Is Your Smartphone Distracting You?

In the middle of a pleasant face-to-face conversation with a friend, your cellphone signals that someone has texted or called. You don’t want to be rude and pull out your phone to check who’s trying to reach you, but gee, you can’t help trying to guess. Soon, you realize that you have no idea what your friend — sitting right in front of you — has been talking about.

Sound familiar? Research suggests you’re far from alone. Although more studies are needed (most have focused on college students, and the results have been mixed), there’s evidence that smartphones can drive us to distraction — even if we don’t pick them up.

Simply leaving your phone out where you can see it may be enough to scramble your focus, according to a study of 42 people ages 20 to 34 published in Scientific Reports in 2023. The researchers asked about half the participants to turn off their smartphones and place them screen down on a table while performing tests that assessed concentration, attention and processing speed. The rest of the participants took the same tests with their smartphones turned off and stowed in another room. The mere presence of a smartphone was linked to significantly worse performance on attention and processing speed.

The buzzing of smartphone notifications may have a similar effect. In a study published in PLoS One in 2022, 73 college students completed tasks designed to evaluate attention and cognitive control, including reaction time, while randomly being played one of three sounds: a smartphone vibrating with a notification, a lawn mower and a computer-generated noise (the control). The researchers found that the smartphone sound was associated with overall slower performance on the tasks.

While acknowledging that more research is needed, researchers concluded that smartphones have a “distracting effect” and can hinder cognitive performance “even if they are not actively used” in a meta-analysis of 22 studies published in Behavioral Sciences in 2023.

The bottom line? When you really need to focus — like when you’re catching up with a friend or getting behind the wheel of your car — consider keeping your smartphone out of sight and out of earshot.