Bryony Gordon Help! I’ve got Inbox Exhaustion

If I’m not deleting or replying, I am worrying about the emails I’m not replying to

Hot and cold sweats, a racing heart, a gnawing sense of anxiety and a fear of impending doom… all a great way to start a column on a bright, sunny spring Saturday.

“Oh no,” you are thinking, as you spread jam on your toast and stir milk into your morning cup of tea. “She’s going to write about mental health again. Does she ever write about anything else nowadays? With a week to go before the royal wedding, couldn’t she at least bore us all with that time she met Prince Harry and hugged Meghan Markle? I am done with reading about alcoholism, obsessive compulsive disorder and major depressive episodes every Saturday morning. Done!”

Don’t worry. I’m not writing about the symptoms of another bout of mental illness – more the symptoms of a life affliction that affects us all in this digital age: Inbox Exhaustion.

Inbox Exhaustion is a condition that – with the introduction of the new General Data Protection Regulation laws next week – is afflicting more and more of us. Every day I am being sent emails by restaurants, charities and online retailers that are becoming increasingly desperate in tone: please, please, please give us permission to keep bombarding you with newsletters featuring discount codes you will never use because you usually delete these emails on sight, and please, please, please allow us to keep sending you mailshots containing competitions you will never enter because when was the last time someone entered a competition?

When they were 14, that’s when. Asos, in their almost daily battle to remind me that I am yet to opt-in to their updates, are beginning to look a little needy. The restaurant chain Bill’s, which just this morning sent me a missive with the subject header “Bryony, can we keep in touch?”, is starting to remind me of a boy I once tried to break up with as a teenager.

Speaking of which, I am sorely tempted to slap a restraining order on Facebook. They know way too much about me, and whenever I log in, I am presented with a lengthy preamble about how much they care about my privacy, even though they’ve spent the best part of the last decade trying to work out ways to invade it.

All of this is sending me into a mild panic. Not only am I being forced to assess just how much rubbish I seemed to have signed up to during the course of my adult life, not to mention why I signed up to it, I am also realising how much time I spend in my inbox rather than outside with, say, my child, or my husband, or even just myself, staring at trees and listening to birds and simply being.

If I’m not deleting emails or replying to emails, I am worrying about the emails I’m not replying to; I’m getting anxious about the people who have sent them and what they must think of me because I forgot to get back to them, having been distracted by the daily dump from Net-a-porter about the best way to wear a wide-leg pant.

In my anxiety, I recently took steps to add a permanent out-of-office to my inbox, so that everyone who emails me immediately receives a lengthy, anguished reply about how anxious my inbox is making me, and apologise in advance for not getting back to them. This seemed to work for all of about five minutes, until my bounceback started getting bouncebacks, and my inbox became completely unmanageable.

I’ve noticed just how many of the companies that bombard us digitally exploit the modern phenomenon that is FOMO – or Fear of Missing Out. “DON’T MISS OUT!” scream so many of the subject headers of the emails currently being sent out by businesses.

Don’t miss out on what, exactly? A dress I don’t need and can’t afford? A cheap two-forone meal at a time of the day I can’t even make because I will still be in the office doing the work I haven’t managed to get done due to my overflowing inbox?

Enough is enough! The only thing any of us are missing out on is our actual real lives, which would be much happier if we filled them with genuine memories rather than junk peddled by online retailers and newsletters from charities whose time and money would be better spent on things that actually matter, like the causes they claim to support.

So I’m using this opportunity to go off-grid – sort of. I’m coming off Facebook, deleting Twitter, and refusing to be panicked into handing over my personal details to all and sundry (unless, of course, I choose to write about them in a newspaper).

During office hours, I’m getting out of my inbox. I suggest you join me, too.