Designing Emails for Tired Brains, Not Perfect Conditions

Most email advice is built for a reader who doesn’t exist.

A reader who is calm, focused, curious, and ready to engage.
A reader with time, energy, and motivation.
A reader who opens emails intentionally and reads them carefully, top to bottom.

That is not how the inbox works in real life (well at least not for the majority of people). 

Real inboxes are checked between meetings, on commutes, while standing in queues, during moments of cognitive overload, stress, fatigue, distraction, in the morning out of habit, mindless scrolling and emotional noise. They are checked habitually, not leisurely. Functionally, not curiously.

If your email strategy assumes perfect conditions, it will fail under real ones.

This blog is about designing emails for tired brains — the brains your emails actually land in — not the idealised versions we wish existed.

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The biggest misconception in email design

Email design has been framed for years as a visual discipline.

• Make it prettier
• Make it more branded
• Make it more “engaging”

But the core job of email design is not to impress.

It is to reduce effort.

When someone opens an email, they are already spending cognitive energy. They have already made a decision: “I will give this a moment of my attention.” What happens next determines whether that moment becomes engagement or friction.

This is why I often say:

Design doesn’t create engagement. It creates the conditions for engagement.

The inbox is not a neutral environment

The inbox is a task and utility environment.

People do not say:

“I’m going to browse my inbox.”

They say (or think):

“I need to check something.”

• find information
• clear tasks
• respond
• confirm details
• resolve problems
• or they are already in there doing something else (more B2B)

This matters because attention behaves differently in task environments than in browsing environments.

• The brain filters aggressively
• Relevance is judged in milliseconds
• Effort is avoided
• Anything that feels “like work” is skipped

This is why inbox behaviour cannot be understood through platform metrics alone. Open rates and clicks do not capture the mental state of the reader when your email arrives.

(You can find out more about this in my blog on inbox behaviour and human psychology.)

Tired brains don’t read - they scan

One of the most important things to understand about email is this:

People do not read emails, they scan them.

Especially when tired. 

A tired brain is not looking for beautifully crafted email that ignites a fire of curiosity or FOMO. It is looking for:

• Anchors
• Patterns
• Cues
• Reminders
• Shortcuts
• Information that solves their problems or needs

The eyes move quickly, searching for meaning with minimal effort. This is why layout, hierarchy, spacing, and structure matter more than aesthetics.

Design choices that increase effort, even slightly, cause drop-off.

• Large blocks of uninterrupted text
• Centre-aligned body copy (which breaks natural eye flow)
• Low contrast between text and background
• Multiple competing focal points
• Unclear or buried CTAs

A tired brain will not fight your design. It will simply move on.

Accessibility is the default

Accessibility is often discussed as if it applies to “a small group of users”.

That framing is outdated and inaccurate.

When you design for:

• Neurodivergent readers
• People with ADHD
• People with dyslexia
• People with visual impairments
• People with cognitive fatigue

…you are designing for reality.

Because cognitive overload, stress, distraction, and low energy affect everyone, not just a niche audience.

• reduces cognitive load
• improves comprehension
• speeds up scanning
• increases confidence
• lowers friction

In other words: accessibility is performance.

If your email only works for someone who is fully alert, focused, and patient, it does not work.

Find out more about this in my Email Design Handbook.

Designing for low energy, not peak performance

Most emails are designed as if the reader is operating at full capacity.

In reality, you should assume:

• They are tired
• They are busy
• They are context-switching
• They have limited mental bandwidth

Designing for tired brains means asking different questions.

Not: “How do we make this more engaging?”

But: “How do we make this easier?”

Ease is not laziness at all! 
Ease is respect for your audience. 

• One clear primary message per email
• A visible hierarchy that guides the eye
• Whitespace used intentionally to reduce density
• Predictable structure that feels safe and familiar
• Clear, descriptive CTAs that don’t require interpretation

Cognitive load is the silent engagement killer

Most engagement problems are not caused by bad content.

They are caused by too much effort.

Cognitive load builds when:

• Multiple ideas compete for attention
• The purpose of the email is unclear
• The reader has to “work out” what matters
• Tone and intent feel mismatched
• The next step is ambiguous

These moments create microfriction.

Microfriction rarely causes immediate unsubscribes. Instead, it creates disengagement over time. People stop opening not because they don’t care, but because opening feels costly.

Predictability vs safety

There’s an important nuance here. Tired brains like predictable structure and they hate predictable content.

Structure creates safety:

• Consistent layout
• Familiar hierarchy
• Recognisable patterns

But content still needs to deliver value. This is where many of you go wrong. You repeat the same promotional or sales patterns, tones, and messages until the brain learns to filter them out.

This is predictive coding at work.

When the brain knows what’s coming, it stops paying attention.

Design cannot be separated from strategy

Design alone cannot solve:

• Poor timing
• Irrelevant messaging
• Broken expectations
• Over-sending
• Lack of exclusions

Designing for tired brains also means designing the experience around the email:

• Fewer emails, sent more intentionally
• Journeys that respect mental state
• Exclusions that prevent overload
• Cadence that creates relief, not pressure

This is why email design, deliverability, data, and strategy cannot be separated.

How to design emails that work with tired brains (practical takeaways)

If you want immediate improvements, start here.

The real, REAL shift

Most people don’t ignore emails because they don’t care. They ignore them because they don’t have the energy.

When you design for tired brains, you stop trying to capture attention and start earning it — by reducing effort, respecting context, and meeting people where they actually are.

That’s not just better design, it’s better email.

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RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.