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The majority of US workers (52 percent) check their e-mail during non-work hours, including on sick days.1 Depending on your employer, it may be an unspoken requirement to respond immediately, but, more likely, you respond right away not because of actual workplace policy but due to a phenomenon known as “telepressure.”

Telepressure, according to Northern Illinois University Larissa Barber, PhD, is “the urge to respond immediately to work-related messages, no matter when they come.”2 Some might find this to be efficient, but what it really does is blur the line between your work life and your personal life, such that you may rarely get a real rest.

Barber’s study was revealing  those who felt greater telepressure, and therefore a stronger urge to check and respond to e-mails at all hours, faced some serious consequences. As noted in the
Journal of Occupational Health and Psychology:3

“This experience [workplace telepressure] can lead to fast response times and thus faster decisions and other outcomes initially. However, research from the stress and recovery literature suggests that the defining features of workplace telepressure interfere with needed work recovery time and stress-related outcomes.”

What Are the Risks of Being Always Accessible?

Those who experienced greater telepressure, and therefore made a habit of responding to e-mails ASAP no matter what the hour, reported:

• Worse sleep     
• Higher levels of burnout (physical and cognitive)     
• Increased health-related absences from work

As Barber told
TIME:4

“It’s like your to-do list is piling up, so you’re cognitively ruminating over these things in the evening and re-exposing yourself to workplace stressors  When people don’t have this recovery time, it switches them into an exhaustion state, so they go to work the next day not being engaged.”

This is not a uniquely American problem, of course. In the European Union, surveys show that people are finding it increasingly difficult to stop their work life from blending with their private life.5 And in Germany, psychological illness is the reason for 14 percent of missed work days, which is a 50 percent rise over the last 12 years.6

And according to a survey of more than 2,000 people, work topped the list as the most stressful factor in people’s lives. Workplace stress resulted in 7 percent of adults having suicidal thoughts.