Turning notifications off
made people more anxious. Here's why.

Notification fatigue is the exhaustion and desensitization that builds up from a high volume of alerts, to the point where people stop evaluating each one and start ignoring, silencing, or reflexively reacting to all of them instead. It sounds like a phone problem. It was actually documented as a hospital problem first, and the hospital version was often measured in patient outcomes, not just annoyance.

The most useful part of this topic isn't the diagnosis, it's a specific, counterintuitive research finding about the cure. Turning notifications off entirely doesn't reliably help, and in at least one well-designed study, it made things worse. Understanding why is the difference between a real fix and a plausible-sounding one.

"Alarm fatigue" predates the smartphone by decades, documented in hospitals, nuclear plants, and other high-stakes monitoring environments where alerts fire constantly. The term entered widespread clinical use following Joint Commission investigations into sentinel events, serious incidents where staff had silenced or ignored alarms that were generating false positives at a high rate, sometimes with fatal consequences.

The electronic health record era gave it a second name and a second wind: "alert fatigue." EHR systems added medication reminders, drug interaction flags, and documentation prompts on top of bedside monitors, all competing for the same attention. Today, the average hospital physician receives more than 180 EHR alerts a day, and overrides more than 95% of the low-priority ones. That override rate isn't laziness. It's the predictable output of a system that cried wolf too many times.

Estimates vary a lot depending on age and methodology, which is itself worth noting before citing any single number as gospel. The average US smartphone user reportedly receives around 46 push notifications a day. Gen Z users report a much higher figure, around 181 a day, close to one every 8 minutes of waking time. Separate research puts daily phone checks as high as 186 times, and finds 76% of employees respond to a notification within five minutes of receiving it.

The anxiety side of this tracks closely with what shows up on the nomophobia page: a meaningful share of men and women report real anxiety when separated from their phone at all, not just when a specific notification is missed.

Gloria Mark's research puts a specific number on what an interruption actually costs: an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully return to the original task, and workers typically complete two other tasks in between before getting back to it. That's not a rough estimate of feeling scattered. It's a measured recovery time.

Sophie Leroy's 2009 research gave the underlying mechanism a name: attention residue. When you're pulled away from a task, your brain doesn't cleanly pause and resume. Cognitive resources stay partially allocated to whatever you were doing before, which is part of why a "quick check" rarely stays quick in its actual cost, even when the check itself takes ten seconds.

Mark's more recent research adds an uncomfortable detail: you're doing a lot of this to yourself. People now switch tasks roughly every 3 minutes on a screen, and nearly half of those switches are self-initiated, meaning no notification fired at all. The phone didn't demand the interruption. The habit did.

A 2019 study by Fitz and colleagues, published in Computers in Human Behavior, ran a randomized field experiment with 237 participants to test what actually helps. One group had notifications batched into three deliveries a day. Another had them batched hourly. A third had notifications turned off entirely.

Batching three times a day produced the best results by a clear margin: participants reported feeling more attentive, more productive, in a better mood, and more in control of their phone, with lower stress than the control group. Hourly batching barely moved the needle compared to normal, unbatched notifications.

The real surprise was the "notifications off" group. They reported higher anxiety and higher FOMO than the batched group, not lower. The researchers pointed to inattention and phone-related fear of missing out as the likely mechanism: silence doesn't resolve uncertainty about what might be waiting. It just removes the information you'd need to stop wondering.

It's worth being precise about what that "notifications off" group actually experienced, because it matters for what Fella does differently. Their apps were silent, but still fully installed, fully open, and fully reachable all day. Nothing had actually changed about their access. The only thing missing was the alert telling them something had happened, which left the uncertainty completely intact: still no notification, still no idea what's accumulating, still a fully open door the whole time.

That's a meaningfully different setup than blocking the app entirely. Fella doesn't ask you to mute a wide-open app and hope the silence feels like relief. It removes the app's availability by default and replaces the ambiguity with one specific, guaranteed resolution point: a 5-minute unlock, once a day, that you know is coming. That's structurally closer to what made batching work, a predictable, resolved moment to check, than to the silent-but-open condition that made people more anxious.

If nearly half of all interruptions are self-initiated, then reducing incoming notifications only ever solves half the equation. The other half is the habit of checking without being prompted at all, the same impulse a closed loop or a resumption urge can trigger with no external alert involved.

A default block addresses both sources at once, by removing the same thing either way: the app being available to open. It doesn't matter whether the next check would have been triggered by a badge or by pure habit. If the app is blocked, neither one gets to happen, and the one 5-minute unlock a day is the single, deliberate exception to that, not a rolling invitation.