Receiving a text message can be a love-hate sort of experience. It’s great to connect, but the pressure to reply can be one of those micro-anxieties we face every day. It doesn’t matter how benign the message may be, some of us (*puts hand up*) look at it and decide not to reply straight away, that we’ll do it later.
But sometimes that later never arrives. “Some people get to the point where they avoid, avoid, avoid, and then it’s too late to respond,” says Sydney-based clinical psychologist Dr Mikaela Tracy. “So you adopt this procrastination cycle where responding actually becomes too much pressure.
” Being overwhelmed or having a bad mental health day are some of the reasons we don’t text back. Credit: Getty There can be many reasons why some of us don’t reply immediately. We can be feeling overwhelmed by our various inboxes, or having a bad mental health day , or perhaps we overthink what we should write, making something simple into a daunting, epic task.
Dr Sharon Horwood, senior lecturer at Deakin University’s School of Psychology, says how we respond can also be generational. “Gen X and Boomers will have nostalgic memories of a time where no one could contact you if you left the house or work, and so some resistance to the idea of being contactable 24/7 is probably inevitable,” she explains. “Conversely, Millennials and Gen Z have probably only ever known life with a smartphone and might feel like responding quickly to messages is completely.