‘Pray for Gen Z, 76 percent of these millennials suffers phone anxiety,’ Psychologist Explains Damage Phone Anxiety Does To Brain, and Tips on How Everyone Can Get Over It
How many of us out there are guilty of reaching for our phones just moments after waking up? Checking email, scrolling through social media and seeing what the latest news is can be so tempting. Jay Rai, an Empowerment Psychologist specialising in the neuroscience of mental health, sa8d in an article published by Forbes ; “Granted, our phones can help us be more productive and improve the quality of our lives, but they are also a major source of distraction and stress, especially when we check them first thing.
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According to a 2019 U.K. study of office workers, the latter group has only grown in recent years; the study found that 76 percent of the millennials surveyed experience phone anxiety, compared to 40 percent of the baby boomers. Considering those numbers … prayers up for Gen Z.
Meanwhile, the internet is now rife with guides specifically for phone-averse people who want to call their representatives.
It seems we still need the phone for reasons large (voicing your complaints about where your taxes are going or the latest horrific anti-trans bill) and small (you want dinner from a place that’s not listed on OpenTable). And the first step to getting over your fear is understanding why you have it in the first place.
1. Your phone anxiety is about … not knowing what the other person is thinking.
You may have heard the widely cited statistic that more than 90 percent of communication is nonverbal. The numbers are a little iffy on that one, but the underlying idea is true: Words are only one small part of how we convey meaning. And plenty of those other parts — facial expressions, body language, gestures — only do their job when you’re talking face-to-face.
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Over the phone, on the other hand, “all we have is the voice,” says Alison Papadakis, a clinical psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies stress. “So that can be a bit nerve-racking for people.” Something that sounds malicious, for example, could in reality be a joke delivered with a smile — but how would you know?
And it’s not just harder to grasp what the other person’s saying — it’s also more of a challenge to know what they think about what you’re saying. “Sometimes when we’re talking to someone, we give them encouragement through our facial expressions,” says clinical psychologist Alexander Queen, who studies anxiety disorders at Tufts University. Raised or furrowed eyebrows, for instance, silently convey that you’re listening, while a head nod encourages the speaker to keep going (and on the flip side, eyes glazing over means it’s probably time to change the subject). Without those cues, the conversation becomes more of a guessing game, with no way of really understanding whether you’ve guessed right. (This also helps explain the excruciating awkwardness of a similar but uniquely horrifying task: leaving voice-mails.)
2. Your phone anxiety is about … being under time pressure.
So why, to so many people, does the phone seem like a scarier option than texting? After all, a typed message is also stripped of all those nonverbal cues. But with written communication, at least, you have time on your side: time to gather your thoughts, time to edit, time to reconsider before hitting send. The phone gives you no such luxuries, meaning that until you hang up, you’re thinking on your feet — and every word is more of a gamble. “You can kind of correct yourself and take things back, but not in the same way, because it’s already out there,” Papadakis says. Pauses are more loaded, too; in person, you can see when someone is thinking or when they’re distracted. But over the phone, especially for the anxiety-prone, every silence can be a sign that things are going awry.

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There’s also the fact that a call is more time-consuming than a text: While the latter can be dashed off in between other activities, the former requires your full attention, or something close to it. “People worry, Am I going to bother this person? Am I going to be a nuisance?” says Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester who studies social stress and emotion regulation. In that mind-set, it’s easy to see a phone call as a demand, one that the other person might fulfill only grudgingly.
3. Your phone anxiety is about … feeling like you’re being judged
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And you’re right, sort of. If you’ve ever made a phone call in an open office, you know how weird it can feel to perform half of a conversation in front of all your co-workers. During face-to-face conversations, outsiders listening in will divide their scrutiny between the two people in question, thereby taking some of the heat off you. “But if you’re talking on the phone, there’s not another person there to take away that attention,” Queen says. “You’re going to be getting all that attention because you’re the one that’s physically in front of them.” (And they probably are paying attention: Research shows that “halfalogues,” or conversations where you can only hear one side, are more distracting than regular old dialogues.)
More often, though, the people around you aren’t the ones stirring up your phone anxiety — it’s the person on the other end of the line. “We don’t like being evaluated by other people. All of our survival as humans depends on other people — we’re very social creatures — so anytime we put ourselves out there to be evaluated, that produces a lot of stress for us,” says Jamieson. “It’s kind of the same thing as public speaking, going into a job interview, other sorts of experiences that tap into this evaluation process. People perceive that they might not be able to perform well in those situations.”
“Some people may have the impression that the stakes are higher for people they may have a relationship with,” Papadakis says. “They’re worried about messing up or upsetting their friends or their romantic partner, and it may have consequences for the relationship. Whereas if I screw up with a customer-service agent on the phone, I’ll never see that person again.”
When that happens, people will often show a higher degree of self-monitoring, or consciously tailoring their behavior to the social situation at hand. Problem is, though, that too much self-monitoring can actually make a conversation more awkward, exacerbating the problem and the anxieties that go along with it. “People who tend towards social anxiety tend to focus a lot on themselves and what they’re doing, and making sure they’re not doing something that would embarrass them,” Papadakis says. “Which makes it harder to have a conversation — if I’m paying attention to me and not what you’re asking me, it’s harder for me to respond to you.”
4. Your phone anxiety is about … being out of practice.
This is the simplest reason, but it’s not wrong: As your parents have likely grumbled at one time or another, people today — especially the Youths — don’t really pick up the phone very much anymore. “Part of it is inexperience,” Jamieson says. “They understand the rules of texting and what emojis mean, but they don’t have the same kind of knowledge about a phone conversation.” He likens it to a grandparent learning to use Facebook: “It’s awkward, they don’t know the rules, they don’t know what’s going on.” Talking face-to-face may be intuitive, but talking on the phone requires an understanding of a subtler etiquette: breaking a phone call down into its parts, and you have to know how to gracefully segue from the greeting into the next phase, when to pause, when to jump in, how to wind things down. It’s something that takes practice.
What Checking Your Phone Does To Your Brain
When you first wake up in the morning your brain switches from delta waves, which occur in a deep sleep state, to theta waves, which occur during a sort of daydreamy state. The brain then moves to produce alpha waves when you are awake but are relaxed and not processing much information.
Now, by grabbing your phone first thing and immediately diving into the online world, you force your body to skip the important theta and alpha stages and go straight from the delta stage to being wide awake and alert (also known as the beta state).
Scientific American reports that “the ideation that can take place during the theta state is often free flow and occurs without censorship or guilt.” This makes theta state an ideal time to tap into your subconscious mind to visualize what you want and help your brain drive your actions forward toward achieving your vision.
In skipping these states and checking your phone right after waking up you are priming your brain for distraction. Seeing or reading something negative first thing in the morning can trigger your stress response and put you on edge for the rest of the day. Similarly, if you see unanswered work emails, you may feel compelled to respond even while you’re still lying in bed. That’s a problem because, as Julie Morgenstern, author of the book Never Check Email In the Morning, puts it, “Those requests and those interruptions and those unexpected surprises and those reminders and problems are endless … there is very little that cannot wait.
What To Do Instead
When you first wake up in the morning, your creative brain is most attuned, so it’s important to use this time to create the conditions you want for your life. Now that you’ve carved out time for yourself, train your brain to be OK with less stimulating — yet more beneficial — activities. Here are a few tips for starting your morning off in a more positive way:
Adjust your settings and surroundings.
Before going to bed, put your phone on airplane mode. Your alarm will still work in this setting, but you won’t be greeted with messages or notifications right when you wake up. Better still, you can turn off your phone or charge it in another room and use a classic alarm clock. This way, you almost remove the temptation entirely.
Plan to do something else.
If you don’t make a plan for how you’re going to spend your morning, it’s easy to slip back into old habits and return to using your phone first thing. Consider using this time in the morning for more constructive activities like:
• Exercising.
• Spending time with family.
• Listening to a podcast or music or looking at art.
• Appreciating the real world around you.
• Looking at your schedule for the day and prioritizing tasks.
• Mindfully make a cup of coffee.
Personally, I use this time to meditate and set intentions.
It might seem cliché, but I know from experience that my best days are the ones where I take the time to meditate, focus on taking deep breaths and think about how I want to feel. And research shows that the morning is a perfect time to do so. One study found that in alpha state — when your brain isn’t totally at rest, but it’s not attempting to tackle anything big that requires concentration — meditating can help produce even more alpha waves.
As for setting intentions, one way to do it is to repeat affirmations that fit with your beliefs and core values. Things like “I expect good things to happen” and “I am going to achieve my priority tasks today” are great statements to start with if you’ve never used affirmations before.
Unlike checking your smartphone, these activities decrease stress, help you become more focused and productive, and provide clarity of thinking. Tomorrow morning, instead of reaching for your phone as soon as you’ve switched off your alarm, get into a better headspace by visualizing what you want to happen that day and the things you want to achieve. Remember, the way you start your day determines how well you live your day.
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