"There might be something"

A good share of reaches have a particular flavour. You aren't looking for entertainment. You're checking. Someone may have replied, or something may have happened, and there might be an email you need to know about. It would only take a second to find out, and then you could relax.

This belief deserves respect, because sometimes there is something. A friend has said yes to Saturday, or the school has rung. If there were never anything, the habit would have died out long ago.

Think, though, about how often the something arrives. Most times round the loop, there's nothing new, or nothing that matters. Now and then there's a real reward, and you can't predict which time it'll be. It happens that this is the best arrangement anyone has found for making a habit stick. It's one of the oldest findings in the study of learning. A reward that comes every time produces a habit that fades quickly when the reward stops. A reward that comes unpredictably produces a habit that carries on through long runs of nothing. The empty checks don't weaken it. They're part of the pattern that keeps it going.

A group of researchers studied this in phone use in particular. They described what they called a checking habit, a brief, repeated inspection of content that changes and that's quick to get at. In their data the habit was kept going by small informational rewards that arrived fast. They noticed two other things. Checks often led on to other use that the person hadn't intended, which is an errand or a check turning into a reach. And the people they interviewed didn't describe the habit as a craving. They described it as an annoyance.

If you've ever opened the fridge, found nothing you wanted, and opened it again ten minutes later in case something had appeared, you know the structure. The difference is that the fridge never rewards you, and the phone occasionally does.

So does checking less help, or does it just leave you anxious about what you're missing? Two experiments are useful here, and the second has a result that cuts against the easy answer.

In the first, 124 adults spent one week checking their email as often as they liked and another week limiting themselves to three times a day. In the limited week they reported lower daily stress.

In the second, 237 people had an app installed that controlled their phone notifications. One group got them as normal. One group got them in three batches a day. One group got none at all. The batch group did best. They felt more attentive, more productive, in a better mood and more in control of their phones, and they reported less stress. The group with no notifications at all got few of those gains. They felt more anxious, and more afraid of missing out.

I think that second result is worth taking seriously. It says the checking urge isn't all foolishness. People do need to know that what's important will reach them. If you cut off the information completely, the need doesn't go away. It just goes unmet, and the person feels worse. What worked was making the information arrive on a schedule the person could trust.

This suggests a split. There's a small class of things that can't wait an hour. A call from the school or a message from your partner would be in it, and whatever your job treats as urgent. There's a very large class of things that can, which is everything else. At the moment both classes come through the same checking habit, so you check eighty times to be sure of the first class. If the first class can reach you by making a noise, you don't need to go looking for it. Chapter 12 turns that into a setup.

There's an experiment you can run for one day first. Each time you check, ask afterwards whether there was anything there that needed you within the hour. Keep a count of yes and no on your scrap of paper. I don't know what your numbers will be. I'd be surprised if the yes column reached five.