Study: Muting your phone may cause more stress, not less
Are you plagued by FOMO — “fear of missing out”?
Silencing your smartphone may not be the stress-buster you think it is.
That’s the takeaway from a new study that found many folks check their phones a lot more when they’re set to mute or vibrate than when they beep and ring.
“Without any clear
‘buzz’ or sound from their phones, individuals with high FOMO might use their phones even more,” said study author Mengqi Liao, a doctoral candidate in communications studies at Penn State University.
For the study, 42% of
138 iPhone users chose vibration-only mode; 8.7% were on silent mode, and the rest kept their ringers on for four straight days. Before the start, people completed a survey to see if they had FOMO, and they activated the Screen Time tool on their phones so they could report exact data to researchers.
Those who muted their phones clocked the highest time on social media and checked their phone more often than participants who didn’t silence their device. Phone screen time was not only higher in those people with FOMO, but muting notifications also increased feelings of stress.
“Instead of muting or disabling all notifications from their phones to avoid distractions, users with high FOMO could customize their notifications setting and selectively disable some notifications,” Liao suggested.
This may mean enabling notifications from close family and friends to alleviate the anxiety, she said.
The findings were recently published online in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
Therapists often tell people to turn their phones off so they can be more present in their day-today lives, but this study suggests that may not be the best course of action for some folks, said Thea Gallagher, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health in New York City.
“The data is pointing to something different if you have FOMO: You will actually be compulsively checking your phone even more because you think you are missing notifications,” she said.