Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at UC Irvine, told me that people check their email an average of 74 times a day. Our email demands our attention. It makes our phone buzz, it makes a little (1) icon pop up that is impossible to ignore, it more or less stomps its feet and throws a fit until we pay attention to it. That’s fertile ground for stress. “We’ve done a study that looks at the start and stop time of when people are on email, and then looks at stress measurements created by heart rate monitors,” Mark said. “We find that the longer time people spend on email, the higher their stress.”

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