Social media are built to attract your attention and engage you for as long and frequently as they can. Notifications about messages, likes, shares, and posts are one of the tools used to shift your focus back to the platform. Let’s look at what you lose when you respond to this social media trick.
A study by Fournier et al. (2026) showed that each notification can steal about seven seconds of your time and attention on average, even if you do not check it.
In the experiment, participants received about 150 notifications per day, checked their phones about 100 times, and spent about seven hours on their phones on average.
It is not only lost time, but also loss of energy and lower productivity. In contrast, disabling notifications can improve focus and well-being in daily life.
Notifications are designed to stand out from their surroundings. Vibration, sound, color, and short messages with calls to action target your attention. Notifications also try to appeal to your goals and personal experience to make you want to check them.
Conditioning is the final element. When you receive positive reinforcement, such as a message from a friend or a comment on your post, it activates dopamine systems in your brain. When this repeats many times, you begin to feel pleasure in response to the notification itself.
Frequent phone use and a high number of notifications determine how easily a person gets distracted. On top of that, people with higher anxiety are more likely to experience stronger distraction, as they tend to focus more on uncertain or unclear notifications.
If you want to improve your focus, turn off unnecessary notifications and use silent mode often.