Definition
💡 Email anxiety is a psychological condition characterized by feelings of stress, worry, or dread associated with opening and managing one's inbox.
Those who experience email anxiety often find themselves avoiding checking their inbox for days and even weeks, procrastinating in responding to messages, or feeling overwhelmed at the mere sight of the unread email badge showing a three-digit number.
This anxiety can have different causes. For some, it can be a traumatic past experience, such as a job in an extremely high-stress work environment that revolved around email communication. For others, it can be caused by the sheer volume of incoming messages (both legitimate and unsolicited) combined with the pressure to respond quickly.
Examples
Real people express their struggles with email anxiety in many different ways. Here are three examples from Reddit:
- "How do I stop my inbox from filling up because I am too anxious to answer any of them? I know it sounds like a stupid thing to be stressed about but with online everything nowadays, my anxiety with emails is debilitating." (Source)
- "I have such bad anxiety when it comes to opening and responding to emails. This has caused major issues in my life but I still can’t seem to get it done in a timely manner. I’m currently applying for jobs, so I have a lot of emails to read and respond to. Any tips on how to get over the stress of it all and just write the damn email?" (Source)
- "I'm a PhD student. A little before even the pandemic started, I began getting behind emails. I would at least take a few days to work up to respond to them. But over the last year it's gotten really terrible. I'm having crippling anxiety replyring back to most emails in general. I try to check emails three-four times a day." (Source)
As you can see, email anxiety has highly negative real-world consequences for those who suffer from it, so addressing it is essential and can greatly improve both personal well-being and professional productivity.
The Best Tool to Deal with Email Anxiety
The most effective tool for addressing email anxiety is professional therapy which tackles its root cause. Clinically proven therapeutic approaches include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
To maximize the effectiveness of therapy, I recommend combining it with improved inbox management techniques and tools. The Clean Email app in particular stands out with its collection of inbox management tools that include:
- Cleaning Suggestions, which make it easy to stop procrastinating and start organizing.
- Auto Clean rules whose purpose is to automate commonly performed actions so that your inbox stays organized without you lifting a finger.
- Unsubscriber feature, capable of stopping even the most persistent unsolicited (as well as solicited but now unwanted) messages.
- Screener option that instantly holds all messages from new senders, giving you time to decompress.
- A user-friendly interface for replying, forwarding, and sending messages.
These and other features are available on both desktop and mobile, and they work with all major mail services.
