How to Snooze Pavlovian Anxiety

Takeaway: Rotate your phone’s chimes to temporarily relieve anxious reactions¹. Useful for unavoidable phone notifications, like work email/chat or tough social situations.

We may create strong associations with mobile notification chimes. This can be a good thing, but it’s useful to be mindful of them regardless. Two examples from my life:

Personal

A decade back I was smitten in a new relationship and assigned her number its own unique notification chime. With that, every text message delivered an oxytocin boost before I could even pick up my phone to read it. It was great! That is, ‘great’ until we split. I dwelled in the dumps longer than I needed to partly because of my association with that chime. See, while the sound was unique on my contacts list, it was still a standard option on Samsung devices. Every time I heard the chime – on the metro, in the office, on TV – that oxytocin boost scraped against reality and threw me into dizzy misery.

Professional

My field is notorious for unexpected late hours and, over time, I began reacting to a specific pattern. When Slack follows a new email by only a few seconds, a new ransomware attack has started and we need to launch a cyber response. That can mean scrambling within an hour – sometimes literally minutes – no matter what time. Eventually, I found that my reaction kicked in even when the pattern did not actually intrude on my personal life. For example, when colleagues are on-call; or during normal business hours; or when the pattern chimed off by complete coincidence. My association with the pattern became an intrusive scourge in and of itself.

I found that rotating notification chimes takes the edge off for both situations.

• For work, I rotate my email and Slack sounds once or twice a year.
• For personal messages, everyone gets the same notification sound. If a conversation begins causing undue stress, I swap in a new chime for everyone all at once.

My guess is that rotating these chimes blunts corrosive associations that might build up in our heads.