You get dozens, maybe hundreds, of notifications every day. In the attention economy this is not accidental. The younger you are, the more you are likely to get. Most of them don’t matter. And at some point, you stop expecting them to. This is not uncommon. When every app tries to fight for your attention, none of them hold any importance.
When Notifications Meant Something
Just a few years ago, notifications were something meant to signal importance. Maybe a friend messaging you, your loved ones, a reminder to pick something up after work, a calendar notification that the event you were waiting for for months is finally happening tomorrow, or Netflix telling you that your favourite show now has a second season.
The fight for your attention has intensified over the last few years. Notifications were once a clever tool to draw you back into an app; now it is constant noise, a silent buzz or hum.
Once you zoom out a bit, a message from a friend, five discounts in five different apps you apparently need for shopping, a social media app that reminds you that the aunt you cut contact with years ago has finally come back to post questionable memes, a reminder to reflect on your day, all look the same. They all interrupt the same way. They all ask for the same thing: attention.
What Your Week Actually Looks Like
To make my point clearer, I collected all notifications I received across various apps and categorised them to show you what you are probably already noticing yourself.
Notifications received in one week, categorised by importance
©️ Glasscat
This is almost 1,200 notifications in one week, on average 168 per day. Most of them are meaningless, and that kind of notification fatigue is exactly the problem. Out of the 1,200 notifications, about 53 of them were somewhat important, and only 8 required fast handling.
Studies show that you get, on average, ~152 notifications per day [Dekker et al. 2024], less if you are older, more when you’re part of a younger generation. A few outliers get up to multiple hundreds to thousands of notifications per day.
Some companies are incredibly aggressive with their notifications. Research shows just how extreme this can get; and the numbers below are averages, not outliers.
Average number of notifications sent to iOS users in the United States per week
©️ Statista 2023
Notifications used to signal importance. Now they signal everything. And when everything is important, nothing is.
Why We Stopped Trusting Them
It is not that we ignore notifications. It’s that we stopped trusting them. After getting dozens of notifications from apps that are of little to no importance to you, you begin to stop trusting the well-known buzz in your pocket. They no longer tell us what matters; they just want us to come back or notify us that something of minor importance happened.
This is why, for many, especially younger generations, notifications are no longer interruptions, no longer a signal to be taken seriously; they’re just a constant, low-level noise. As I highlighted multiple times now, it’s not that all notifications are completely useless or not important, but if we get showered with them all day, the important ones might get lost in between the constant stream of useless interruptions.
And if we think about it, this could even be critical in some situations. We miss messages, social opportunities, and sometimes even important news.
The Habit Behind the Buzz
The paper “Beyond the Buzz: Investigating the Effects of a Notification-Disabling Intervention on Smartphone Behavior and Digital Well-Being” by Dekker et al. (2024) tested whether disabling notifications can reduce screen time and improve digital well-being.
Interestingly, research suggests that disabling notifications doesn’t significantly reduce screen time. You would likely expect the opposite: fewer interruptions, less time on your phone. But that’s not what happens.
The research team recruited young adults aged 18–30, as they may be particularly in need of strategies to reduce screen time. This age group shows higher levels of smartphone usage and overuse compared to older generations [De Mares et al. 2024; Saad 2022]. The study lasted 25 days and was structured into a baseline week, an intervention week (notifications disabled vs. enabled), and a post-intervention week to measure effects. Participants completed three longer surveys and short daily surveys before going to bed [Dekker et al. 2024].
The majority of participants expressed interest in reducing their screen time.
Yet the results showed close to no change in screen time compared to the baseline [Dekker et al. 2024]. The research team concluded that the lack of effects supports the idea that smartphone usage has become a form of habituation.
Rather than just disabling notifications, it appears that more action is required to improve smartphone usage and digital well-being. Other studies suggest that putting the phone out of sight has a stronger effect due to this habituation [Johannes et al. 2019; Koessmeier and Büttner 2022].
Dekker et al. conclude that while participants were highly motivated to break their habits, there were no notable effects and screen time remained largely unchanged. They also report that some participants experienced situational FoMO, suggesting that disabling notifications could even have negative effects.
A Symptom, Not the Cause
The paper by Cynthia A. Dekker and her colleagues prompted me to reflect. Could it be that notifications are no longer the primary source of distraction? They appear to be merely a symptom. We don't check our phones due to the occurrence of something significant; rather, we check them out of habit, to avoid feeling excluded, and to engage with a (digital) social environment. It seems that despite our desire to regain independence from our smartphones, the relentless buzz of notifications and the anxiety of missing out on developments in the digital realm and our social circles pulls us back into persistent screen time habits.
What We Lost
Notifications didn’t just lose their value; they also lost their function as a signal. The strategy shifted from meaning to constant presence. If we think about it, it’s no longer about notifications, it’s about how we interact with our mobile phones.
We don’t wait for signals anymore. We check our phones anyway. The system has flipped, and this is why the fight for attention has become the dominant strategy for apps. This is also what the study by Dekker et al. shows.
Maybe reducing notifications isn’t enough. The problem seems to run much deeper. Perhaps we need to reconsider attention itself and determine who or what deserves our focus.
Attention is the scarce resource, not just notifications. If everything asks for attention, attention loses direction and fades into continuous noise. Silence used to mean nothing, but today it might mean everything, replacing noise with a moment of tranquillity.
Sources
[1] Cynthia A. Dekker et al. 2024. Beyond the Buzz: Investigating the Effects of a Notification-Disabling Intervention on Smartphone Behavior and Digital Well-Being.
[2] All additional references (e.g. De Mares et al. 2024; Saad 2022; Johannes et al. 2019; Koessmeier and Büttner 2022) are cited as reported within [1].
[3] Statista. 2023. Average number of notifications sent to iOS users in the United States per week, by app (July 2023). Statista. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/1245420/us-notifications-to-social-app-ios-users/ on May 2nd, 2026
