Why we hate waiting for replies

I confess that I can be a little paranoid at times. And never more so than when I’m sending important emails.

It usually goes something like this.

After agonising over the message itself, often rewriting it several times, I hit send and the clock starts ticking.

If I’ve done my job properly, I’ll usually be pretty confident of a positive response at this point. That confidence lasts about five minutes.

And if my correspondent hasn’t replied within an hour, I start fretting.

Familiar trap

If there’s no response by the next day, I start checking my inbox every ten minutes, trying to suppress my rising panic while convinced that I’ve somehow dropped a digital clanger.

Then I get a perfectly acceptable (or even enthusiastically positive) reply that proves my concerns were totally unfounded. So I kick myself for being such an idiot, even though I know full well that I’ll probably fall into the same familiar trap again all too soon.

This happens a lot. In fact, it’s almost exactly what happened last week, when I sent an email to a new contact that I’d been trying to build bridges with.

Relief

In just 24 hours I went from full confidence that my message would land well to pacing the kitchen, silently devising ways to avert the disaster that my careless message was bound to trigger.

And yet, two days later and to my immense relief, I got a glowing reply that was full of praise for my idea.

‘It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy,’ wrote the novelist Leila Sales. ‘But when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.’

Her post has received more than 11,000 likes so far. So yes, I do tend to torment myself with such pointless anxiety. But I’m clearly not the only one.

Once we send an email, we can’t fully relax until we’ve had a reply. This is because our brain finds it incredibly difficult to ignore open loops.

The psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik first wrote about this in a paper way back in 1927, long before email was invented.

She had observed that waiters in her favourite restaurant could often remember multiple incredibly complex orders. But each order seemed to vanish from their memory as soon as the customer paid their bill.

Panic button

The same happens when we send an important message. We open a file in our brain that we can’t forget. Then we revisit it continually, guessing what the reply might be.

But we may start to reach for the panic button if the reply takes longer than we expected.

Alarm bells ring out as we race through all of the worst possible outcomes.

We rehearse our reaction to each one and build mental contingencies for how we’ll cope with them.

We stay distracted like this for as long as the wait for a response lasts.

And then, when we get a reply, we forget all about it.

Until we send the next one.

Another way

It’s not just the Zeigarnik effect (or paranoia) that causes this issue.

The trouble is that, when we write, we’re trying to communicate with someone who isn’t actually there with us (as I explained recently).

Imagine how you’d feel if they were and they waited in silence for several hours before responding to something you’d said.

This is one reason why sending an email or direct message is rarely the best way to resolve an urgent, complex or emotive issue. There’s also the fact that we often get more angry in email.

But workplaces are now so dependent on written channels that it’s easy to forget that there is another way. So here’s a guide to help you decide when to pick up the phone instead.

And if that’s really not possible, follow these seven rules of writing difficult emails.

Image montage credit: Roshan_NG/Shutterstock/Emphasis