Email Addiction: Counseling for the Emailaholic
Do you jump out of bed in the morning and run to check your email? What about first thing when you come home? Right before you head to bed? When you are on the computer, do you check your email every ten minutes? After you complete a paragraph for the article you are currently writing for your website? Hold that thought…
If so, then I welcome you, my emailaholic friend. Let us fight this email addiction together! Be right back…
I have an email addiction. Writing for sites did not exactly help the cause as I now have a comments addiction. With each article published and each new fan there comes an increasing number of comments and articles published. I want to check it more frequently and not fall behind, so I find myself constantly hitting the refresh button on my in-box. Speaking of which… Darn; still nothing!
Email addiction can be fun, but it can start being a nuisance and eliminating the amount of work that one can get accomplished. Your whole day starts revolving that email saying “You have a new comment” or “you’ve been published.”
The emailaholic that is trying to defeat email addiction must admit to his or herself that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Some people have too much pride admitting their addiction. Other people enjoy email addiction too much to do anything about it. If you have any of the symptoms I mentioned in the first paragraph, you are a candidate for this emailaholic counseling session.
One way to eliminate your email addiction is abstinence. Get off your computer, go outside, and stay there. Another alternative would be to burn your hard drive. You can burn the entire computer, but that is overkill and expensive. If you have the will power, then you can continue using the computer while prohibiting yourself from going to your email.
If you decide to use will power, you may try to block your email service’s web site while you are working. This would help you avoid checking your email as there would be extra boundaries that would interfere with the simplicity of continuously refreshing your in-box.
If you are like me, half the time I check my email, I have nothing. I use Yahoo! Mail, so this is inexcusable. This could easily be corrected by Yahoo! Messenger. With Yahoo! Messenger, it gives you a warning once email has arrived. No more checking an empty in-box folder. See if your email provider has any similar type of notification service.
Email addiction can be nipped at the roots if the emailaholic desires. Will power and establishing boundaries to eliminate the simplicity of checking your email will assist you in your increasing depression from seeing your in-box empty.