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The Road to Mental Hell is Paved with Good Notifications
Do yourself a favor today and tell your phone to shut up
Even the best-designed and most appropriate notifications imaginable can have unintended consequences. On December 29, 1972, a perfectly airworthy passenger jet was flown into the ground 20 miles from Miami International Airport. As the plane was approaching the airport, a warning light in the cockpit indicated that the nose landing gear was not locked in the lowered position.
While investigating the possible ramifications of this notification, the crew inadvertently deactivated the autopilot but no one noticed this because everyone was focused on the landing gear indicator. The plane slowly descended. When the fact they had made an unplanned descent finally caught the attention of the copilot, it was too late. Seconds later, the airplane hit the ground, killing 101 passengers and crew. Rarely does distraction have consequences that catastrophic, but it is never conducive to optimal performance.
While push notifications from our phones may rarely be deadly, they present a significant threat to both our cognitive performance and our mental health.
I recently created a profile on a popular social platform in an effort to elevate my business networking game. I was amazed at the complexity of the notification settings. There were 10 top-level notification categories to turn off if I wanted no notifications at all. Even when nothing happens there are notifications. “Your weekly round-up!” “Things you may have missed despite our incessant efforts to notify you of them!”
My phone would happily notify me every couple of minutes of some late-breaking event in cyberspace if I would let it. And many people do exactly that. A friend of mine picked up his phone the other day as we were wrapping up a game of pickleball. The screen was full of notifications. Emails. Text messages. No doubt the latest musings of social media. I watched as tension suffused his demeanor. But so what?
The performance costs of push notifications
We like to think we can multitask, but Anthony Wagner, PhD, a psychology professor at the Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute says…
