The other day a person called into a radio show and said that she missed out of a free trip because she has anxiety opening her mail and let the letter site until a deadline passed. The topic wasn’t even about fears or anxiety (her story’s point was about missing the trip) but that detail seemed strange to me.
Sometimes I will let mail pile up but that is because I am lazy and it is usually letters I am 99% sure are junk mail. Has anyone ever heard of a person who was actually anxious about opening mail?
Yeah, I could see anxiety opening an unadorned letter from your bank/mortgage holder, “Will it be an extra charge? Are they raising my home loan interest?”
But I doubt that a letter with a free trip inside would look ominous.
So apparently there must be a “scared to open ANY mail” neurosis. Anyone have this?
I know people who, at times, just put all mail aside as it comes in. If you can imagine being worried about bills, then surely you can see that that worry might extend to checking envelopes to judge whether they might enclose bills.
It wouldn’t surprise me, only because people seem to have all sorts of quirks and phobias that fall out of the “normal” range of behavior, whatever that may be. I’ve never heard of this particular one, but there have been times I’ve gotten snail mail or email that I didn’t want to open for a variety of reasons. Irrational, perhaps, but there you have it.
I don’t worry about bills. I know they’re coming, same time every month, and I know I can cover them. There’s never anything that I’m expecting to get that causes me any worry.
But there are some senders who I’m never expecting to hear from, but always dreading. If I see one of those, then yes, I’ll be anxious. But I’ll still open it.
I also sometimes drop the mail in a pile on the table as I come in and forget to open it, but that’s out of negligence, not fear.
It may stem from a time when I was having trouble keeping up on bills, but I think a lot of it is tied to undiagnosed ADD. I tend to have trouble beggining or accomplishing some of the most mundane tasks, to the point of them actually becoming a problem. Mail is just one.
When I lived by myself I went through a period where I only bothered to take the mail out of the box every 7-10 days. I thought this made sense (no phobia, just streamlining my life).
My mail lady had a problem with it though. She asked a few people about it and they then told me about her asking. I filed a complaint with the post office, but never heard anything back.
Frankly, I get more anxious not opening my mail if I get a letter from my bank or any other bill collector. I’d be to worried I’d miss a deadline to deal with a problem if there was one. I would rather just deal with a problem as fast as possible to get it over with. But that’s just me.
I’m depressed and have a lot of stress and anxiety in my life right now and I’m scared shitless of my mail. I have months worth piled on my coffee table waiting for me to go through it and I’m paralyzed.
Yes and the piling up is avoidance, part of phobic disorder. My roommate has this issue. He would let his mailbox fill so full they would stop delivery and leave a note when we first moved here but I started bringing it in. He then let it pile all over the dining room table. He would get mail for himself as well as his sister and mother who used to live here. One day I separated it in to boxes so they could pick theirs up. Some of the coupon packs were two years old. Just in the past year he will go through it as it comes in. I don’t know if I helped him get over it by reducing the pile or his new anxiety meds are helping.
I have similar issues with the phone so I totally understand. I have missed appointments because I hate answering the phone, and I know it’s not hate like annoyance, but hate like desperate avoidance of conflict. I hate talking to people when I can’t be face to face because there’s too much you can’t detect from just a voice.
Aside: do companies really send out mail which entitles you to a free vacation ?
Back when I had financial problems, I would sometimes avoid checking the mail for a few days, out of dread of getting another collection letter or late fee notice.
Generally I have good memories of getting mail. Except Credit card bills. I always know what I have used them for but the anxiety of some huge mistake occuring drives me batty.
I’d been thinking about starting a ‘how weird am I?’ thread about this very issue - and look, now I don’t have to!
Like you, I don’t particularly mail-avoid (though I do usually find opening mail unpleasant, but not overwhelmingly so). Phone-avoid like crazy. Email-avoid … sometimes. I have a bunch of emails that I have to check for various things - one of them I have a routine now: log on - web surf for a while to calm down - check whether/how much mail in my inbox - web surf some more - finally read the damn stuff and do the tasks.
Conflict avoidance is definitely part of it, and wanting to see people’s faces when I talk to them. And I also think there’s a buildup over four decades of disliking talking on the phone … even pleasant conversations with friends are kind of a bit unpleasant because I just hate the phone that much, so now there’s a low grade ‘nothing good can ever come out of this communication medium’ hanging about my mental image of ‘phone’
I can well imagine someone having that perception of physical mail. ‘Nothing good can come out of this medium. Even if it LOOKS unthreatening. Lets do this tomorrow.’
I don’t think I have ever actively avoided opening the mail entirely, but I have let it sit for several days and I definitely get where that comes from. When I was very depressed, I “knew” nothing good was coming, so there was no point. I wouldn’t even open my fortune cookies at Chinese restaurants because I “knew” they were going to be bad.
Perhaps I misunderstood, but you complained because your mail carrier inquired about your well-being? I know mail carriers are alert to people not picking up the mail and have saved lives by notifying the authorities.
No, she was gossiping. I was fine, she knew I was fine (I’d occasionally see her and say hi). She liked to talk and used her knowledge of the mail people recieved to give her an in for conversation. She wasn’t asking about my well-being, she was talking about “that wacky guy in the corner house who gets lots of catalogues”.
She eventually got fired for not delivering junk mail. If you were friendly with her she’d offer to not deliver your junk. When caught, she had hundreds of pounds of undelivered junk mail in her apartment.
But back to my original behavior of once-a-week mail collection. It really made sense back then. I paid whatever bills were there and threw out all the rest once every 7-10 days. I was never late paying bills, and the whole thing was so efficient.
After his death I started to receive credit card bills in my father’s mail (he was in a personal care home at the time). Each card had thousands of dollars of charges and I was at my wit’s end wondering when it would stop.
Turns out that my brother had been using my dad’s credit cards to buy stuff - nothing outlandish. Just routine necessary purchases. He had significant mental health issues and I’ll never know why he acted in this manner.
That said, I developed a HUGE anxiety around receiving and opening mail at that point. It took years for me to OK with grabbing my mail from the box and taking care of it.
I still have relapses where I let it all pile up in the box for days because I am just too anxious. Most of the time when the anxiety hits I will at least take it out of the box and stash it in my work briefcase.
My Grandmother’s second husband apparently reached the paranoia level about his mail that he boarded up the letter slot in the door (standard here instead of a box), and got everything redirected to the neighbour, who was directed to open it and check it was safe before bringing it over.
I believe he was mostly thinking about anthrax and the like, rather than bills, but I’m not sure.
I read about people who don’t like to answer the phone at work. I think these were general office staff being pressed into service as receptionists, at a small office, so basically whoever is “free” picks up the phone. You’ll eventually notice if one worker won’t stop what they’re doing to pick up the phone (when everyone else is also busy).
There are people who hate getting voice mails, text messages, and emails. At least emails (usually) give a preview plus user name, so there’s less likelihood of anxiety.