"We're curled up on the couch at the end of another long day, finally getting a little refuge from the relentless busyness of modern life. Then, the smartphone lights up, announcing itself yet again, calling us back to the churn. Our phone has already buzzed, dinged, and flashed red dots 150 times today, the North American average (Stern, 2013). Each interruption has carved away a sliver of our time; each glow has pulled us into a digital world."
"To explain it, imagine this: We're in our home office, emails open on our laptop, our fingers flying across the keyboard, our body grounded in our chair. Then our stomach growls, so we close the laptop and wander into the kitchen for a snack. And the moment we cross the doorway, the emails evaporate. They just disappear from our minds, erased like they never mattered, and we're suddenly thinking all about snacks, drinks, and dinner plans."
Smartphone notifications repeatedly interrupt daily life, drawing attention into digital interactions and pulling people away from quiet moments. Frequent buzzes and red-dot alerts carve away time and invite quick, habitual responses to messages. Small social prompts can prompt immediate replies, which often occur amid environmental shifts that trigger the doorway effect. Crossing a threshold from one room to another causes the brain to discard prior task-related memories to make room for new context. This context-dependent memory updating makes short replies and notifications especially likely to derail focus and lead to unplanned mental shifts toward new activities and plans.
Read at Psychology Today
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