Self-help articles and the like online suggest that cleaning one’s email inbox assists in better mental health.
Reporting to you live from A Student’s Dorm Room, I can confirm that this may very well be true – so long as your email inbox isn’t your student email.
The student, who shall go unnamed, attempted this self-help craze cleaning, only to find that the inbox refused to stay clean! Every five minutes, they reported a new email: from the College Union Activities, or Student Senate, or the quarantine system filtering spam. As many as five to ten new emails daily accost their inbox, each demanding personal attention.
“It’s so easy to let it pile up,” the student admits. “It doesn’t sound like much, but it is.”
And, while emails pile up from student groups, including the Student Senate, there is one menace greater than these: Moodle.
“Every time there’s an assignment, every time I submit something, any time the professor breathes – there’s a new email.”
Apparently, the Moodle site also gathers these emails and copies them in the form of notifications on the site, requiring students to monitor several sources of information.
“It’s just too much,” another student said, this one complaining to their friends in the Pryor Learning Commons.
“Mhm,” their friend replied. “Moodle sucks.”
Of course, discussing the mental health of students doesn’t always earn the proper respect. Adults – that is, adults older than college students – don’t always believe in the mumbo-jumbo world of self-care and self-exploration.
“They should grow up and understand that emailing only gets worse as they’re older!” one man argued.
When asked if he understood what emails were, the man sputtered and said that Fox News warned him about snowflakes like me.
“Ah well, thanks all the same,” I replied, praying that man didn’t have children of his own.
Who can say, really, whether clean email inboxes are a decent solution to stress within adult lives? If it works for you, it works for you.
One universal truth we can all agree on: Jewell email inboxes are always too crowded.