Instant Genius - Email overload: How a full inbox affects your mental health, and what you can do to take back control

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

It’s a feeling most of us will have experienced at some point: you arrive at work in the morning and open your email client only to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unread messages staring back at you. In this episode we catch up with Dr Emma Russell, a psychologist based at the University of Sussex. She tells us about the far-reaching effects dealing with a constant stream of emails can have on our mental health, why some of us are more prone to these negative effects than others, and how we can take back control. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. It's a feeling most of us will have experienced at some point. You arrive at work in the morning, open your email client, only to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unread messages staring back at you. In this episode, we catch up with Dr Emma Russell,

a psychologist based at the University of Sussex. She tells us about the far-reaching effects dealing with a constant stream of emails can have on our mental health, why some of us are more prone to these negative effects and others, and how we can take back control. Today we're talking about email and many varied relationships that we have with it. So these days, of course, it's ubiquitous. But how long has email being a part of our lives, you know,

when did it first really start taking over communication-wise? So I think the very first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson back in 1971. So quite a long time ago. In fact, from the University of Sussex, the first transatlantic email was sent in 1973. So we've got a bit of a legacy there. But actually, the reality for most people is that they weren't using work email as part of their organizational life until probably around about the mid-1990s. So we're looking at sort of 25 to 30 years or so that work email has been part of people's lives. Of course, back then in the 1990s, the way that we accessed it was extremely different from today. So if you wanted to have a look at your email, you generally had to dial up with some antiquated telephone signal

where you'd hear your computer whirring away and actually downloading the one or two messages for the day that they had in store for you. Whereas now, of course, we are able to access our email constantly and through our mobile devices as a result. of, you know, 4G and 5G technology. So our experience of email has really changed quite significantly over the period that we've been using it. First off, so you mentioned there in the 70s, which I think a lot of people will be surprised by. Do we know how pervasive email is now? You know, is it even possible to get a ballpark figure of the average number of males a day that people are likely to get? Yeah, so there's some organisations that do try to monitor people's email use. I think it was Statista in 2020, who said that around about 3.2 billion emails are sent and received on a

day-to-day basis. That, of course, incorporates all emails. So that's work email, personal email, solicited email, unsolicited email. But their anticipation is that that is going to just continue to increase. And by 2025, they anticipated that we would be sending and receiving around about 4.6 billion emails on a day-to-day basis. It is massively pernicious. It's still the most widely used digital communication method that we have today. So although there's lots of new kids on the block like Slack and Teams and Yammer and all kinds of different technologies have come up, email still seems to reign supreme as the communication medium of choice. I think it was in 2019, so it's a little bit out of date now, but back in 2019, Radicati Group found that the majority

of professionals, 86% of professionals actually say that work email is their preferred communication tool. So they preference that above telephone, instant messaging and old-fashioned face-to-face communication. So within professional work context, it still seems to be the one that people want to use the most. It does differ in different industries. So we've seen Slack, for example, is coming up as being much more preferential in sort of creative industries and things like that. But yeah, email is still the one that most of us use most of the time. So that's quite interesting going on to the next thing and the main topic of this conversation, which is the psychological effects of emails. So you said 86% of people said it was their

preferred method of communication. Yeah. So this was back from 2090s. It may well have changed since the pandemic and then the great proliferation of digital technologies that we are now faced with. But yes, that is the case. And yeah, in terms of the psychological effect, email itself as a system is not necessarily something that is going to have, you know, positive or negative effects on people. It's more how we actually use these technologies, how we use email. And what we find in the academic research literature is there's quite a well-known concept, which is the paradox. of email. Basically, the way in which we use email can have very positive effects for us. It can equally have very negative effects for us. In fact, the same actions that we use can have positive

effects, maybe for well-being and negative effects for, for example, work performance. So just to give an example of that, if you use work email outside of your normal contracted working hours, that could be very beneficial for you in terms of getting your tasks done. So it's very advantageous for your work performance. But it might have negative impacts on you from a kind of health, well-being, work, family conflict perspective. So we generally find that it's quite difficult actually to unpick what it is that creates the negative experience of email and what creates the positive experience of email. And that's because a lot of the research in the field is, varied, it's disparate, it focuses on different outcomes. You know, some studies focus on well-being, some studies focus on work performance, focusing on different actions, you know, not looking necessarily at how we integrate our activities and how we use email as a general part of our working life, rather than just something that's seen as an add-on or an extra. So we need to take all of these things into consideration when we look at what it is about email that has positive and negative

effects for people. Yeah, so when we're talking about negative psychological effects then. So presumably we're talking about things like stress and anxiety. Am I right in saying that? Yeah, so in the study that we recently published, we actually looked at the academic literature on how people use work email, and we were able to identify four key aspects associated with stress or negative indicators of well-being. So the first one there is the experience of overload. So that might not be a surprise for many people, given the huge volumes of email that we experience on the daily basis. But yeah, it can have a negative impact on your work overload. It can also have a negative impact in terms of your psychological strain experience.

So feeling exhausted, burned out, under pressure, out of control, this kind of thing. It can have a negative effect on your work engagement. so it can cause you to withdraw or retreat because you feel so under pressure. And it can also have a negative effect on your work-life balance. So we refer to that as work-life conflict. Those are all related to well-being. Then we also had a look at the different kinds of negative effects that we find for people's work performance.

And we found three main categories here. The first of those was that it has potentially a negative impact on the tasks that you're doing as part of your kind of normal responsibilities within your working role. It can have a negative impact just on how you manage the rest of your email. So your ability to actually navigate your email system and your email communication can be negatively impacted. And then the final area is your ability to communicate with and collaborate with your colleagues in an effective way. So those would be the three aspects of work performance that email can have an impact on. And as I mentioned, different email actions will have positive implications for some of those outcomes and negative

implications for other outcomes. And the consensus between studies is generally very, very mixed. So one study may find a positive outcome for one action and a very similar study would find a negative outcome for the exact same action. So it is very difficult or it has been very difficult to date to understand quite what's creating those differences. So having said that, can we say then that it's likely that different people's personalities change how they respond towards email and stress caused by email? Yeah, so in some other research that I've been doing, we have actually started now to look at individual differences and the extent to which this will impact people's ability

to manage their work email effectively. And self-regulation is something that we know in psychology is extremely important in lots of different domains of life. So people who are able to self-regulate to kind of monitor their actions, adjust their actions when they're not achieving what they need to, and continue to garner feedback from their environments. These are people that generally do well in different domains of life. And it's no different when it comes to work email. So people who are able to keep an eye on the strategies that they're using to see whether those strategies are helping them to achieve their goals and then adjusting those strategies when they're not appear to be the people that operate best.

And the personality characteristic that's coming through seems to be related to an aspect of self-control. So people who are very good at exercising self-control are also generally good self-regulators and therefore more likely to be adept at dealing with their work email in an effective way. So they're dealing with email to help them to achieve their work goals and also to help them achieve their well-being. In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are. Writers, thinkers, creators,

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a non-profit month-to-month senior community within the Front Porch family. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking.

Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French Acoustic Specialist Focal, Name Audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by Name Boutique. Visit vocal powered by name.com for more information. So say I am struggling with my emails, what's your advice to help me manage that better? Well, what we did in our latest piece of research was a massive systematic literature review.

What that means is that we identified all of the academic research papers that talk about the actions that people use in relation to their work email. and we unpicked which of those actions were predicting effectiveness in work performance and effectiveness in well-being. A huge amount of reviewing to do looking at 62 papers, which we whittled down from a broader list of 5,000 papers, but basically from these 62 papers, we were able to identify 13 action categories. And of those 13 action categories, we actually only found that there are four action categories that universally across the studies seem to predict positive well-being outcomes and positive work performance outcomes. So we call these our superactions. And if I were to give any advice to people, it would be if you can start to harness these super

actions and to engage these superactions in your work email activity, then you're much more likely to be successful and to keep on top of your work email. There's always caveats. So there's always specific conditions and situations that we need to take into account. People have different job roles and different expectations placed upon them. But generally speaking, we are quite confident that from the mass of academic literature, these four superactions are the actions that we would suggest people try to adopt wherever possible in their work. So let's have a look at these then. So what are they? and how can somebody implement them? Okay, so the first superaction is that people need to try to communicate their access boundaries

in relation to work email and then to try to stick with whatever they're communicating to people. So what that usually means is that if you are not going to be dealing with your work email, potentially because you're out of office or because you're somebody who doesn't want to work in the evenings or on weekends, then it's letting people know that that is your preference, that that is how you want to organise your time boundaries in relation to work email. Once you communicate that, and that's often through using automated messages

or perhaps putting a line in your signature, you know, I don't work Fridays, for example, letting people know that that is a time when you're not going to be dealing with email and then really trying to stick to that. And the reason why we think this seems to work is because it's helping to manage people's expectations. about your availability. So you then don't feel the pressure to respond, but your activity partners

also know when they can contact you, when is appropriate. And it just helps to set those boundaries and expectations. Now, it's not always possible, of course, in some jobs for people to be able to do that. In some jobs, you have to be quite flexible about when and where you work. But everybody does need some time every day where they're switching off. from their work. It's very important that people have what we call a sense of psychological detachment from their work every day if they are to be productive and to work with relatively low levels of stress. So even if you're in a job where you are going to be having to dip in and out of your email fairly frequently, at the times where you know you're not going to be doing

that and that does need to be for a particular period every day, it's just letting people know about that. And just sending things at holding emails, you know, I've got your message, I can't deal with it at the moment, but I'll get back to you by whatever the date happens to be. So it's kind of being very clear about your access boundaries. That would be the first super action. The second of the super actions is to what we call triage your email. Now, what that really means is that you're just regularly checking in on and reviewing your inbox. So you're always aware of what you have waiting for you, what needs to be done, and you're managing your email system in a very sort of foresighted, purposeful way. So here you might have systems for deleting email,

putting email into folders or flagging email, generally trying not to keep your inbox too swollen, basically with unread messages. So there's been conflicting advice here that has perhaps proliferated some of the more sort of popular outlets that suggest things like, you know, you need to get down to inbox zero or you need to be using, you know, folders and flags and all of these systems religiously. We're not necessarily saying any of that, but what we are saying is that where people are regularly engaging in housekeeping on their system and reprioritizing and sorting out what needs to be done, these are the people that are keeping abreast of what's required and managing their work much more effectively. So yeah, keep checking in. The idea that

potentially you wouldn't look at your email for long periods of time during your work day is not necessarily helpful. There have been some studies that show people then actually get quite anxious at the point where they have got to go and check in because there could be so much they're waiting for them. But just, you know, whatever's appropriate for you, maybe every 40 minutes, every hour, just regularly looking at what's going on and sorting out what you've got at those particular periods. The third superaction is only use your work email to send work relevant communications. Now that might sound obvious, but if you're using email for other purposes, so for general personal exchanges, you know, ping ponging jokes and niceties back and forth,

that can be quite nice. But what tends to happen then is it creates quite a lot of clutter. So the suggestion is that if you only use email for work relevant messages and you use other things for all of the other aspects of your life that you want to manage, it really does help to keep your inbox down to a minimum. It helps people to identify that you only use email for work and it's not something that they can use to contact you for other things. Sending, you know, big group messages around to people, have you seen my mug? This kind of thing is not helpful. But if you're sending messages about critical, congruent work topic, then you're probably onto a winner. So this is associated with improved well-being and improved work

performance for those that you engage with as much as with yourself. The fourth superaction is about being civil, courteous and considerate in your work email exchanges. So there's quite a large literature on digital incivility. The norms for what's considered civil do differ from organisation to organisation and from work culture to work culture. But once you've identified what are the norms for civil behaviour within your organisation and your culture, if you can try to adhere to these, so being polite, courteous and respectful of your colleagues in the exchanges that you engage in will be very helpful for both your well-being and your work performance and that of the people that you work with. So you mentioned there making jokes and

group chats and things. Does something like another messaging service like Slack or WhatsApp help with that because you can sort of compartmentalise the different messages that you're receiving? Yeah, it's possible. I mean, this isn't something that we have specifically looked at in our study whether people could use other platforms as a kind of compensation. But what we have found recently is the rise of WhatsApp as a digital communication tool. So in the latest survey that the digit research centre conducted in 2023, this was with about 3,000 working adults. Email was the most popular communication tool. This was followed by teams. But WhatsApp was coming in third for work communication. And of course, WhatsApp is actually not something that most organisations and employers

support as a tool to exchange business communications. So this was really interesting to us. And actually what we think we're finding and it has come across from some of the research, particularly in healthcare industries, is that people are almost using WhatsApp as a replacement for the corridor chats and water cooler moments where you might engage in a bit of gossip or a bit of chit-chat or a bit of social support with each other. So it may well be actually that something like WhatsApp could be the forum to engage in those sorts of exchanges. And that's probably a bit safer anyway, because of course then we've got some of the issues of privacy, GDPR, you know, sensitive information potentially being conveyed through a medium that you perhaps don't have

protections for in terms of your employer. We're talking about smartphones now. So do you have advice like should I download my work email clients to my phone? Whether you should or shouldn't, your organisation will probably have some guidance for you on that. But we do know that many people do access their work email on their personal mobile devices. The suggestion here, and this fits in with one of our super actions about our access boundaries, is that if you do have it on your phone, we would still recommend that when you're not contracted to work, when it's not part of your normal work activity that you silence your work email notifications because it is so important to have time each day where you're not dealing with work communications. Again,

it does depend on your job role, but wherever possible, if you can try to make sure that your work email isn't infringing on your personal time and your leisure time, then this is beneficial for productivity and for well-being. So we've covered an awful lot there. There's quite a lot to take in. So just sort of by way of summary, as though one or two things that you think someone listening to this that is perhaps struggling

with managing their email, a couple of pieces of advice that you would give them. Yeah, so I think it comes back to this notion of self-regulation. And what I mean by that in terms of giving advice to people is just keep checking in with what you're doing. So what we found with our super actions was that all of those actions are helpful for people in terms of achieving their task goals in achieving their personal goals, but also, and this is important, I think, in helping other people that you work with to achieve your goals.

So for example, when you're being civil and courteous and respectful to people, that's good for you. It's good for getting your work done because people are more likely to respond to you. but it's also good for the people that you work with because it makes them feel good about what they're doing. So I would say to people, just keep thinking about the ways in which you're using your email. Are those approaches that you're using helpful for your tasks, helpful for you in terms of achieving your personal goals, and also helpful for the people that you're working with? And if you can say yes to each of the strategies that you're using, then it's probably going to be a good strategy to keep using. I mean, there's lots of suggestions that we give in terms of how you can use your email client more effectively.

So we do suggest things like make use of things like the delay send function. So if it's really important for you to get something off your chest at 12 o'clock at night and you know you're not going to sleep unless you do it, by all means write that email, but delay sending it. So use the automated processes in the system to say, I'm not going to send this until I've looked at it again tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock and it's not going to get sent until 10. Use things that you're out of office replies to let people know when they can expect a response and really try to stick to that if you can. So there's lots of things like that that people can be doing. There's now add-ons that you can adopt for your particular email client that can even look at

things like how courteous and polite your message is. So it can stop you before you send something and say, are you sure you want to write this? If you have the opportunity to have that incorporated into your email systems, then that will be great in terms of the superaction for being polite and respectful and courteous to your colleagues. So it's really just trying to see how you can make better use of the system wherever possible so that you're always checking in, regulating and monitoring the way in which you're dealing with your email and making adaptations when you can see that your strategies are not necessarily more that successful.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Emma Russell. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at Science. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal.

The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at Name Audio. com.