There was a time when people weren’t expected to be available 24/7. News came by mail once or twice a day, and gossip came by way of magazine or word of mouth. Those days are over. The ubiquity of smartphones has eliminated any semblance of privacy we had. All day long, our phones are blowing up with texts, emails, DMs, and push notifications from Uber Eats (which discussed using AI on restaurant food photos) urging you to buy Chinese food even though you just ordered from them an hour ago. This constant barrage of notifications can definitely get annoying, but there’s a bigger problem than that. Push notifications are closely linked to smartphone addiction, and research shows that these disruptions turn off our attention span and actually slow down our overall reaction time.
In 2022, a team of psychologists from the University of Arkansas and the University of Plymouth in England challenged a group of students to complete cognitive tests while being periodically interrupted by the sound of a vibrating phone, as well as a computer-generated control tone. The results, published in the journal PLOS-One, showed that participants responded more slowly to tasks when they were interrupted by the phone rather than another sound. This mirrors the results of a 2016 study at the Catholic University of Korea and published in Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, which found that people reacted more slowly to tasks and had a higher error rate when interrupted by phone notifications. Even more worrying, this is just the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.
Bad vibes
After the first iPhone was born in 2007, people quickly got used to the buzzing sound of their phones, even as more and more apps began sending push notifications daily or even more frequently. However, each vibration causes a disturbance that interrupts both concentration and workflow, causing setbacks in task execution, or even in the realization of a thought. Another study, published this year, went further by actually measuring these setbacks. Conducted by a team of French researchers and published in Computers in Human Behavior, the research found that receiving a smartphone notification caused on average a delay of about seven seconds in cognitive processing. The notifications also caused participants’ pupils to dilate, an involuntary indicator of heightened emotions like fear and excitement.
The same study also provided answers as to why smartphone vibrations may be more annoying than other noises. Smartphone buzz can have a particularly high level of perceived relevance. That is, people are more likely to interpret sound as demanding their attention. We may have been conditioned by urgent notifications like work chats and delivery notices to interpret the sound of a smartphone as urgent, and therefore worth abandoning another task to focus on. Smartphones also trigger us emotionally in ways that other noises don’t, as evidenced by the fact that people’s pupils can dilate simply from the sound or vibration of their phone.
How to deal with disruption
You might think that the best way to avoid being distracted by phone notifications is to simply turn them off, but it’s not that simple. Here we come to another study (smartphone notifications are a hot topic in behavioral science these days, if you couldn’t tell), this one published in 2024 in the journal Media Psychology. In a randomized controlled trial of more than 200 Android users, aged 18 to 30, half of the participants were asked to turn off their smartphone notifications for a week. All participants had their phone usage tracked during the week using an app created by the researchers. Somewhat surprisingly, the results revealed no significant difference in total phone use between the two groups. However, it’s worth noting that the French study also mentions that notification frequency has more to do with productivity than screen time (although it’s best to keep the 20-20-20 rule in mind).
Turning off notifications comes with another challenge: the fear of missing out. Yes, FOMO is actually a serious topic of psychological research, and it can lead to levels of anxiety just as mentally distracting as the phone itself. So, what can we do about the impact of phones on our productivity? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. Some tricks can help you avoid your phone a little easier, like keeping it completely out of your sight, or better yet, doing an activity that you find really interesting. However, given how dependent we have become on smartphones, we may not be able to live without them.
