Nobody decides to check their phone. It’s a habit.

By Unplug · Published 6 November 2026 · 5 min read

You unlock your phone to check the time. Ten minutes later you are still scrolling, and you could not say what you were looking for.

Why do you pick it up without deciding?

Researchers call it a checking habit: a quick look at something that is easy to reach. It is not a session. It is a glance.

In one study of how people use smartphones, a typical check lasted less than 30 seconds. You unlock the screen and open one app. The researchers were surprised to find people checking all through the waking day, and a sizable share of phone use was nothing but checks. (press release, paper)

That data is old, from Finland and the USA, and the paper came out in 2011. It tells you how the habit works, not how many times you do it today.

Why is it so hard to stop?

Because a habit does not wait for you to decide. A cue shows up, like boredom, a gap in the day or a buzz, and your thumb is already moving.

One of the authors put it this way: habits are automatically triggered behaviors, and “habits are not easy to change.” (press release)

That is why willpower alone tends to disappoint. The useful question is not “how do I resist?” but “what is setting this off?”

Do notifications make it worse?

Possibly. In an experiment with 221 students, each person spent one week with alerts on and the phone within reach, and another week with alerts off and the phone away. They reported more inattention and hyperactivity symptoms in the alerts-on week. (Kushlev et al., 2016, university summary)

Those are everyday attention symptoms, self-reported, in students. The lead author said the results do not show that phones cause ADHD.

Turning everything off is not obviously the best answer either. In a two-week experiment with over 200 people in India, batching alerts three times a day (9am, 3pm, 9pm) left people happier, more productive, less stressed and more attentive than usual. Hourly batching changed nothing. Turning alerts off completely made people more anxious. All of it was self-reported. (Fitz et al., 2019, authors' summary)

Does making it a little harder help?

It looks promising. A free app called one sec adds a 10-second pause when you open an app you picked, and lets you back out.

Of the 280 people who used it for six weeks, opening those apps fell by 57%. Backing out was the strongest part. The pause helped too. (Grüning et al., 2023, full text)

Read that with care. These were volunteers who chose to install it, there was no comparison group, and one of the authors made the app.

Does it help to leave the phone in another room?

Maybe, but not for the reason you may have read. A 2017 study claimed that just having your phone nearby uses up some of your mental capacity. (Ward et al., 2017)

When other researchers repeated it with a pre-registered plan, they found no difference between a phone on the desk, in a bag or in another room. (Ruiz Pardo & Minda, 2022)

So we cannot say a nearby phone drains you. A phone out of reach may still help because it adds a step before you check. That is our reasoning, not a finding.

What about at night?

In a survey of 844 adults in Flanders, texting or calling after lights out went with worse sleep. It was a survey, so it shows a link, not a cause. (Exelmans & Van den Bulck, 2016)

What to try

Pick one or two, not all five. Nothing here is rock solid, and we tag each idea honestly.

• Batch your alerts. Let only the important ones through, and read the rest at set times. Evidence: mixed
• Put a pause in front of your autopilot apps. A pause or a tap-to-confirm before the one or two apps you open without thinking. Evidence: mixed
• Charge the phone outside the bedroom. Bedtime use goes with worse sleep, though that does not prove cause. Evidence: mixed
• Keep the phone out of reach when you need to focus. Another room, a bag, a drawer. The “mere presence” effect did not replicate, so do it for the extra step, not for brain drain. Evidence: just common sense
• Notice the moment you reach for it. Ask what you were about to look for. If there is no answer, put it down. Evidence: just common sense

What we don’t know

We did not find long studies of these tricks on ordinary adults. Most of what is above ran for one to six weeks, with students or volunteers, and relied on people reporting how they felt.

We also left out the popular claim about how many times a day people check their phones. We could not trace a number back to the paper.

None of this promises you a result. Try something for a couple of weeks and see how you feel.

Who wrote this

We make Unplug, a minimalist Android launcher and app blocker. Nothing above shows that any app works, and this article is not evidence for our product.

Sources checked on 6 November 2026.

Sources

1. Oulasvirta, A., Rattenbury, T., Ma, L., & Raita, E. (2012). Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(1), 105-114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-011-0412-2. The under-30-seconds detail is quoted from the press release.
2. Kushlev, K., Proulx, J., & Dunn, E. W. (2016). “Silence Your Phones”: Smartphone Notifications Increase Inattention and Hyperactivity Symptoms. CHI 2016, 1011-1020. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858359. Design and quotes from the University of Virginia news page.
3. Fitz, N., Kushlev, K., Jagannathan, R., Lewis, T., Paliwal, D., & Ariely, D. (2019). Batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being. Computers in Human Behavior, 101, 84-94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.07.016. Design and results from the authors’ summary.
4. Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. PNAS, 120(8), e2213114120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2213114120. Full text: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9974409
5. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140-154. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462
6. Ruiz Pardo, A., & Minda, J. P. (2022). Reexamining the “brain drain” effect: A replication of Ward et al. (2017). Acta Psychologica, 230, 103717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103717
7. Exelmans, L., & Van den Bulck, J. (2016). Bedtime mobile phone use and sleep in adults. Social Science & Medicine, 148, 93-101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.11.037