Your Phone Can Truly Bum You Out

People love their phones. At least, you'd have thought they do, considering they now spend around five hours a day – a third of their waking hours – looking at them, buying stuff through them, taking photos with them and checking the incessant stream of notifications they receive from friends and family on them.

However, new research conducted by Nottingham Trent University has found that, actually, all that attention might not be doing lots of phone users much good.

The researchers developed an app called "NotiMind" and had 50 participants download it. The app collected details relating to the phone's notifications over the course of five weeks, as well as participants' self-reported moods at various points in the day during the five-week period.

What the researchers found was that, in that time, the participants received over half a million digital bulletins between them. Of those, 32 percent triggered emotions, with feelings of fear, nervousness and hostility among the sentiments felt by research participants.

Unsurprisingly, it was general alerts – like dumb phone updates and messages telling participants they were about to run out of storage – that caused the worst reactions.

Sam, a 31-year-old chef from east London, can sympathise. "Notifications are mad annoying," he says. "They are, more often than not, an irritating distraction, especially at work or when I'm trying to chill at home."

Job-related phone alerts also had an adverse impact on moods, especially when arriving in huge volumes – something Jim, an editor at an online media company, can recognise from his own experiences.

"My job involves getting around 150 emails a day, which just stresses me out generally. But it's after work hours particularly – when I'm still expected to reply to certain emails – that I really notice it becoming an issue," he said. "I'll feel my phone buzz in my pocket and instantly get a pang of anxiety, a feeling that the email is going to be bad news."

In contrast, people tend to appreciate receiving messages from loved ones, particularly in bulk; that feeling of belonging understandably led to positive emotions. Of course, this isn't always the case: "It's when I get lots of group chat notifications that I want to freak out," said 26-year-old events manager, Sara. "It's all too much, getting 20 different messages at once. I turn off my notifications sometimes, but then I get the craziest FOMO."

"These digital alerts continuously disrupt our activities through instant calls for attention," researcher Dr Eiman Kanjo told the Telegraph.

For some people, the answer to the stress of an ever-buzzing phone is to just give up on technology altogether, or at least wean yourself off it to the absolute most basic of necessities. For the rest of us, I guess it's just another 60 years of "fear, nervousness and hostility" every time we hear our phones go off.

@shaydakisses