Why do we feel uneasy without our phones?

What is a phone doing when it lies face-down on the table, screen dark, saying nothing? Judging by how often hands drift toward it, rather a lot.

The odd part is that people report two opposite things about being apart from it. In a Pew Research Center survey of US teens and parents, 44% of teens said not having their smartphone makes them feel anxious. In the same survey, 74% said they often or sometimes feel happy without it, and 72% said peaceful [1]. Those figures add up to well over 100%, which tells you plenty of teens ticked both. Parents are not off the hook either: 47% said they spend too much time on their own phone.

So rather than pick a side, let’s line the two arrangements up and compare them like lab samples.

Dimension	Phone within reach	Phone away
How it feels	Reachable; nothing to miss	Unease for some, happiness and peace for many [1]
Hearing	Every chime and buzz lands	Alerts fall out of earshot
A demanding task	An alert alone disrupted performance [2]	No alert to interrupt
A week of it	More self-reported inattention and restlessness (alerts on) [4]	Less of both (alerts off) [4]
Silent phone nearby	Evidence mixed [5][6]	Evidence mixed [5][6]
The cost	Steady interruptions	A missed message, and the itch to check

Feeling: uneasy and peaceful, in the same breath

The Pew numbers are self-report, a snapshot rather than an experiment. They don’t show that putting the phone away causes calm, or that keeping it causes worry. What they do show is that the two feelings are not rival camps. One person can dread the gap and enjoy it, sometimes within the same afternoon. Anyone who has patted an empty pocket in a mild panic and then, twenty minutes later, noticed they hadn’t thought about the thing once, will recognise the data.

Does the ear ever clock off?

Not really, and for good evolutionary reasons. Eyes have lids; ears do not. In a classic study, Carles Escera and colleagues had people concentrate on a visual task while a regular sequence of tones played in the background. When an unexpected novel sound or a change in the sequence turned up, responses to the visual task slowed, and brain recordings showed matching responses to the intruder [3]. Participants were told to ignore the sounds. Their hearing, apparently, did not get the memo.

That is the background machinery a notification plugs into. Hearing is a watchman that keeps sampling the surroundings, and anything new or out of pattern gets flagged, whether you asked for it or not.

The chime that taught itself to matter

A phone’s alert tone has no meaning on day one. It becomes a cue by reliably arriving just before something worth looking at: a reply, a name, a small social reward. That part is ordinary learning, our gloss rather than a finding from the papers here.

What the papers do show is the price. Cary Stothart and colleagues gave people an attention-demanding task and, without warning, sent notifications to their phones. An auditory or vibration alert on its own disrupted performance, even when nobody picked up the phone, and the dip was comparable to actually using it for calls or texts [2]. The authors’ suggested explanation is that the buzz kicks off task-irrelevant thoughts. Who’s that? Did they reply? The phone stays in the pocket; the mind wanders off to check it anyway.

Kushlev’s swap: one week each way

Lab tasks last minutes. Kostadin Kushlev, Jason Proulx and Elizabeth Dunn ran something longer: 221 people from the general population spent one week with alerts on and the phone within reach, and another week with alerts off and the phone away. In the alerts-on week they reported more inattention and restlessness [4]. That is self-reported attention, not a diagnosis of anything, and participants knew which week was which. Still, a week is long enough to stop being a novelty.

Is a silent phone still loud?

Here the notebook gets messier. Adrian Ward and colleagues reported that people whose phones were in another room did better on working-memory and reasoning tests than people whose phones sat on the desk [5]. The phrase “brain drain” travelled well.

Then Ruiz Pardo and Minda ran a pre-registered direct replication and found no difference between phone-location conditions [6]. Their reading: mere presence may not be enough to dent performance. So the strongest evidence points at the chime and the buzz, not at the dark rectangle itself. Fair to the rectangle.

Which one when

Phone within reach makes sense when being reachable is the point: waiting on a call, caring for someone, on shift. The unease people report without it is real data, not a character flaw, and sometimes it is simply accurate.

Phone away makes sense when the task needs a long, unbroken thread: reading, writing, a hard problem, a conversation. The evidence that alerts break that thread is the firmest in this pile.

If you’re curious which column you live in, here is a ten-minute trial. Put the phone in a different part of the house, sound on or off, your choice. Set a clock that isn’t the phone. Then just notice what comes back, if anything: a thought that gets to finish, attention that stays on one page, the ordinary quiet of a kettle or rain on the window. Notice the unease too, if it shows up. Both are results. Write them down if you like; a sample of one is still a sample.

A caveat on what was measured

These studies tested specific people on specific tasks: teens and parents in one country, volunteers in labs, one week of alerts. The ear-and-attention findings describe averages, and one headline effect did not replicate. None of it says the phone is bad, and none of it is advice about health.

Sources

1. Pew Research Center (2024). “How Teens and Parents Approach Screen Time.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/03/11/how-teens-and-parents-approach-screen-time/
2. Stothart, C., Mitchum, A., & Yehnert, C. (2015). “The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100
3. Escera, C., Alho, K., Winkler, I., & Näätänen, R. (1998). “Neural mechanisms of involuntary attention to acoustic novelty and change.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1162/089892998562997
4. Kushlev, K., Proulx, J., & Dunn, E. W. (2016). “‘Silence Your Phones’: Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms.” Proceedings of CHI 2016. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858359
5. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462
6. Ruiz Pardo, A. C., & Minda, J. P. (2022). “Reexamining the ‘brain drain’ effect: A replication of Ward et al. (2017).” Acta Psychologica. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103717