How many times do you check your email on a normal workday? Be honest. Not the number you’d like to say, the real one, counting every quick glance at the phone and every tab you flick back to between actual tasks.
Some research suggests this little habit might have an effect on wellbeing and stress.
A quick note before we go further: I’m a writer, not a psychologist or a clinician, and what follows is me reading and thinking about one study, not handing out advice. The research here is drawn from a particular group of people, so treat it as a useful clue about how attention and stress interact, not a rule about your life.
In 2014, Kostadin Kushlev, then a PhD candidate, and Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia ran a two-week field experiment to test something simple. Does checking email less often make you feel better? They published it the following year in Computers in Human Behavior as “Checking email less frequently reduces stress.”
They recruited 124 adults, about two-thirds of them students, the rest a mix of financial analysts, medical professionals and others. Over two weeks, each person spent one week checking email as often as they liked, and another week limited to three times a day. Which week came first was decided at random. So everyone was their own comparison, living both ways.
You might expect the finding to be about getting more done. Fewer interruptions, more output, that sort of thing. That isn’t what they measured, and it isn’t what jumped out.
What they found was that people felt calmer during the limited week. Participants reported significantly lower daily stress when they were checking less, and lower stress in turn predicted higher well-being across a range of measures. Kushlev put it as plainly as it can be put. “Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often.”
It’s one two-week study of 124 mostly young people, so it’s a clue rather than a verdict, but the mechanism it points to has shown up in other workplace research too.
The stress relief didn’t come from clearing the inbox faster or replying the moment something landed. It came from checking less often, full stop. The authors point at attention fragmentation, the cost of constantly breaking off what you’re doing to glance at something else, not the speed of your replies.
I know that cost intimately, because I lose to it most days. A Slack message comes in while I’m writing. I tell myself I’ll just glance. I glance, I answer, I come back to the document, and then I sit there for a while staring at the half-finished sentence, trying to remember where I was going with it. The message took ten seconds. Getting back into the writing takes a lot longer.
I’ve built a small fortress against this, with mixed success. The phone goes in another room. I close every tab before I start. No social media open while I work. None of it makes me disciplined. The systems leak, I break my own rules, and some mornings the fortress is more of a fence. But the principle holds: the cost is the interruption itself, not whether the email was urgent.
There’s a wrinkle that makes the study more honest, not less. The people in the limited week mostly couldn’t actually hit three times a day. They checked a mean of about 4.7 times, well above the target, against a baseline of about 15 checks on a normal workday. Kushlev was upfront about it: “Most participants in our study found it quite difficult to check their email only a few times a day.”
So the lower stress showed up in people who tried and largely fell short. That’s encouraging, because most of us are going to fall short too. You don’t have to be a monk about it. Cutting from fifteen-odd checks toward five seems to do something, even if three stays out of reach. As Kushlev framed it, drawing on his own study, “people find it difficult to resist the temptation of checking email, and yet resisting this temptation reduces their stress.”
Kushlev says he changed his own habit after the study. He now checks email in chunks several times a day, rather than constantly responding to messages as they arrive. That’s the one lever from all of this I’ve actually pulled, and the one I plan on keeping — not three times a day, just in chunks, with the inbox shut in between, getting back to whatever I was supposed to be doing before the next glance.
If the low hum of being always-on has tipped into something heavier than email annoyance, a chat with a qualified therapist is worth far more than anything I can offer here.
