It’s almost as if being needed in some way after work calls attention to just how flattening work might have been. “A message, even a simple one, requires thought, mental energy and sometimes even emotional bandwidth,” says Caroline Plumer, psychotherapist and founder of CPPC London. “It might feel like cognitive overload after we have likely already spent all day performing tasks and making decisions. When stress ramps up, our ability to think, problem-solve, and be creative decreases. Our brains under stress become more concerned with avoiding pain and keeping us out of harm’s way than accomplishing tasks on our to-do lists.” Texts can end up feeling like yet another thing on a to-do list, she adds, especially when we have just shaken off our work to-do lists. Liz Kelly, therapist in the Washington, DC area and the author of This Book Is Cheaper Than Therapy, says that common daily work situations (like a tough conversation with our boss, bad traffic on the way to the office, or dealing with a problematic client) activate our sympathetic nervous, putting our body in “fight, flight, freeze or fawn” mode. “This nervous system activation can cause us to feel shut down or on edge, which makes everyday tasks, like responding to messages, much harder to complete,” she says. We aren’t bad people for feeling this way when a friend texts, it’s about how our brains are hardwired to respond to all of these stimuli, but we shouldn’t completely brush this off as normal or fine.
