Do you suffer from email apnea?
According to Stone, she first noticed the email apnea phenomenon in herself, as she was checking her email one day. Stone realized that she was holding her breath as she sifted through her inbox, as her brain whirled and she tried to figure out where to file things, what to respond to, and how to deal with the assortment of emails which arrives every morning. Once she noticed her own email apnea, Stone started looking around her, and she noted that other people apparently did the same thing, breathing shallowly, hyperventilating, or not breathing at all while checking their emails, using their phones, and engaging in similar tasks.
I would assume this happens more often in the morning when we strive to check our mails before anything else - have they replied? did something go wrong? do I need to reply to this person right away? how am I going to sift through so many emails? etc… What could work is to become aware of the amount of information coming in and then going through/ replying to the ones that matter today. Other stuff can wait for a day or two. ‘Urgent’ and ‘real-time’ are overrated words.
