If you often leave the office feeling burnt out, here’s a simple tip to help beat a common but often overlooked cause of workday stress.

Beat workday stress

If you want to reduce daily stress, close your email inbox! According to a study by the University of British Columbia, easing up on the number of times you check email a day helps beat stress.

The study asked some of the 124 adults to limit checking email to three times a day for a week. In contrast, others were told to check email as often as they could (which turned out to be about the same number of times that they normally checked their email prior to the study). These instructions were then reversed for the participants during a subsequent week and participants also answered brief daily surveys about their stress levels.

Avoid constantly responding to emails

“Our findings showed that people felt less stressed when they checked their email less often,” says Kostadin Kushlev, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at UBC’s Department of Psychology.

Kushlev’s inspiration for the study came from his own experiences with email overload.

“I now check my email in chunks several times a day, rather than constantly responding to messages as they come in,” he says. “And I feel better and less stressed.”