Attention & Distraction
Articles on how phones, notifications and constant switching affect focus. Some of the best-known claims here did not survive replication, so we separate what has been measured from what has only been repeated. Start with the guide, or browse the shorter pieces below.
Articles in this topic
Texting and Driving: The Famous Number Is About Truck Drivers
The 23-times crash figure comes from a study of truck drivers. The largest naturalistic study of ordinary drivers puts texting at 6.1 - and alcohol impairment at 35.9 in the same dataset.
Cyberloafing: The Cost Figures Come From Companies Selling the Cure
Cyberloafing research finds the behaviour unrelated to job performance and monitoring unrelated to improving it. The enormous cost figures trace to companies selling the remedy.
Binge Watching: Nineteen Definitions, One Experiment, and It Was About a Setting
Researchers use nineteen definitions of binge-watching. The only randomised experiment changed a default setting, not the viewer, and daily viewing fell.
Distracted Walking: Large in the Simulator, Very Small in the Crash Data
Phone distraction produces measurable crossing errors in simulators. In fatality records, it appears in only a fraction of one per cent of cases.
Is Screen Time Accurate? Your Estimate Isn’t, and Nobody Has Checked the App
Your own screen-time estimate is usually wrong. But the number shown by your phone has barely been validated against independent logs.
Does White Noise Help You Focus? It Depends Who You Are, and How Loud
The evidence on white noise is genuinely positive, but volume changes which tasks it helps, and a substantial minority perform worse with it.
Second Screening: You Remember the Programme Fine, If You Actually Watch It
An eye-tracking study found people who watched TV with a second screen remembered the programme as well as single-screen viewers, as long as their eyes stayed on it.
Digital Detox: Cutting Down Works a Little, Cutting Off Does Not
Two 2025 meta-analyses and a 1,661-person Facebook experiment agree: reducing social media use brings a small, real wellbeing gain. Quitting outright brings nothing, and sometimes the opposite.
Do Blue Light Glasses Work? A Cochrane Review Says No - and the Screen Still Matters
A Cochrane review of 17 trials found blue-light glasses do not reduce eye strain or improve vision. Evening screen light still affects sleep - through brightness and timing.
Digital Hoarding: What Has Actually Been Measured
Digital hoarding has a validated questionnaire, a workplace literature and a study of 801 students linking it to cognitive slips. It also has one experiment, no longitudinal study, no intervention trial, and three studies pointing in three directions.
Nomophobia: A Post Office Invented the Word, and It Is Still Not a Diagnosis
Nomophobia is a score on a twenty-item questionnaire coined for a 2008 phone-insurance survey. It appears in no diagnostic manual, and the largest study found 99.2% of 2,838 people registered some degree of it.
Phantom Vibration: Very Common, Well Documented, and Not a Syndrome
Phantom vibration is reported by 27% to 89% of phone users depending on the study. It is not a recognised diagnosis, and the one year-long prospective cohort found it rose with being on call and halved within two weeks of the job ending.
Phubbing: What the Research Actually Found (and Who Invented the Word)
Phubbing was coined for a dictionary marketing campaign, then became a research field. The pooled effects are real but correlational, and the one dyadic study found perceived phone use predicted a worse day while actual phone use did not.
Why Do We Keep So Many Browser Tabs Open?
Logged browser data says the median is about eleven tabs, not fifty - and that a third are never reopened. Tabs are a memory system, and most of what you have read about them is folklore.
Zoom Fatigue: The Famous Explanation Was Never a Study
The four causes of Zoom fatigue were arguments, not findings. The experiments have since been run. Here is what they confirmed and what they did not.
What Notifications Actually Do (And What They Don’t)
What the research shows notifications cost in attention and recovery time, and which popular claims about them the studies do not support.
Grayscale Phone: Does It Actually Reduce Screen Time?
Three short studies found less daily screen time with grayscale on. Pickups did not change, and sleep and productivity results were null.
How to Use Your Phone Less: What the Evidence Supports
Which methods reduce phone use, by how much, and with what limitation attached. A study-by-study table rather than a list of tips.
How Often Do People Pick Up Their Phones? Why There Is No Single Average
There is no defensible universal average for phone pickups a day. The circulating figures count six different things. Two are citable, with conditions.
How to Check Your Phone Less: What the Evidence Actually Supports
Checking is a habit of frequency, not duration. Here is what trials of prompts, nudges and defaults actually changed, and what they did not.
Does Social Media Actually Shorten Your Attention Span?
No study tests social media use, over time, against a direct measure of attention capacity. Here is what the closest evidence actually shows.
Why Am I So Bored? The Hidden System Behind Modern Boredom
Boredom isn't a shortage of things to do. It's the gap between your attention and your world - and the most common response to it, switching to something else, is the thing that widens the gap.
Why Your Attention Span Feels Broken
The most famous statistic about attention spans has no traceable source, and the most cited research measures switching behaviour rather than capacity. What that changes about the problem.
The Focus Apps That Actually Block Distraction
The useful question is whether a tool removes the choice in the weak moment or only reminds you to choose better. For many people, the first step is a free built-in limiter they already own.
Why you sit down to work and lose 40 minutes without noticing
You didn't lose the time because you're undisciplined or don't care. You lost it because you switched - from the task to the tab, from the tab to the next tab, from there to a thought, and eventually back.
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