“Email is one of the most common triggers for social anxiety and productivity-related anxiety,” says Alice Boyes writing in Psychology Today. She suggests one of the main reasons we feel anxious about email is that it’s ‘asynchronous,’ meaning there’s a delay between sending an email and receiving a response.
I don’t know if I’ve ever written an email to a stranger before, but I can understand how one might feel when performing such a task. I find myself to be a bit of a perfectionist, especially when doing art, like painting or drawing. So, if I were writing an email to someone I don’t know I would probably stress out over grammatical errors, punctuation, and wording. Sometimes I look up synonyms for simple words, so as not to sound, well, simple.
While an email is in written form, phone calls are verbal, and most people argue they can be more anxiety-inducing.
“Anxiety is typical for all of us. It’s a universal emotion that we can all relate to,” says Dr. Lindsay Scharfstein, a psychologist who specializes in social anxiety disorder and phobias. ‘For the most part, we know that individuals are not afraid of phones. They have phones in their office, backpack, purse … What they’re typically afraid of is the evaluation or judgment that may happen when they’re on a phone.’ Telephone phobia (the fear/avoidance of phone conversations, not the phone itself) can be one aspect of social anxiety, which affects 15 million people in the U.S. Fears that they are intruding, being unintentionally rude, or even that their voice sounds funny can keep people from making a call.
I haven’t ever made a phone call to a stranger, I don’t think. I know that I would have trouble putting a sentence together to ask for help with something, or whatever else you’d have to make a phone call to a stranger for.
With this information, you can decide which is a more daunting task for you, and which you prefer, writing an email or making a phone call.
