There's A Specific Phone Habit That Experts Say Is Worse For Your Brain Than Your Screen Time

It's far and away the most annoying part of social media for many of us, and new research says it's the worst, too: Having notifications on is worse for your brain than screen time in general, according to a new study.

The French and Swiss study shows what many of us who've had notifications turned off for ages already know: Those constant pings and text bubbles hijack your brain in a way that is not just irritating, but, it turns out, actually harmful.

Having notifications on is worse for your brain than screen time, according to new research.

The study found that all those notifications aren't just disruptive, they're actually far more predictive of how distracted you're likely to become than mere screen time alone. In other words, it is not necessarily how long you are on your phone that determines how fragmented your attention span becomes, but rather how frequently it interrupts you.

Previous research on the subject has been hobbled by one key detail: They used simulated notifications rather than real ones, which removed the influence of real-world use and experience.

This new study replicated actual notifications among a study cohort of 180 university students with an average age of 21, the core demographic that seems to be suffering major attention-span impacts from smartphone use, with an average number of daily notifications of 100.

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Notifications slowed down cognitive functions by at least 7 seconds.

To measure the distractions, subjects were broken into three groups who were asked to complete psychological puzzles while receiving three types of alerts: Notifications they had been told were their own, piped into the research computers they were using; general notifications that belonged to someone else from actual social media sites; and blurred notifications that were unreadable.

The tests consisted of Stroop tasks, like being shown the word "blue" in red type and being asked to identify the type color, not the word itself. During these tasks, the subjects were shown the aforementioned notifications.

Stoica Adrian's Images | Canva Pro

Researchers found that notifications slowed down the cognitive processing of the Stroop tasks by seven seconds across the board, but it was most pronounced for those who thought they were seeing their own personal notifications, not the general ones or blurred ones.

And importantly, the more emotional the notifications were, the more pronounced the impacts, from the delays themselves to physiological responses like pupil dilation. Researchers say this shows that the emotional impact of notifications is just as pronounced as the cognitive ones.

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Although the delays themselves are small, their frequency amounts to major attention deficits.

Seven seconds doesn't sound like that big of a deal, of course, but when it's happening dozens or even hundreds of times a day, it adds up to a major problem, one that has a far bigger impact than screentime alone.

In fact, researchers were unable to find a particularly strong connection between screentime alone and cognitive impacts. It was the notifications and, relatedly, how often the subjects checked their phones that became the determining factor.

And perhaps most important of all, the researchers found that these notifications played a key role in conditioning the subjects to constantly check their phones and field disruptions.

Which, as a person who's had notifications turned off for decades, makes something I constantly see make a whole lot of sense: The insistence with which apps and websites suggest I "turn on notifications" or remind me I have them turned off. They need us to be as distracted as possible in order to harvest as much data as possible to sell it for marketing, of course.

It also underscores one of the most shocking revelations from former tech execs who developed social media apps: Our apps are modeled on slot machines to be as addictive as possible. So turn your notifications off. Nobody deserves that kind of access to your brain.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.