Simply Having Your Smartphone Around Is Draining Your Brain Capacity

Digital technology is integrated into our lives—arguably, to a fault. On one hand, our ability to connect to others and access information at any given moment offers new opportunities for our work life, relationships, health, and more. 

On the other hand, the long-term effects of being constantly "dialed in" to infinite information and technology haven't been revealed yet. Dealing with constant stimuli has ushered in an unprecedented attention crisis that can also affect our jobs, relationships, and health in a negative way.

Our brain is only able to retain a certain amount of information at any particular moment—this is called our "cognitive capacity." Different cognitive tasks require different amounts of our brain's cognitive capacity. 

Our cognitive abilities and restraints are determined by the availability of our attentional resources—such as working memory (i.e., the amount of information we can mentally hold at any given time) and fluid intelligence (i.e., the ability to solve new problems). 

Say you're sitting in front of your computer, putting together a presentation for your meeting later that week. This task obviously requires quite a bit of your cognitive capacity—you have to include data, provide analysis, and package it in an aesthetically pleasing way. 

There's no reason to touch (or even think about) your phone as you're completing this task. And yet, a 2017 scientific review from the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research suggests that the mere presence of your smartphone in your workspace can distract you from your presentation and limit your attentional resources—even if you're not actively thinking about your phone or phone-related tasks.

After conducting two separate experiments to see just how smartphones affect cognitive performance, researchers determined that simply having a smartphone nearby while you're trying to focus on a task may reduce cognitive capacity, regardless of whether or not you're interacting with it or receiving notifications.

If you're the type of person who's constantly using (or thinking about using) your phone, it might be smart to leave it in a different location while you knock out your to-do list. Trust me, once you start leaving your phone in other rooms while you work on other tasks, you won't even miss it! 

Technology is great, but having our smartphones around when we aren't using them can be seriously distracting (and detrimental to our cognitive performance!). The next time you really need to focus, consider moving your phone out of your line of sight—or even better, out of the room entirely!