“The ‘salience network’ of the brain, which includes the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, helps us do that.”īut the rise of social media co-opted our salience network, “effectively fooling us that something new but trivial is urgent.” It’s why we refresh our notifications or doomscroll to see if we missed anything across our various newsfeeds. “Because our attention is a limited resource, at any given moment our brains need to determine what is important,” the Center reports. It “hacks our brains”-and we’ve been using them, one way or another, for years. They’re textbook examples of what the Center for Humane Technology calls “persuasive technology,” that is, tech created specifically to keep us glued to various platforms. A lot of the apps, streaming services, and platforms we use every day have become a habit-or compulsion depending on who you ask-by design. We don’t have to look too far to get an understanding of why our work inboxes can feel so overwhelming. But there’s something about our shift to remote work that has made this feel a lot more anxiety-inducing. Does this email have anything to do with me? Do I need to be notified every time there’s an update on this collaboration platform? Can this email go straight to trash or is it vital to a project I didn’t realize I was a part of because I missed an earlier email? Sometimes it feels easier to just go down with the ship. My inbox has gone from a space that held all the answers (What’s on my to-do list? What needs to be added to my calendar?) to one that begs a lot of questions. The sheer volume makes it hard to know what I should pay attention to and has made my kid-gloves approach impossible. The constant stream of emails, notifications, and pings have led to this feeling of being on a life boat that’s sprung a leak, with a colander as my only savior. Now I’m managing six email accounts across my personal and work lives, along with four Slack accounts (though I get notifications for seven) that come with their own channels and direct message threads. Then I got a full-time job, and I could finally understand how someone could have hundreds if not thousands of unread messages. Every email I received was handled with care and digested with relative ease. During my years as a freelancer, I prided myself on my ability to keep an inbox at zero.
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