I found an interesting article that gives an early peek at the impact that email is having on our stress levels.
The article entitled Email raises stress levels gives an early peek at some intriguing research being conducted at Loughborough University by Professor Tom Jackson and his team. In a nutshell, it reveals that reading and sending email increases stress, and that it peaks at the times of day when people’s inboxes were the fullest.
Also, email “which arrived in response to completed work had a calming effect,” which appears to back up research conducted by Masicampo and Baumeister and M. Zeigarnik around the effect of completed or well-managed tasks.
I’m going to try to get a hold of the original research, just because it appears to be so promising. In particular, I suspect that email by itself has little effect, but the time demands that email triggers… well, that’s where it all starts.
Take a look at the article and stay tuned to this space for more insights if I am able to learn some more about these early findings.
