Psychology says people who keep their phone on silent all the time aren’t being rude or antisocial

There’s a moment I remember clearly. I was sitting at dinner with my wife and daughter, and my phone buzzed. It was nothing important. A notification from an app I barely used. But my hand moved toward it instinctively, and my daughter’s eyes followed my hand, and something about that sequence made me feel genuinely ashamed.

That night I put my phone on silent. Not for the evening. Permanently. That was over a year ago, and I haven’t turned the ringer back on. And the thing I’ve noticed since then isn’t that I miss things. It’s that the mental noise I didn’t even know was there has gone quiet, and the difference is so significant that I can’t believe I lived with it as long as I did.

The Cognitive Tax You Don’t Know You’re Paying

In 2017, researchers at the University…