You’re finishing for the day when an email lands. Have you got five minutes tomorrow?
That is all it says. No explanation. No friendly sign-off. Just six words and enough empty space for your mind to begin writing its own (increasingly unhelpful) version of what might follow. Before you’ve even opened your calendar, your chest feels tight, your attention has narrowed and part of you is already preparing for the worst: criticism, an unreasonable request or the loss of a client you had assumed was perfectly happy an hour ago.
How can a few ordinary words on a screen create such a physical reaction?
One way to understand this is to get to know a little more about the body’s stress response and how it was designed to protect us from danger.
Imagine spotting a tiger. Before you have time to weigh up your options, your body begins preparing you to survive. It is the same instinct that helped our ancestors, and the animals before us, stay alive in the face of real physical threats. Your heart starts beating faster, your attention narrows, your muscles tense and energy surges to help you fight, escape or otherwise deal with the danger. The response is automatic because, in the face of an immediate threat, speed matters.
Fortunately, there aren’t many tigers roaming our modern workplaces, but the same protective system can respond to other kinds of threat. Criticism, rejection, uncertainty, conflict and the possibility of losing something important can all put the body on alert.
Of course, your brain doesn’t literally mistake an email for a tiger. But it does recognise that the message could have consequences for your income, reputation, workload or an important relationship. Sometimes the threat lies less in the message itself than in everything that might follow. That’s why one short email can produce a surprisingly physical response – and why one particular message can set it off while dozens of others pass without incident.
Six words, several possible disasters
Written messages are unusually good at leaving things out. There’s no tone of voice, facial expression or the immediate opportunity to ask, “What do you mean by that?” A written message creates a gap, and the mind rarely leaves a gap politely unfilled.
Have you got five minutes tomorrow? could mean a great new idea they want to share, a routine question or a conversation about next month’s plans. It could also mean a complaint, a lost contract or the impending doom of professional humiliation on a spectacular scale. The message gives you no way of knowing which. So your mind starts preparing for all eventualities.
The combination of uncertainty and possible judgement can be especially stressful. In a review of 208 laboratory studies, researchers found that situations involving both social evaluation and a lack of control produced particularly strong cortisol responses. What this means is, we tend to find situations harder when something important about us might be judged and we cannot fully control the outcome. Work provides plenty of opportunities for both. You may be highly capable and still have limited control over what another person thinks, chooses or does next.
It’s no wonder a vague message can land with rather more force than its word count would suggest.
When the business is yours, the stakes become personal
Business owners are often good problem-solvers. That is partly how they became business owners. Yet the ability to keep finding solutions can hide how much pressure they are absorbing along the way.
The boundaries between work, security and identity can also become particularly blurred. I know the physical jolt of opening my inbox when I am already close to capacity. One seemingly small request lands and, although it may be perfectly reasonable, it feels like the thing that tips the balance. The knock-on effect reaches every other commitment in the day, and suddenly everything feels like too much.
That reaction is not proof that the sender is dangerous or that something awful is about to happen. I often encourage people to see it as a sign that the situation matters to them, they are already carrying a lot and their mind has detected the possibility of more than they currently feel able to manage.
Capable people can still be running at full alert
Workplace stress does not always look like someone falling apart. It might look like answering emails late at night because leaving something unresolved feels worse. It might be replaying a meeting while making dinner, becoming unusually irritated by a small interruption or opening the laptop “for two minutes” before bed.
You may still meet deadlines, support other people and appear calm and competent. Underneath, more and more energy is being used simply to keep everything going. Sometimes the exhausting part is not only dealing with the pressure. It is having to manage how you appear while you are under it.
In 2024/25, an estimated 964,000 workers in Great Britain experienced work-related stress, depression or anxiety. Together, these accounted for 22.1 million lost working days. Those figures show how widespread workplace stress has become. What they cannot show us is how many people continued performing well while quietly running on fumes.
Your phone is not always the villain
The usual advice is to switch everything off at five, create firmer boundaries and never check email from the sofa. Sometimes that is excellent advice. It does not work as a universal rule. For an entrepreneur, a flexible worker or someone dealing with clients in different time zones, choosing to check a message later in the day may make the following morning easier. Being able to work at a time that suits you can create freedom.
A 2023 study found that after-hours connectivity could increase people’s sense of autonomy and was indirectly associated with less emotional exhaustion. The important part appears to be the autonomy: being connected felt different when it gave people more control over how and when they worked.
It is a very different experience when you keep checking because you believe everyone expects you to remain available. A large 2025 study examined 5,414 managers and 17,962 non-managerial employees across 142 organisations. It found that leaders’ after-hours smartphone use was associated with a wider culture of constant connectivity, which was then associated with collective emotional exhaustion.
Choosing to deal with something now feels very different from not feeling allowed to leave it until tomorrow. The most useful boundary may be less about a particular time on the clock and more about whether you have any meaningful choice.
We're not particularly good at judging urgency
Senders and recipients do not always read the same email in the same way. Across eight experiments involving 4,004 people, researchers found that recipients tended to overestimate how quickly senders expected a response to non-urgent work emails. The researchers called this the email urgency bias.
The sender thinks, “They’ll pick that up tomorrow.” The recipient sees a message at 8.47pm and thinks, “Apparently I work nights now.”
That mismatch was linked with greater stress and poorer wellbeing. A very small change helped: senders clearly stating that an immediate response was not expected.
A leader doesn’t need to write, “You must answer me tonight.” But their previous behaviour or expectations may have helped establish what a person believes a dedicated employee is expected to do. This is where it is not just for the individual to figure out, it should be made explicit in the company’s culture and working practices.
‘For tomorrow, no need to reply tonight’ removes a surprising amount of psychological admin. The recipient no longer has to decide whether leaving the email until morning will make them look unhelpful, uncommitted or bad at their job.
Of course, some people write not urgent and then behave as though they have released a starting pistol. The words need to match the way people actually behave.
When the alarm goes off
If an email has triggered a strong response, telling yourself to stop being ridiculous rarely helps. Your protective system believes something important may be at stake. Getting annoyed with yourself only gives you two problems to deal with.
Start by noticing what is happening in your body. Slowing your breathing and allowing the out-breath to become a little longer can take the intensity down a notch. It will not solve the email, but decisions are easier when your internal alarm is not drowning out everything else.
Then separate the message you received from the story your mind has built around it.
What do you actually know? What are you predicting? Is there something useful you can do now, or are you trying to solve a conversation that has not happened yet?
There may be a practical next step. You might need to ask for clarification, renegotiate a deadline, decide what can wait or have an honest conversation about capacity. No amount of mindfulness will make an unreasonable workload reasonable.
There will also be times when nothing can be resolved that evening. You may have to leave some uncertainty unanswered, without reopening the email in the hope that a seventh reading will reveal a previously hidden friendly tone.
What does the situation actually need?
We do not need to eliminate the stress response or convince ourselves that work does not matter.
Stress can help us focus, prepare and act. It makes sense that our protective system responds to possible threats involving our relationships, reputation and security. Those things matter to us.
The difficulty is that the stress response cannot always tell the difference between something that could happen and something that probably will. It does not know whether answering tonight is genuinely necessary or simply something you have learned a good, committed person should do. It cannot renegotiate your workload, clarify someone else’s expectations or remind a client that “one small change” is now on its fifteenth revision.
That part is ours.
The tiger explains why a message can put your whole body on alert. Once you recognise what is happening, you can begin to work out what appears to be under threat, how much of the story you actually know and what the situation needs from you.
The answer might be a reply, a clearer question, a boundary or some support. It might also be deciding that nothing useful will be gained by sacrificing the rest of the evening to six words in an email.
Sometimes, the email can wait until morning.
