Work e-mails are bad for your health: study

Are you addicted to checking your work e-mail? Do you check it first thing in the morning and before you go to bed? Do you check it on work breaks and even on vacations? Well, here’s a piece of advice: Stop.

According to a new study by researchers at the University of California-irvine, people who check their work e-mail regularly exhibit higher states of stress, and less focus, than workers who continue to do their jobs while being cut off from e-mail entirely. The study examined the heart rate of workers at a suburban office outside of Boston. Some of the workers were asked to go about their e-mail-filled days as usual, others were asked to step away from e-mail for a full five-day workweek. The researchers fitted both groups with wearable heart rate monitors capable of taking heart rate measurements second by second.

The workers who abandoned e-mail had a variety of different roles within the organization, including managers, administrators, research scientists and tech- nologists, and all of them usually use e-mail during the course of a workweek.

The research team, led by Uc-irvine informatics professor Gloria Mark, found that people who read e-mail throughout the day were in a steady “high alert” heart rate state, while those who did not check e-mail had more natural, variable heart rates.

Those without e-mail also reported feeling more in control of their work after five days without constantly reading and responding to messages. They also found they had more time to complete work tasks. And when the experiment was over, most of the people who had been barred from e-mail said they realized that most e-mails aren’t important.

Mark said that for most workers, the idea that we need to be checking e-mail is a myth that we tell ourselves.

“Of course for some jobs it is necessary,” she said. For example, one of the people her team studied works in customer service and found it hard to do her job without e-mail.

“But for most of the other people, they discovered just how unnecessary e-mail was,” she said.