Your dinging, buzzing, vibrating phone is stressing you out – but so is its silence

Tingling skin and a higher heart rate are just two of the reactions that can be produced when people hear a mobile device make a noise, but even when it’s quiet, phantom phone calls and ‘ringxiety’ continue to play on our obsession

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The average person checks their mobile phone about 60 times per day whether they hear a sound or not, says psychology professor Larry Rosen. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 5:02pm, 28 Apr 2017Updated: 5:27pm, 28 Apr 2017

Many of us find the constant dings, rings, buzzes and beeps that come from our computers and mobile phones impossible to ignore. Experts say it’s a sign of our dependency on technology, which validates and entertains us while also cutting into our productivity and altering our attention span for the worse.

When a mobile digital device makes a noise, it produces mental and physical reactions in people, says Larry Rosen, a psychology professor emeritus at California State University and author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Their heart rates increase. Their skin tingles. They grow increasingly antsy with every minute they don’t look at the screen.

“We’ve trained ourselves, almost like Pavlov’s dogs, to figuratively salivate over what that vibration might mean,” Rosen says. “If you don’t address the vibrating phone or the beeping text, the signals in your brain that cause anxiety are going to continue to dominate, and you’re going to continue feeling uncomfortable until you take care of them.”

For some people, signals in the brain that cause anxiety can take over if they do not address their beeping or vibrating phones, says psychology professor Larry Rosen. Photo: Alamy

The reaction is so ingrained that it kicks in even without a prompt, Rosen says. The average person checks their mobile phone about 60 times per day, or nearly four times each waking hour, whether they hear a sound or not, according to one of his recent studies. That adds up to a total of 220 minutes per day.

“Almost exactly half of the ‘check-ins’ have no alerts or notifications,” Rosen says. “It’s your brain telling you to check in. It’s your brain telling you, ‘I don’t know if anyone new is following me.’”

Sometimes, people even hear “phantom rings”, where they think their phone is going off but it isn’t, says David Laramie, a Beverly Hills psychologist who coined the term “ringxiety”.