Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

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It was my birthday recently, and I decided to give myself a present. I turned my work e-mail off. It was surprisingly difficult. In fact, the only way I could do it was by turning my iphone off entirely. And that got me wondering: what happens when you turn your e-mail off?

After a couple of hours, I realised that what happens when you turn your e-mail off feels exactly the same as when you stop smoking. You start to feel withdrawal symptoms, the inside of your head starts to itch, you get a little bit tetchy, and you suffer from a physical craving.

How can this be? How could I have become addicted to e-mail?

Well, very easily, it turns out. And I'm by no means the only one. When AOL surveyed 4,000 people aged 14 or over about e-mail addiction in 2008, 67 per cent admitted that they had opened an e-mail in bed, in their pyjamas.

Why?

Neurologists have discovered that the relationship between recipients and their e-mails is very similar to that between gamblers and slot machines. That's why so many people now half-jokingly talk about their 'crackberry'.

Both e-mails and slot machines are addictive. Both work on a principle called 'variable interval reinforcement schedule'. Tom Stafford, a psychology lecturer from the University of Sheffield explains: "This means that rather than reward an action every time it is performed, you reward it sometimes, but not in a predictable way."

This unpredictability makes e-mail an even more powerful way to train behaviour than standard Pavlovian behavioural approaches. In order to get the reward we crave - gossip, or a prize, or an invitation - we need to keep checking our e-mails.

And the lesson that slot machines teach us is that if we didn't win last time, we might well win next time. We just have to pull the lever. And keep on pulling.

It's a physical rather than a psychological phenomenon. When we win, or receive an e-mail, the part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate that appears to control bodily functions such as breathing and heartbeat as well as rational decision making is flooded with dopamine.

When we don't, the anterior cingulate craves its hit of dopamine. So it keeps on telling us to keep on checking our e-mails, in the hope that something new comes through.

It's not just e-mail though. Social networks such as Facebook work on the same principle. They teach us to crave contact and stimulation and to actively seek it out.

This craving can easily be exploited by individuals or brands. Indeed it's one of the reasons why we are so ready to hand over our data in the first place: in order to receive the illusory reward of a dopamine hit. I once worked with a woman who received 700 Facebook notification e-mails in a single month. Needless to say, she didn't get much work done... I currently work with someone who has begged a second screen from the IT department specifically for her e-mails, just to make sure she can get to them as soon as they arrive.

Like a cigarette though, one hit is never enough. Martin Amis once observed that 'the only problem with smoking a fag is that you can't light up another one at the same time.'

In the same way, any dopamine reward only serves to make you crave the next one. And to suffer inordinately when you cannot get it.

Witness the reaction in any organisation when the e-mail server goes down. Pandemonium isn't in it.

And yet how much of this chaos is caused by business communications?

Very little, I'd estimate.

The peak time for Facebook usage appears to be in the middle of Monday afternoon, rather than over a weekend or out of office hours.

So e-mail addiction is no longer simply a personal issue. It's a business one. The tool that was going to free us has enslaved us. And is costing our businesses time. And time, for most of the organisations we work for, is money.

This is why a number of companies - Mercedes Benz among them - are placing restrictions on their employees' use of Facebook during working time. It's not such a bad idea - especially when you consider that it's actually a liberation, rather than a restriction. After all, we don't tend to supply our employees with other addictive substances during working hours, do we?

I know what I'll be doing next time I'm off on holiday. I'll be leaving my e-mail off. And I'll be encouraging my colleagues to do the same. After that, I'm thinking of setting up e-free periods during the working day in the creative department.

My only problem is, how will I let anyone know about them?