This is an opinion piece. It reflects the author’s own views, not reported fact.
A few years ago I stopped keeping work notifications on after 7 p.m., and the thing I remember most clearly isn’t the peace of mind — it’s how apologetic I felt telling colleagues about it, like I was confessing to something. Nobody had ever explicitly told me I was supposed to be reachable at all hours. I’d just absorbed it, the way most of us absorb the actual, unwritten rules of a workplace, and it took a deliberate act to notice I’d been following one I never agreed to.
I think that’s the part of this conversation that gets missed most often, including by well-intentioned “right to disconnect” policies: the problem was never really the emails themselves.
The research backs up what that felt like
There’s a piece of research I keep coming back to, a 2016 study from researchers at Lehigh University, Virginia Tech, and Colorado State University that’s become something of a landmark in this area. What they found, working with nearly 300 employed adults, wasn’t that people who sent or received more after-hours emails were more burned out. It was that people who believed their organization expected them to be reachable were more exhausted — regardless of how many messages they actually answered. The researchers called it anticipatory stress: a low, constant hum of anxiety about a demand that might arrive, which turns out to be more draining than the demand itself.
That distinction matters enormously, and I don’t think it’s landed in how most companies and most of us individually think about this. A blanket “no emails after 6 p.m.” policy treats the symptom — the volume of messages — while leaving the actual cause, the belief that you’re supposed to be available, completely untouched. You can ban after-hours email and still leave the anticipatory stress fully intact, because nobody sent the message that mattered: that not answering has no cost.
The data on this is genuinely more mixed than I expected
I want to be fair to the counter-evidence here, because it complicates the tidy version of this argument. Gallup has found that around six in 10 workers check email outside normal business hours — and that most of them don’t report it as a burden. Only about a fifth said it was extremely or very important for getting ahead at their company. Read at face value, that’s a real problem for the “always-on culture is destroying us” narrative: most people checking email after hours aren’t describing it as oppressive.
I don’t think that contradicts the anticipatory-stress finding so much as it sits alongside it uncomfortably. A lot of people have made a genuine peace with occasional after-hours check-ins that don’t come loaded with an unspoken expectation attached. The problem isn’t universal, and it would be dishonest to write this as though every working person is quietly suffering under it. What both pieces of research agree on, though, is that the mechanism that actually predicts harm isn’t the behavior — it’s the expectation underneath it, and that expectation is exactly the part that’s hardest to see, hardest to name, and hardest to opt out of without feeling, as I did, like you’re confessing to something.
What’s actually changed
At least eighteen countries now have some version of a right-to-disconnect law on the books, starting with France in 2017. I think that’s a meaningful, well-intentioned response, and I don’t want to dismiss it. But I’d argue it’s treating the more visible, more legislatable half of the problem. A law can require a company to formally state that employees aren’t obligated to respond after hours. It can’t reach into a team’s actual culture and remove the quiet, informal signal — the manager who responds to messages at 11 p.m. without meaning to set an example, the unspoken sense that the fastest responders get noticed — that tells people what’s really expected regardless of what the policy says.
I don’t have a tidy fix for that, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I think naming it accurately is a start that most of this conversation skips. The question worth asking, at your own job, isn’t “how many emails do I answer after hours.” It’s whether you actually believe you could stop, tonight, with no cost. If the honest answer is no, that’s the actual problem — and it was never going to show up in a count of how many messages you sent.
That same expectation-versus-behavior gap shows up in how companies and employees are still negotiating hybrid work: the formal policy on paper and the informal expectation everyone actually operates under are very often two different things, and it’s the second one that determines how people actually feel about their jobs. It’s also, not coincidentally, the same low hum of anticipatory stress that makes a genuinely consistent wind-down before bed so much harder to hold onto than it sounds — it’s difficult to properly switch off at night when part of you never fully believed you were allowed to.
