How I Cured My Phone Anxiety using the Notification Settings
A surprising source of the millennial phone-call anxiety
I was tired of hearing a bleep every time someone posted something on Instagram, or a bleep every time someone knows someone I may know on Snapchat, even though I haven’t used Snapchat in years. I could feel my shoulder tense up as one bleep after the other came in.
My phone would just bleep over and over and over again and I’d be left with 50+ notifications from so many different apps. The messages I actually cared about were lost in the sea of pop-ups, and messages from my friends were missed because I was always muting my phone.
So, I decided to sit down, scroll through my apps turn off the notification authorization for most of the applications, and make conscious decisions about which notification types were still allowed for the remaining apps.
Here are a few examples:
- Instragam is turned off all the way
- WhatsApp is still authorized completely
- Medium can give me a badge and a pop-up but without sound
- The Wallstreet Journal gets only a pop-up
The general trend in the decisions was that news apps could show up but not attract my attention with a sound, any apps that were…
