Mailbox madness: Do you suffer from email anxiety?
While email may be a simple way to communicate, it can sometimes become overwhelming to deal with, and can you leave you feeling anxious.
Electronic mail, or email as it is commonly known, is said to have been around for the past forty years and is a great way to communicate instantly without having to rely on snail mail.
But if you're someone who relies on their email, you would know that if you leave it standing for too long, expect your inbox to be flooded with emails - some messages important and some just pure spam.
READ: Oops! Are you guilty of these email typos?
In life, there are two people in the world. One on hand you have people who are obsessed with reading every single message that pops up, and on the other hand, you're left with the person who takes their time to sift through hundreds of emails. It's easy to get overwhelmed and easy to experience email anxiety - the pure anxiety of not attending to your inbox, feeling that you missed a message, or forgot to reply to someone.
Medium has shared a few ways to combat email anxiety:
- Understand your anxiety - What exactly is making you nervous and anxious? Take time to understand why you're feeling this way and allow yourself to go through the motions.
- Take time - Don't rush in replying to all your emails as you may miss the small details like an attachment or an important deadline. Rather take time to craft a well-thought-out response which covers all bases.
- It's not life or death - Although it might seem urgent to you, the fact of the matter is that the world will not end or you won't get fired for not immediately responding to an email. Just make sure you do so within an appropriate timeframe.
In addition to her social media platforms, Jane relies a lot on her email for communication with her peers and external parties. She is not a sufferer of email anxiety but has shared the anxiety of witnessing someone with a flooded inbox.
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"Thankfully I don’t have email anxiety, but I'm certainly not a person who can't live with unread emails. The other day I saw someone’s email inbox had 1002 unread emails - now that gave me anxiety! So every time they look at their phone, can you imagine the stress," Jane said.
How about you? Do you fear your email? How do you deal with email anxiety?