Do you always feel frazzled on a Friday? Workplace stress is a real thing your inbox being flooded with emails, the constant deadlines, pop-up projects, meetings, and even your commute to-and-from the office all add to weight on your shoulders. It’s easy to see why your workplace might just be the perfect stress-creating environment.
There’s all sorts of things that add stress to our lives. But it seems like now more than ever, the workplace has become an especially large source. We don’t need a study to tell us our work suffers when we’re stressed. And while workplace stress is caused by a number of factors, there is one you can take steps to control today: How you spend your time. If you often leave the office feeling burnt out, here’s a simple tip to help beat a common but often overlooked cause of workday stress.
Avoid constantly responding to emails
“Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often,” says Kostadin Kushlev, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at UBC’s Department of Psychology.
Kushlev’s inspiration for the study came from his own experiences with email overload. “I now check my email in chunks several times a day, rather than constantly responding to messages as they come in,” he says. “And I feel better and less stressed.”
Beat workday stress
If you want to reduce daily stress, close your email inbox! According to a study by the University of British Columbia, easing up on the number of times you check email a day helps beat stress.
The study asked some of the 124 adults to limit checking email to three times a day for a week. In contrast, others were told to check email as often as they could (which turned out to be about the same number of times that they normally checked their email prior to the study). These instructions were then reversed for the participants during a subsequent week and participants also answered brief daily surveys about their stress levels.