Why you can't switch off
Your phone is face-down. You're not checking anything. Some part of you is still braced for it to buzz, and that bracing is doing the damage on its own.
Most advice about work spilling into the evening assumes the problem is checking — one more glance at Slack, one more scroll through email. But a lot of people who aren't checking anything still can't relax. The tension is real, and it isn't coming from the phone. It's coming from what the phone represents.
A name for the thing you already feel
Researchers Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi named this workplace telepressure — a state with two parts working together. Preoccupation: you can't stop thinking about work messages, whether or not any have actually arrived. Urge: a compulsion to check, disconnected from any real reason to. Telepressure is studied as a genuine predictor of burnout in its own right, separate from raw hours worked — two people can log the same hours and carry very different amounts of this.
The preoccupation half explains the specific, strange sensation of not relaxing even with the phone out of reach. It's a background hum, mechanically similar to an unfinished task sitting in your head — except here, nothing is actually unfinished. You're braced for a demand that hasn't arrived yet.
Here's the part that surprises most people
The obvious fix sounds like a policy: a company writes down that nobody is expected to reply after 7pm, and the pressure should ease. Research on telepressure complicates that. What predicts it more reliably isn't the written rule — it's the informal, unwritten norm: the quiet sense that "if I don't reply by a certain hour, someone will notice." A policy the actual culture ignores doesn't touch that.
The rule on paper isn't what your nervous system is responding to. The unwritten expectation is.
This matches a real, local number: a 2025 survey by Blind of 1,450 verified India-based IT professionals found 68% feel obligated to respond to work messages outside office hours — not that they're formally required to, but that they feel the obligation regardless. That gap between formal rule and felt pressure is exactly what the research describes.
What actually moves the needle
None of this requires a braver conversation with your employer, though that can help. It starts with noticing that the tension you're calling "can't switch off" is not being generated by your phone. It's being generated by a part of you still on duty — and that part can be given an actual off switch, not just a quieter one.
- Barber, L. K. & Santuzzi, A. M. (2015). Please respond ASAP: workplace telepressure and employee recovery. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 20(2), 172–189. — the original naming and measurement of workplace telepressure.
- Blind (2025). Burnout epidemic in India's IT sector: one in four clock 70 hours a week. Survey of 1,450 verified India IT professionals, conducted March 2025. Blind's own report.
Common questions
Workplace telepressure, a term coined by researchers Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi, describes two things happening together: preoccupation (you can't stop thinking about work messages) and urge (a compulsion to check, even without a real reason to). It's studied as a real predictor of burnout, separate from how many hours someone actually works.
The research says usually not on its own. Telepressure has been linked more strongly to informal, unwritten norms — the sense that "if I don't reply by a certain hour, someone will notice" — than to whether a formal policy exists. A written rule that the unwritten culture ignores doesn't change the pressure.
The underlying construct is studied globally, but a 2025 Blind survey of 1,450 verified India-based IT professionals found 68% feel obligated to respond to work messages outside office hours — a large, real, local number in the exact population most likely to read this.
Behavioural and cultural changes, not paperwork: muting notifications structurally rather than relying on willpower to ignore them, a manager or senior colleague visibly modelling not replying after a certain hour, and deliberately practising psychological detachment from work in the evening.
We are building the things that make the end of the day quieter.
dusk embrace is building the small things that end a night well, starting with the one that covers your eyes. Come be first.
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