I Can’t Reply To Your Long WhatsApp After Work

After a day of typing thousands of words, there’s nothing that shuts my brain down quicker than a long WhatsApp essay or four-minute voice note (which, by the way, I’m guilty of sending, too). Even if I love the person messaging me, it can sometimes still feel like a lot of mental effort is needed to reply to the message. Friends have told me they have days where they feel similarly, paralysed by the WhatsApp notification number going up, agonising over not replying, and yet seemingly being unable to send the oftentimes quick reply that’s required. Days go by before the message is given attention, then the cycle repeats. Maybe for you it’s group chats rather than voice notes, or messages with external links instead of a chunky block of text — we all have something that takes us obscenely long to reply to. The message isn’t really the problem, but the message seems to bear the brunt of the problem: a drought of time and energy.

It’s almost as if being needed in some way after work calls attention to just how flattening work might have been. “A message, even a simple one, requires thought, mental energy and sometimes even emotional bandwidth,” says Caroline Plumer, psychotherapist and founder of CPPC London. “It might feel like cognitive overload after we have likely already spent all day performing tasks and making decisions. When stress ramps up, our ability to think, problem-solve, and be creative decreases. Our brains under stress become more concerned with avoiding pain and keeping us out of harm's way than accomplishing tasks on our to-do lists.” Texts can end up feeling like yet another thing on a to-do list, she adds, especially when we have just shaken off our work to-do lists. Liz Kelly, therapist in the Washington, DC area and the author of This Book Is Cheaper Than Therapy, says that common daily work situations (like a tough conversation with our boss, bad traffic on the way to the office, or dealing with a problematic client) activate our sympathetic nervous, putting our body in "fight, flight, freeze or fawn" mode. “This nervous system activation can cause us to feel shut down or on edge, which makes everyday tasks, like responding to messages, much harder to complete,” she says. We aren’t bad people for feeling this way when a friend texts, it’s about how our brains are hardwired to respond to all of these stimuli, but we shouldn’t completely brush this off as normal or fine. 

Last year, people spent on average 16 hours a month on WhatsApp alone. That’s a lot of time alongside the hours we clock in. “Most of us spend a lot of the day looking at smartphones and computers and having to be highly responsive, and this can lead to digital and general burnout,” Plumer says. “This is only worsened by the feeling that we need to spend further minutes or hours attached to our screens. Modern communication is instant, and with that can come the pressure that our responses should be immediate.” Responding to messages after work can feel as though it’s eating into our rest and relaxation time, she adds, affecting our ability to recover from a long day. Unless a message is urgent, perhaps we don’t need to reply that same night if what we need that evening is to decompress before the next day. 

The elephant in the room here is that your job may be demanding too much of you — and that’s why something as simple as a text feels too much. Research from last year found that 44% of British adults feel physically and/or mentally exhausted after work, with younger people being more likely to experience this. On the flip side, it might be that a friend is demanding too much. Plumer recommends taking stock to reflect on what might be the cause of this feeling when  people try to contact you. “It might be worth scheduling a time once or twice a week to respond to any messages that have been put off rather than trying to force a reply as they come in, or at the end of every day.” She also recommends reducing your notifications or muting certain chats or groups. “You might also want to consider leaving voice notes or even making a phone call rather than typing a message. Phone calls in particular can help mitigate the need to get caught in a back-and-forth message exchange. If the message only needs a simple reply like a yes or no, do it sooner rather than later, and get it out of the way.”

If work and friendships both feel fine, it might come down to how you compartmentalise at the end of the day in order to look after yourself. Kelly says she sees clients lack compassion towards themselves when they’re “overwhelmed, overstimulated and cognitively fatigued”. Before trying to tackle any messages straight out of the office, Kelly says to “consider engaging in activities that will help you regulate your nervous system, such as doing some stretching or yoga, taking a walk outside, creating art or crafting, dancing to a song, or even having a short power nap.” You might feel mentally clearer and less daunted by notifications after that point. “If you need help returning messages, try setting a timer for five or 10 minutes and see what you can accomplish during that time,” Kelly says, “and if you don't feel up to reading and responding to a long message, it's perfectly okay to let your friend or family member know that you cannot answer now, but you will be happy to return the message once you have more time and energy.” Your friend will likely understand, because the chances are they too get overwhelmed by messages as well. In fact, their reply might have come after days of feeling unable to get to it.

Taking Kelly’s advice on board, if it’s been one of those days, I leave the message unopened and allow myself to do the things that help me feel regulated once again. Sometimes it’s reading a book, other times it’s going to the gym. The message is still there, but I allow myself to drop the urgency I’ve attached to it that no one else asked for. Then, feeling more like myself, I’m able to reply and give the energy that’s required of me. It doesn’t feel taxing this time, because it’s energy I have ready to give.