Keeping your phone on silent feels responsible. You’re not letting every text, email, and random app notification boss you around all day. You’re protecting your mental health. In theory, anyway.
A 2022 Penn State study looked at screen-time data from 138 iPhone users and found that people checked completely silenced phones nearly twice as much as phones left on vibrate: 98.2 times a day versus 52.9. Among people with higher FOMO, the number climbed to about 120 checks a day. Study author S. Shyam Sundar said the issue is uncertainty. If you can’t hear or feel a notification, you’re left wondering whether something is waiting for you, and for some people that turns into checking the phone over and over just to find out.
Sundar said that can be especially distracting in places like classrooms, where silencing the phone is supposed to help you pay attention. Instead, you can end up sitting there thinking about whatever might be happening on the screen in your pocket.
Keeping Your Phone on Silent Might Actually Make You Check It More
Your personality might have something to do with it too. A 2023 Stanford study followed more than 800 college students and found that people who scored higher in conscientiousness generally used their phones less and for shorter stretches, while more extroverted students used theirs more. Additionally, a meta-analysis in Current Psychology pulled together 36 studies involving more than 15,000 people and landed in roughly the same place: problematic phone use was more common among people lower in conscientiousness and higher in neuroticism or extraversion.
So silent mode isn’t doing the same thing for everyone. If you can mute your phone and forget about it for an hour, great. If you mute it and then pick it up every four minutes because you’re convinced somebody has texted, you haven’t exactly escaped the distraction.
Leaving notifications on can be just as bad. UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark found that it can take an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after a digital interruption. A phone buzzing through a meeting, dinner, or the one afternoon you’re finally getting something done can ruin your concentration just as easily.
It really comes down to what you do after you switch to silent mode. If the phone goes face-down across the room and stays there, great. If you’re checking it again ten seconds later because you “just wanted to look at one thing,” the setting probably isn’t doing much for you.
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