional states. It also leads to burnout and diminished work-family balance, which is important for individual’s health and well-being.

Related: Email stress – who to blame?

4. Email communication is complex:

Complex and emotionally-driven emails complicate the message and causes misinterpretation of the message. They can also contribute to work-related stress, such as feeling overloaded, which impacts job satisfaction and working relationship. Badly written emails are found to be the source of some staff frictions, including disagreements over work-related responsibilities and activities.

5. Many workers check email often:

Apparently, employees have a bad habit of using the “push” feature on mobile devices that automatically updates emails as soon as they arrive. This creates a short response time but at the same time causing immediate email stress, because you check your email many times a day. 70% of work-related emails are handled within six seconds, which indicates that employees check email constantly. Actually, studies show that the average worker checks email 74 times a day. This, combined with the fact that studies also state that one of the most stressful habits for workers is leaving their email on all day, indicates that checking email to often can be extremely stressful for workers.