How To Stop Checking Notifications All The Time

Earlier this week, I wrote about breaking habits and Buddha’s five ways to remove distracting thoughts. There’s possibly nothing more distracting in our modern age than the constant stream of notifications we receive from email, messages, and social media.

Hugh McGuire’s post, “Why can’t we read anymore?”, struck a note with me. A couple years ago, I also realized while trying to read a book that I could hardly concentrate for more than ten pages at a time. In the back of my mind, there was some constant tic-like process always wondering if I had any new messages or likes or posts until the questioning quickly became unbearable, and I gave in to the urge to check on my digital life.

I felt horrified that I was struggling to read for a few minutes when I could easily, naturally, and joyfully do it for hours as a child. Fortunately, since that time I’ve become much better at managing and controlling my notification checking urges. This is my guide on how to overcome one of the most annoying side effects of being immersed in a world of digital information and “social” media.

We’re All Rats

To overcome an urge to check on notifications, we first have to understand why checking for notifications is such a compelling behavior.

In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner explored the effects of reinforcement on conditioning animal behavior. In his experiments, a pigeon or rat was placed in a box, now commonly known as a Skinner box, and received food when it pecked a disk or pushed a lever.

In these studies, the response conditioned for by the experimenters was pecking a disk or pushing a lever. The reward was the food. But of course, it’s not very surprising to anyone that rats would become conditioned to push a lever if they received food every time they did so.

The interesting question to ponder is what would happen if you didn’t give food to the rat after every single lever push. Skinner became famous for studying how different “schedules of reinforcement” affect animal behavior.

Schedules of Reinforcement

Schedules of reinforcement are rules for intermittently rewarding an animal. The four main simple schedules of reinforcement are:

1. Fixed ratio. Get food after pushing the lever n times. Ex: Get food after pushing the lever every 3 times.
2. Variable ratio. Get food after pushing the lever an average of n times. Ex: A sequence of the number of pecks required before getting food in a variable ratio schedule with an average of 3 pecks could look something like this: 1 peck, 4 pecks, 2 pecks, 3 pecks, 5 pecks, …
3. Fixed interval. Get food by pushing the lever x amount of time after the last reward. Ex: Push lever. Get food. During the next fifteen seconds, the rat won’t get food no matter how many times it pushes the lever. After 15 seconds, as soon as the rat pushes the lever again it will get food.
4. Variable interval. Get food by pushing the lever an average of x amount of time after the last reward.

We’ll be focusing on the latter two because those are the ones that will be relevant in the case of notifications. In the following graph, the short lines off the plots of the different schedules of reinforcement correspond to when a reward was given to the animal.

In general, when the frequency of rewards is comparable, variable-interval schedules tend to elicit more responses than their fixed-interval counterpart. This intuitively makes sense because in variable-interval scheduling you don’t know the answer to the question, “Is there a reward waiting?”. If you knew you could only get a reward every 10 minutes, you would only check every 10 minutes.

This is why fixed-interval scheduling produces curves that start flat and become increasingly steep as the time for the next reward becomes closer. This is often called the “fixed-interval scallop” and is present because animals don’t have a perfect sense of time. If they had access to clocks (or Apple smartwatches!11!1!!), then of course they would only check exactly every 10 minutes.

Digital Reflex / Digital Reward

In our case, we aren’t rats pushing a lever. We’re humans refreshing Twitter or Facebook or Gmail. The response is checking for notifications, and the reward is a new notification. I’ll refer to the response as the digital reflex and the reward as the digital reward.

Our overall digital reflex can be thought of as the sum of several app-specific digital reflexes. For example, a Facebook digital reflex, Twitter digital reflex, Instagram digital reflex, etc. The amount you check your phone is proportional to your overall digital reflex. But the amount you check each individual app is proportional to your app-specific digital reflexes.

The frequency of a digital reflex is how often you perform the reflex (e.g. how many times you check Twitter). The strength of a digital reflex is how hard it is for you to resist the reflex (if you really tried, how long could you go without checking Twitter?).

Better Than Rats

Unlike rats desperate for food, we have the ability to overcome our addictions. I’ve created a sequence of three strategies ordered in such a way that they require a minimal amount of cognitive effort to subdue digital reflexes.

• Strategy 1: Push Notifications
• Strategy 1.5: Regulated Push Notifications
• Strategy 2: Fixed Time Digital Reflex

The exact strategies to use for each app-specific reflex may vary, but in most cases, the best idea is to apply the strategies in order (1 -> 1.5 -> 2). Why this is so becomes evident after an explanation of the strategies.

Strategy 1: Push Notifications

The first strategy is to simply turn on push notifications for a digital reward. This might sound paradoxical until we remember why variable interval scheduling reinforces behavior so well.

Variable interval scheduling works because you don’t know exactly when you’ll be rewarded. If we knew we would get an email every 30 minutes, there would be little need to constantly check email. In other words, the power underlying variable interval scheduling is variable interval uncertainty, our inability to answer the question, “Is there a reward waiting for me?”

But push notifications provide an answer to this. You know that if you haven’t received a push notification, there isn’t a reward waiting for you, and so there’s no need to check. By eliminating the question loop capturing some of your concentration in the back of your mind, you’ll be attain a deeper level focus while working.

And perhaps more importantly, push notifications are an extremely helpful first step in the process of overcoming a digital reflex because of the weakening effect they have on the reflex. Once you’re accustomed to push notifications, eventually you’ll only check an app after receiving a push notification from it.

After this habit has solidified, you can start to remove the push notifications. But now you’re faced with a considerably easier task than before. Your goal is no longer to eliminate the habit of checking for digital rewards. It’s to continue the habit of not checking for digital rewards.

Push notifications are especially a good fit for important, low-frequency rewards. Here are examples of what I use push notifications for:

1. My most personal email account. Medium frequency & sometimes important. I certainly don’t have email notifications turned on for all my email accounts, but my personal one is generally not too spammy (unlike my berkeley.edu one…).
2. Twitter notifications. Low frequency. I’m not popular enough that Twitter push notifications would become a nightmare. (Although you can change that by following me @SmithaMilli). Plus, actually opening Twitter to check for notifications is a huge time suck for me because I’ll inevitably come across interesting articles & get absorbed in them.
3. Text messages. Medium frequency + high importance. Because I have a pretty horrible response time on conversational text messages, people generally only text me for time-urgent things (“What time are we meeting?” “Be there in 5 minutes”).

Strategy 1.5: Regulated Push Notifications

Okay, I kind of lied. I don’t have push notifications for the above three things on all the time. Having push notifications on all the time does improve your focus in one way by freeing your mind from asking, “Do I have a reward waiting?”.

But when you’re working in a flow and notifications pop on your screen, it’s still disruptive and distracting, especially if you’re tempted to open the apps after seeing a notification (“Oh new email? Better check that out”). So, when I’m working I actually turn off notifications for all of the above three. I turn my phone upside down, so that I can’t see the screen, and I exit out of my Twitter, iMessage, and Mail desktop apps.

The reason I didn’t start with explaining Strategy 1.5 is because it is less likely to work if you jump straight into it from your digital reward addicted zombie-like starting state. If you simply turn off all notifications without having first dulled the strength of the reflex, you’ll continue to be plagued by strong urges to reopen and check those apps, and might not have the discipline to stick to not checking them.

Strategy 1.5 pairs well with Pomodoro. You exit out of all notification-creating apps while working and then allow yourself to check them during your break time. This also transitions nicely into Strategy 2.

Strategy 2: Fixed Time Digital Reflex

This is the common sense strategy. Set fixed times that you can look at an app. For example, only checking Twitter at 10am, 4pm, and 10pm. What we’re doing here is using self-control to force digital rewards to go from a variable-interval schedule to a fixed-interval schedule.

The lower the importance of a digital reward, the bigger the intervals between checking will be. For instance, I only check Facebook in the morning and night. But if I were allotting intervals to check work email, I might do once an hour during work hours and once every three hours during non-work hours.

Start with small intervals and gradually increase to larger intervals until reaching your desired interval. For example, you can start by only checking Twitter once every 30 minutes. Once you achieve that, increase the interval to an hour, and so on.

If you’re always attempting a manageable interval, it should be completely accomplishable for you to reach your goal.

Pairing Reflexes With Strategies

The reason Strategy 1 -> Strategy 1.5 -> Strategy 2 works so well is because you’re weakening the reflex as you go to minimize the amount of willpower and self-control you have to exert. However, there are three factors you can use as heuristics to reason about which sequence of strategies makes sense for a given reflex:

1. The strength of the digital reflex. If your digital reflex is too strong, you should start with Strategy 1.
2. The frequency of the digital reward. However, if the digital reward is too high-frequency (e.g. new tweets on your Twitter feed), then Strategy 1 simply isn’t an option.
3. The importance of the digital reward. If the digital reward is important, you might as well turn push notifications on. For example, it is very reasonable for you to keep Slack push notifications on for messages that mention you because they’re likely to be urgent / of high importance.

If something is low frequency and high importance (e.g. Slack mentions), then you should just stick to Strategy 1. If something is low importance, then you should aim for Strategy 1.5 or Strategy 2. If it’s a weak reflex or it’s too high frequency to use Strategy 1 on, then you can start with Strategy 2. But otherwise, start with Strategy 1 and then work your way up to Strategy 1.5 or Strategy 2.

Extra Tips

1. Set aside a specific time to respond to messages. The thing about messaging conversations is that after you respond you’ll (shockingly) just get another message! It can be never-ending. So to force a rate limit, I tend to only respond to non time sensitive texts/Facebook messages at the end of the day. I also like this because I strongly prefer face-to-face interaction with people anyway.
2. Meditate to increase your self-control. Although I’ve tried to write this guide in a way that sort of “cheats” by minimizing the amount of cognitive willpower you need to exert, cultivating your self-control is invaluable. After practicing meditation for a while, you’ll simply be able to drop any obsessive thoughts over a digital reward without having to go through this whole process.
3. Replace the habit of checking notifications with a different habit. When forced to be idle for a brief amount of time, most of us automatically take our phones out and start checking a list of apps. Consider substituting those few moments with time for reflection and planning instead.

Peacefully Reading Again

Once we no longer feel the need to constantly be plugged in and checking up on what’s new in our online lives, we can finally focus completely on what we’re doing in the moment. No more half-listening to friends while wondering about new Snapchats or Instagram photos or tweets or whatever.

Were you able to read this entire post without feeling distracted by all those digital temptations? If not, hopefully your future self would be able to.

Did you like this post? Follow the blog for more! And follow me @SmithaMilli. Thanks to Canzhi Ye for reviewing this post.