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Health

11th Dec 2018

Checking your emails when you’re out work is really bad for you

Jade Hayden

There are few things worse than having your work emails synced to your phone.

You’re sitting at home, or on a night out, or heading down to your local Nandos for a cheeky bit of chicken, when it happens – the worst thing that could ever happen in the world.

An email comes through to your phone causing you to think about work.

Truly harrowing.

(Or maybe you like thinking about work when you’re not in work and that brings some sort of calm into your otherwise hectic life. Who can say for sure?)

Either way though, looking at your work emails when you’re not actually in the office might not just be a hindrance to your life time-wise, it could also be affecting your mental health too.

A study conducted by Virginia Tech considered the health of almost 300 people who worked in universities and found that while all of them had at least some form of anxiety, very few of them knew it was partially due to their work lives blending in with their personal lives.

Grim.

The research concluded that employees who worked “flexible work hours”, meaning that they were pretty much always available to their bosses, were negatively impacted health-wise but also sometimes had poorer relationships with their families.

The study’s co-author William Becker told the Daily Mail: 

“The competing demands of work and non-work lives present a dilemma for employees, which triggers feelings of anxiety and endangers work and personal lives.

“Our research exposes the reality, [that] ‘flexible work boundaries’ often turn into ‘work without boundaries,’ compromising an employee’s and their family’s health and well-being.”

Makes sense, yeah.

Better un-sync those work emails from your phone, so.