I recently read a great article at Harvard Business Review called “Fixing Our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email”. The author, productivity expert Maura Thomas, does a great job of highlighting some of the ways that ASAP work culture and the misuse of email add unnecessary stress to our lives.
In the article, one thing in particular caught my eye: the introduction of the term “telepressure”, which was new to me, here defined as
“An urge to quickly respond to emails, texts, and voicemails — regardless of whatever else is happening or whether one is even ‘at work.’”
Sound familiar?
Ms. Thomas links to a study done at Northern Illinois University which discusses the many negative ramifications that telepressure can have for our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
French trains, sabre-toothed tigers, and our caveman brains
I think that articles and studies like this are important because they ask us to take a step back and evaluate the effects of technology—both positive and negative—on our daily lives. The fact that technologies do affect us is not news—I remember learning in college about the overwhelming anxiety and sense of displacement that 1860s Parisians felt when riding a train out into the country at the blistering speed of 30 miles-an-hour—
Pictured: Sheer terror.
—but the fact that technology has advanced exponentially in the last couple of centuries means that its effect on us is likewise accelerated.
At the end of the day, we as human beings are pretty much the same animal that wandered the African savanna 60,000 years ago. Back then it made sense to have an acute stress response to novelties in our environment—from sabre-toothed tigers to lightning fires to poisonous berries, there was basically just a ton of stuff that could kill us, and so acting immediately could literally be a matter of life-or-death.
The problem is that now, far removed from these prehistoric pressures, when we are, say, out at dinner and we receive an after-hours work email, even though rationally we know that it could wait until tomorrow, our primitive caveman brains all of the sudden start screaming “RUUUUUNNNNN!!!!” Which tends to stress us out. Either we act on that stress immediately and are thus constantly distracted (i.e. “working when we are not at work”) or we do our best to ignore the stress and spend hours stewing in our own anxiety.
Outsmarting prehistoric stress
There’s not much we can do about our caveman brains, but we can change the way we interact with new technologies to make sure our relationships with them (and with our friends, families, and coworkers) stay as healthy as possible. By setting reasonable limits on when we will and won’t be available for business, and by giving clear expectations on when we would like a response to an email or other business communication, we go a long way toward reducing the opportunities for our savanna-wandering brains to freak the hell out, saving all that stress and fight-or-flight responsiveness for situations where we really need them.
You know, like when you open up the lid on the barbecue and see a spider.
RUUUUUNNNNN!!!
