Here's How Distracting Your Phone Notifications Really Are (According To Science)

There used to be a time when people weren't expected to be available 24/7. The news came by mail once or twice a day, and gossip came by way of magazine or mouth. Gone are those days. The ubiquity of smartphones has eliminated whatever semblance of privacy we had. All day long, our phones are blowing up with text messages, emails, DMs, and push notifications from Uber Eats (which discussed using AI on restaurant food photos) urging you to get Chinese food even though you just ordered from them an hour ago. This constant barrage of notifications can sure get annoying, but there's a bigger problem than that. Push notifications are closely correlated with smartphone addiction, and research is showing that these disruptions are disabling our attention spans and actually slowing our overall reaction times.

In 2022, a team of psychologists from the University of Arkansas and Plymouth University in England challenged a group of college students to complete cognitive tests while being periodically interrupted by the sound of a phone vibrating, as well as a computer-generated control tone. The results, published in the journal PLOS-One, showed that participants responded to tasks slower when interrupted by the phone as opposed to another sound. This mirrors the results of a 2016 study done at the Catholic University of Korea and published in Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, which found that people responded slower to tasks and had a higher rate of error when being interrupted by phone notifications. More worrying still, this is only the tip of a very dangerous iceberg.

After the birth of the first iPhone in 2007, people quickly became accustomed to the buzz of their phones, even as more and more apps began sending push notifications on a daily, or even more frequent, basis. However, each vibration causes a disruption that breaks both concentration and workflow, causing setbacks in performing tasks, and even just completing a thought. Another study, published just this year, went a step 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 an approximately seven-second delay in cognitive processing on average. Notifications also caused participants' pupils to dilate, an involuntary indicator of heightened emotions like fear and arousal.

The same study also provided some answers as to why the vibration of a smartphone can be more distracting than other noises. The buzz of a smartphone can have a particularly high level of perceived relevance. That is to say, people are more likely to interpret the sound as demanding their attention. We may have been conditioned through time-sensitive notifications like job chats and delivery notices to interpret the sound of a smartphone as urgent, and therefore worth dropping another task to focus on. Smartphones also trigger us emotionally in a way that other noises don't, as exhibited by the fact that people's pupils can dilate just from the sound or vibration of their phone.

You might assume the best way to prevent being distracted by phone notifications is just to turn them off, but it's not so simple. Here we come to yet another study (smartphone notifications are a scorching hot topic in behavioral science these days, if you couldn't tell), this one published in 2024 in the journal Media Psychology. In a randomly controlled trial of over 200 Android users, ages 18–30, half of participants were made to disable their smartphones' notifications for one week. All participants had their phone usage tracked for the week through an app made by the researchers. Somewhat surprisingly, the results found no significant differences in total phone usage between the two groups. However, it is worth noting that the French study also mentioned that frequency of notifications was more related to productivity than overall screen time (though you'd best still keep the 20-20-20 rule in mind).

Disabling notifications comes with another challenge: the fear of missing out. Yes, FOMO is actually a serious subject of psychological research, and it can lead to levels of anxiety that are just as mentally distracting as the phone itself. So, what can be done about the impact of phones on our productivity? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer. Some tricks might help you avoid your phone a little easier, like actually keeping it out of your sight altogether, or better yet, doing an activity you find truly engaging. However, with how reliant on smartphones we've become, this may be a case of can't live it, can't live without it.