The email you won’t open doesn’t shrink in the dark. It feeds.

Avoidance buys relief now and charges interest. The unopened thing keeps growing in imagination and sometimes in fact, and every hour spent knowing it is there costs more attention than opening it would. What makes it heavy is rarely the content. It is the carrying.

Open one thing you have been leaving closed, with no obligation to answer it today. Read it, learn its real size, then decide. If it needs a reply you dread, write three sentences rather than the perfect message, because a short honest answer sent today beats a good one you never send.