Are you addicted to emails? Do you check your inbox each time you pass a computer? Here’s how you can control your addiction

New York: The first of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) involves admitting that you are powerless over alcohol. The first of the 12 steps for email addicts, newly devised by the American life coach Marsha Egan, involves admitting that email is controlling you.

After that, though, the similarities become less pronounced.

Alcoholic Anonymous’ third step is about turning over your life to a higher power; Egan’s is about the sensible use of inbox folders.

Addictions achieve a sort of horrible glamour in proportion to their capacity to ravage, and emailaholism just doesn’t cut the mustard. No one is ever going to direct an inspiring movie about a hard-living country musician delivered into salvation after a battle with the demonic forces of Outlook Express.

And yet perhaps we shouldn’t mock. Internet addiction is recognised as a disorder by the American Psychological Association, while the Centre for Internet Addiction Recovery in Pennsylvania offers counselling for cybersex addiction, chatroom addiction, eBay addiction and compulsive surfing. There’s no reason why email-checking should be excluded.

Egan tells the story of one client who can’t walk past a computer without checking messages. She plans monthly therapeutic teleconferences for addicts.

The website Mindha-cks.com explains why email is addictive. Imagine you’re a rat, trapped inside a box in the laboratory of the celebrated psychologist BF Skinner. There’s a lever, and every time you press it, there’s a chance you’ll get a food pellet. But, as Skinner discovered, the rats press the lever more compulsively when the pellet only sometimes appears. (There’s no suspense when you’re certain a pellet is on its way — you can just calmly plan to press the lever whenever you’re hungry.) Pressing the “check email” button is exactly the same.

If you can find a way to start checking mail less often — such as working for an hour before opening your email programme, as time-management expert Julie Morgenstern suggests — the positive effect will snowball, since you’ll be more likely to have messages when you do check: the suspense, as with the pellets, vanishes. If working life is a rat race, you might as well be a self-aware rat.