I have done the questionnaire to make sure that I am not addicted to shopping and credit cards and the one which investigates whether you are a miser who forgoes daily necessities just so you can put it all away for a rainy day. I have looked at the list of things to watch out for if you think you might be a partying alcoholic or a reclusive, boring billy-no-mates.

On the medical side of things, I read a piece on stomach ulcers and did a really good job of convincing myself I had one, until I asked my doctor about it, who smiled, almost apologetically and shook his head. Imagined symptoms? Yes.

Ulcer? Sorry my dear, not this time.

But last week, I finally managed to find something that I truly think I have succumbed to. While the research on the condition is limited, emerging studies tell us the effects of it are perhaps not as benign as we might think.

The common name for this modern affliction is email addiction. Think about it. How many times do you check your inbox every day? How many of the 'you've got new mail' pings do you hear in a week? And how much of the stuff that you send and receive is absolutely pointless and irrelevant, timewasting and brain-draining?

Here's an example of what I got today:

Tesco have some great offers for me on bananas and other fruits, someone called Till Bronner would like me to buy his new book and a property website has sent me lovely pictures of houses I'm never going to buy.

My work email asks me if I have any painkillers, whether I have seen a bag that has gone missing and invites me to have some sweets which someone has kindly brought back from their holidays and left at reception. All of these messages seem harmless enough but is the information overload having an effect that we are not perhaps aware of?

Firstly, there is the obsessive checking to see what's new. It's become part of my morning routine to check my email before I leave the house at 4.30am. Thus begins a day of regular logging on (I have three email accounts each with a different password). I have even started to develop a regular and irritating sense of having forgotten to do something . . . before realising that it's the email fix that needs to be sated.

But this harmless obsession might not be so harmless after all. A HewlettPackard study has shown that people who are distracted by emails experience a temporary 10% drop in their IQ.

America Online says addicts are checking their mail in the bath and some workers spend up to 50% of their time using email.

The worst thing that has happened for the email addicts has been the arrival of the Blackberry. I don't have one and refuse to get one because I know it would ruin my life. I have had the pleasure of spending time with a Blackberry user and the joy of listening to the endless 'pingf pingf pingf' is difficult to verbalise in a family publication.

How less 'full' our heads must have been before the advent of email. We don't really need to carry all of this useless information around in our brains and some of the world's biggest corporations are beginning to realise this.

Having suffered the barrage of endless and countless emails, companies such as investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort are looking for better ways to handle communications.

I had thought about boycotting email and just not using it anymore but that throws up another problem. Withdrawal symptoms would lead to sleepless nights spent imagining massive 'refresh' buttons floating over my head just begging to be pressed. The plus side is that they would invent a new name for my email cold turkey and the hypochondriac in me could rest easy.

Claire Byrne is co-presenter of the Breakfast Show on Newstalk 106-108