Slashdot Mirror
Checking Email as Soon as You Wake up Could be Ruining Your Day (cnbc.com)
From a CNBC report: If you're like most people, you wake up to an alarm ringing on your smartphone. Then you probably roll over and check your work email. That's a dangerous way to start the day, according to a woman who studies happiness for a living. Reading just one negative email could lead you to report having a bad day hours later, says Michelle Gielan, former national CBS News anchor. [...] Before you check your email or the news, put yourself in the right frame of mind by taking two minutes to draft a positive email to someone in your social support network. Thank a friend or family member for their support, or praise a colleague on their recent work, she suggests. After you send your upbeat email, move on to your regular routine of checking your work email or the news. That two-minute message primes your brain to see everything in a more positive light.
"If you're like most people, you wake up to an alarm ringing on your smartphone."
1. I don't even have a "smart" phone or any phone to begin with.
2. If I did, I would never let it wake me. I'd fucking smash it. Fuck waking up from some alarm. I wasn't put on this shitty planet to be tortured like that every day. When I wake up, I wake up.
It brightens up my day!!
Study debunked. Everyone involved with study needs to be fired.
Starting a day with a first post really helps.
WTF?!
And if I did have time for it (and to maintain a 'social support network', whatever the fuck that is, in the first place) a few work emails first thing in the morning wouldn't be enough to bring me down.
I check work email first thing when I wake up hoping to see confirmation that I am not already half a day's work behind schedule. If I just didn't check it, I would instead just be constantly worried that I probably was until I got to my desk and THEN maybe found out I wasn't.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If you don't do exactly as I say, you will have 7 years of bad luck. To avoid this bad luck you must do the following: Spend 2 minutes every morning writing a positive email to one of your contacts before checking your email. Then send that email along with a copy of this email to your contacts. This is the only way you can avoid the bad luck.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Why limit to just after waking up? "Reading just one negative email could lead you to report having a bad day hours later" says the article. But why would that be different in the morning compared to any time of the day? If the reaction is "those fucking incompetent bastards!" on a regular basis then it doesn't matter if it's in the morning or not. You still want to rent a chainsaw from the tool hire shop and go pay them a visit.
One bad email once in a while is OK. I find that once in a blue moon early morning disaster email wakes me up instantly, more than any stimulant ever could. I like to sleep in you see...
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
Hours later I WILL STILL BE AT FUCKING WORK.
Only AI will resolve this issue bringing with it my freedom to go and explorer.
I don't have my work email account on my cell phone. I don't check it until I get to work.
Oh, and I don't use an alarm on my phone. I still have the same clock radio I used in high school in the '80s. With an onion on my belt, or something.
reading work-related emails while NOT AT WORK, could be ruining your day.
When the alarm goes off on my iPad 2 at 4:30AM, it's an WW2 air raid siren that I turn off immediately. When the clock alarm goes off at 5:00AM, it's an annoying beeping that I turn off immediately and roll out of bed. I'm checking email and reading The Wall Street Journal after I get on the express bus at 6:00AM. I start work at 7:00AM.
"If you're like most people, you wake up to an alarm ringing on your smartphone. "
If you're like most people over 45 you wake up because of the horribly urgent pressure on your bladder. Several times a night. The you wake up in a cold fearful sweat two minutes before your alarm is due because you're thinking about utility bills or the joy of family life. So you never actually hear an alarm, despite waking up feeling desperate and alarmed multiple times every morning.
At least that's what they tell me.
according to a study Gielan conducted with Arianna Huffington...
Arianna Huffington is not someone I would associate with happiness.
The same goes with reading stressful or negative news, according to a study Gielan conducted with Arianna Huffington and her husband, happiness researcher and author Shawn Achor.
Society pays for a "happiness researcher"?
If I get bad news after making a conscious effort to be upbeat, it ruins my day just the same, except I get angry, too, not just annoyed.
I was given a smallish book years ago entitled, "365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life". Basically, the book is a memoir of a guy who after two divorces and a failing business received a thank you letter. He then realized how rarely in his entire life he ever had been thanked. So he choose to start writing a thank you letter to someone else every day, and it transformed his internal worldview for the better, as well as his external life and interactions with people.
Basically, the act of _forcing_ yourself to come up with someone to be thankful for every day, primes your mind into a more positive state--and I imagine: doing it over-and-over pre-primes your mind into a way of thinking, makes it easier to recall good acts when pressed (ala your brain puts more emphasis on those linkages to memories) .
It's interesting that once in awhile a anecdotal books can be well ahead of the scientific curve.
I try very hard not to look at email, Facebook or the news until I've had a chance to wake up, get the kids out of bed and get ready for the day. Working for a global company in systems integration, most of the first emails in the morning are from India or other countries far ahead of us timezone-wise, and they're almost never good news. My first few morning messages from the last week have been similar to:
- Yet another broken code release failed in production and they're throwing it back over the wall to the systems guys for the 20 millionth time
- The developers are going to be late again delivering something that was due 3 months ago
- Company that has repeatedly presented itself as world-renowned Technology X experts is proving yet again they were lying
Looking at that as the first thing you see when you wake up, it sets the tone for the rest of the day. You wake up mad, aren't as nice as you should be to the spouse or kids, resulting in "if mama's not happy, no one's happy", resulting in pretty much guaranteeing a bad day. If everyone's doing this every day, no wonder we have so many pissed off, uncivil interactions with others. Everyone's mad!
--EOM--
love is just extroverted narcissism
"you are welcome to my lawn"
Washing down a 5 hour energy with a mocha, or letting the first dumb coworker or customer "motivate" you?
Nope. I wake sans an alarm, 05:00 near every day. Get up, turn on the coffee and feed the kats. Then sit and write about yesterday or surf a little bit. Emails can wait, Nothing is more important than a bit of serenity first thing. The kits usually want a little lovin'. No comparison between the outside world and soft, purring warmth early in the morning.
1/2 hr, 40 minutes in, then I can face the world. Bring it on!!
"who studies happiness for a living"
I mean, the existence of this field of study pretty much ruined it for me.
> Checking Email as Soon as You Wake up Could be Ruining Your Day
So what? Seriously, so what? I don't avoid crossing the street because vehicles exist. I don't live in a persistent state of fear and obsessive need to constantly be happy about everything. I am not a delicate snowflake here.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
> Thank a friend or family member for their support, or praise a colleague on their recent work, she suggests
This feel-good bullshit designed for special snowflakes who can't handle everyday life has got to stop.
Your thank-you one-liner does nothing for me. The email notification popup is a distraction; opening it only to delete it a third of a second later gets real old, real fast. It's not giving me anything of value. A million of those won't even buy me a pack of gum.
Same with your praise emails. There's nothing in there for me that's actionable. What am I supposed to do, collect them over time, then send them all at once to my boss before my next review? No, you go ahead and praise me in front of my boss if you want--not me. That's where your praises will have the most impact.
While the article (both source and Slashdot) is a good one -- rather, worth pondering -- I have always questioned the constant focus people give on "being positive" or "being upbeat". Many people go to great lengths to achieve this (read: excessive focus on optimism), sometimes to the degree where that itself becomes unhealthy (read: wearing blinders to the realities of life).
How truly important is it that we be "positive" all the time? Or see things "in a positive light" as much as possible? Is the degree of importance not on a per-person basis?
I can't speak for others, but I've always bordered on the neutral and practical side. That includes traits such as being skeptical, in addition to knowing how and when to apply both negativity and positivism -- neither are unconditional. The irony is that I'm a UNIX systems administrator, where most of my job involves telling people "no" or explaining the downsides/negatives to an idea (a trait that is not respected in DevOps, a field where everyone wears rose-tinted glasses and, put lightly, is huffing their own farts). It's taught me that people really don't like unabashed honesty and criticism, unless it's done with a soft hand or with a lot of unconditional empathy (and as an introvert I'm a fairly empathetic person, but what good is my empathy if it's faked for the recipient's benefit?); bosses only want to hear "no" if it's immediately followed by "but here's a way we CAN do it" (which is practical in a way, but also unsettling).
I'm left wondering if Michelle Gielan would make it more than a week if she was to work in Operations.
This is all separate (IMO) from telling people "thank you" or appreciating their efforts. To me, that should be done universally, if/when applicable, and in honesty. In other words: as humans, we should be doing that regardless of situation or circumstance. I don't see what this has to do with receiving a negative Email; you know that Email is still going to be there after sending off unrelated praise.
Ironic captcha: accept.
Knocking your foot on the corner of your bed could ruin your day, study finds, news at 11!
Personally, getting a coffee that tastes bad ruins my day every time.
> If you're like most people, you wake up to an alarm ringing on your smartphone
No.
I'm nearing 45 and I've never set an alarm clock--not once--in my life. I have an old-fashioned clock by my bed, but no alarm.
Here's the thing: If you're still sound asleep at the time you need to get up, then obviously you need more sleep. You're not going to feel well-rested if you're forced out of bed. Go to bed earlier. It's much healthier to wake up on your own than having your sleep interrupted every day. Seek help. It's a symptom of something that can only be bad for you in the long term.
Who among us doesn't like to wake up and see what fresh horrors have been foisted upon us while we slumbered?
Oh, wait, that would be me. I never check email until after coffee, a bagel, and a bowl of sweet, sweet crack.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If you work from home, the only reason to get up is to check your work emails.
I'll assume they're not referring to people who are on-call and thus may start work at any hour of the night. Starting work before you get out of bed, means you're a prostitute, whichever way you look at it. What sort of (non-sex worker) employee does that? I mean, most middle-class people can't do that because their tools (and files) are at work. A lot of people probably refuse to bring work home or think they'll be back at work soon enough, why rush? So this refers to people who work on the move or to middle-level managers, who can issue rulings and bark orders over an email server.
People suggesting that what I like to do is ruining my day are so fucking annoying that they keep ruining my days, everyday. Please stop trying to impose to others what they should do to be happy, it's doing exactly the opposite of what you want. Oh, and go fuck yourself.
Why would anyone check their work email from home? That's insane. I don't work unless I'm *at* work, outside of an emergency. Why anyone would willingly incorporate this into their routine is beyond me.
I have 3 alarms set on my phone (which is one advantage over alarm clocks) - at 6, 7 and 8am. When the 6am alarm sounds, I hit the snooze button, when the 7am sounds, I wake up. The 8am alarm is there as a backup, just in case. During the summer, I don't need it much, but as it gets colder, I do
I'm sure this will attract lots of sarcastic comments, but: for decades (centuries, for all I know, but I'm not *that* old) many varieties of Christianity have recommended starting the day with prayer and Bible reading. Getting into a good mood isn't the purpose, but it is a common effect. Two terms often used for this are "quiet time" and "devotionals" (or "devotions"--ok, I can't count...).
Thank a friend or family member for their support, or praise a colleague on their recent work, she suggests.
This is exactly the kind of "upbeat" email that stresses me out. Fucking extroverts doing social to earn brownies.
I cant believe that something so insubstantial gets a sheen of credibility.
Thank you for this story.
Start your day with a great piece of ass! It usually glues a smile on MY face!
Being a guy (which you likely already guessed), I usually wake up with that classic boner.
If mother nature didn't want me to use it, then she would have not had me aroused. (Thanks, Mom-Nature.)
SEE! It all fits! Mother Nature (i.e. a female figure) arouses males of the species in the morning so as to satisfy those likenesses she created!
This also makes my female partner happy as well!
How could anyone argue with that? Who are we to argue with Mother Nature!
I didn't invent this! I just honor it!
The rest of my day's are always GREAT!
No need for coffee, or any kind of emails.
Gotta go now. Need to get to sleep. Can't wait to wake up again!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
I sync neither my gmail account nor my company email on my employer-provided phone. It also helps that the phone is usually downstairs charging overnight and not on my bedside table (within easy reach, so to speak).
Ever wondered whats wrong with the world? http://www.ishmael.org/
People check Email as soon as they wake up?
No one goes to bathroom as soon as they wake up anymore?
No wonder their day is ruined.