Somewhere in the settings of every phone is a long list of applications, each with a switch governing whether it may interrupt you. For most people the switches are left as they came: on. The phone arrives configured to reach you, and reaching you is treated as the natural state of things.
A smaller group goes through the list and starts turning switches off. Messages from close contacts stay on. A banking alert, perhaps. Almost everything else goes quiet: the social apps, the news apps, the games, the retailers, the services that have learned to call themselves urgent.
The usual word for this person is disconnected, with the faint suggestion that they are making themselves hard to reach on purpose, opting out of the shared agreement to be available. We think that reading misses what the gesture is actually for. The person is still reachable. They have changed who gets to decide when.
This is an observation about a habit, not a research finding. But there is published work on notifications that makes the habit easier to understand, and one part of it complicates the tidy version of the story.
A notification is not a neutral message
It helps to be clear about what a notification is. It is not simply the message it carries. It is a separate decision, made by whoever wrote the application, about whether that message should be allowed to break into whatever you are doing.
Those two things have come apart. Plenty of notifications are not messages from people at all. They are prompts engineered to bring you back: a reminder that someone you follow has posted, a nudge that a sale is ending, a streak about to lapse. The team behind the 2019 study Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being, published in Computers in Human Behavior and led by Nicholas Fitz with Dan Ariely among the co-authors, put the point bluntly in their opening: notifications, they wrote, are designed to capture and monetise attention.
That is the part the default settings obscure. Leaving every switch on is not staying open to the people who matter. It is granting the same standing interruption rights to a friend and to a shopping app, and letting both arrive in whatever order they choose.
What the alerts do while you carry them
The cost of all this is not only the seconds spent glancing at the screen.
In a 2016 study presented at the CHI conference, Kostadin Kushlev, Jason Proulx and Elizabeth Dunn took 221 people from the general population and ran them through two weeks of contrasting conditions. For one week, participants kept their notification alerts on and their phones close. For the other, they kept alerts off and the phone further away. In the week with alerts on, people reported noticeably more restlessness and difficulty holding their attention, and lower self-rated productivity, than in the week with alerts off.
Worth saying plainly: this is one study, not settled consensus, and it relies on what people reported about themselves rather than on a hard measure of their output. But the direction is consistent with a wider body of work on interruption, and the practical reading is modest. A stream of alerts does not just cost you the moments you spend on each one. It changes the texture of the time around them, keeping part of your attention turned outward, waiting.
The part that complicates the story
Here the headline needs a correction, and the same Fitz study supplies it.
That experiment did not only compare alerts on against alerts off. It tested a middle setting: notifications collected and delivered in batches, three times a day, at predictable hours. The people in the three-times-daily batch came out best. They reported feeling more attentive, more productive, in better moods, and more in control of their phones than the group receiving alerts as usual.
The group whose notifications were switched off entirely did not come out best. They reported higher anxiety and a stronger fear of missing out than the others.
That result should slow down anyone reaching for the cleanest version of this argument. Total silence is not automatically the healthiest setting, at least not in this experiment. The benefit seemed to come less from never being reached and more from being reached on a schedule the person could predict and trust. The study was run with smartphone users in India over a short two-week window, so it should not be stretched into a universal rule. But it points somewhere useful. The thing worth protecting is not silence. It is the power to decide the timing.
Attention as something that can be owned
The headline calls notifications a claim on the last parts of your attention that still belong to you. That phrasing is doing real work, and it is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a flourish.
Most of a modern day is already spoken for. Work has a claim on your attention, and so do the people you live with, and so do the ordinary obligations that fill a calendar. What is left over, the unclaimed minutes between those things, is a smaller share than people tend to assume. The default notification system treats that remainder as open ground. Anything with your contact details, or an app on your phone, can post a flag in it.
Going through the settings is a way of saying that the remainder is not open ground. It still belongs to someone. The person who turns the switches off has not decided to be unreachable. They have decided that being reachable is something they grant deliberately, to particular people and particular things, rather than a blanket permission handed out by a phone’s factory configuration.
Framed that way, the gesture is close to the opposite of avoiding connection. It is an attempt to make sure the connection that gets through is the connection the person actually chose, not whatever happened to be loudest.
What the setting does not tell you
None of this means a quiet phone is a reliable sign of anything in particular, and it would be a mistake to swap the unflattering story for a flattering one.
Some people turn their notifications off after genuine thought and feel steadier for it. Others do it and quietly miss things that mattered, or spend the freed-up attention no better than before. Some leave every alert on and are perfectly content. The Fitz study is a reminder that the same setting, switched off, sat on top of more anxiety for some people, not less. A configuration screen cannot tell you which case you are looking at.
What survives all the caveats is a narrow, useful point. Notifications are not neutral, the default is not the only option, and the volume of interruption a person lives with is, to a real degree, adjustable. Turning the switches off is one way to adjust it. So is batching them, which the evidence here actually favours over silence.
What we keep coming back to is how quietly the decision gets made for most people, and how rarely it gets made on purpose. The switches were set by someone else, in a factory, with their own reasons. Whether to leave them that way is a small question. It is just not one most people have answered yet.
