The cognitive load of messaging vs talking on the phone

Messaging is more popular than ever, with 25 billion messages sent per day globally, according to ecoATM. It’s also evolved over the past 20 years, moving past simple text to include emojis, polls, voice notes, GIFs and more.

Whether you’re making plans, checking in or part of a thousand group chats, messaging has become the default state of communication for many people.

But has that ability to message anyone at any time become too much? Below, we’ll explore the cognitive load of messaging and whether it’s all gotten too overwhelming.

Notification onslaught

Most people get between 50 and 100 message notifications a day, according to a study from the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics, and that number can bloat to over 400 for smartphone power users in younger generations. Text messages are only a portion of those notifications.

All those notifications can trigger stress, as the interruptions can increase frustration and time pressure. Users also reported lower productivity, inattention and hyperactivity due to notifications.

However, notifications are an integral part of messaging because the communication can be asynchronous. While you can sometimes text in real time, people’s differing schedules often mean one person is busy while someone is texting them. This helps make messaging convenient but also increases our cognitive load when those messages aren’t reciprocated in real time.

Why unanswered messages can feel stressful

As The Guardian succinctly puts it: for most of human history, “people lived in small, tight-knit groups where disappearing from someone’s life wasn’t an option.” That’s because humans are social beings that need community, family and friends to grow and thrive, according to Penn Arts & Sciences researchers.

Yet messaging has made it easier than ever to disappear and not respond. While messaging may seem like an evolution of legacy forms of human communication like letters, there’s a key difference.

Physically mailed letters come with the inherent understanding that they must travel for several days, weeks or even months. If someone responds to a letter they received right away, there is still a delay in waiting for the response to arrive back to us. We understand the letter must reach the recipient, and if it doesn’t, there won’t be a response.

Text messages come with a different understanding: Most people have their phones on them all the time, so the expectation is that the text message will be seen at some point during the day. In fact, a study by Google found that anxiety waiting for a response to a text can start shortly after sending it.

One mantra that has gone viral on social media to combat this anxiety is the thought that “It takes seconds to respond to a text message,” and that if someone doesn’t respond to you in a timely manner you aren’t a priority for them and should check your investment in that relationship. Our understanding of texting when compared to letters is so different that people have come up with mantras to deal with the difference.

The Google study also found that recipients of text messages often felt pressure to respond within 20 minutes of receiving a message but became concerned with potential conflicts to responding. Those include distraction from their current task or taking away time from the people they were currently with. Because of these conflicts, people sometimes do not respond. If other stresses pile on top of these conflicts, people can then forget to respond entirely.

While anxiety can be triggered when someone doesn’t respond in a reasonable timeframe, like 24 to 48 hours, ghosting, which is when someone stops responding and disappears from someone’s life like a ghost, can be worse. In a study in the Sexuality & Culture journal, researchers found that the act of ghosting can increase anxiety, lower self-esteem, increase blood pressure, lower heart rate and hinder psychological and physiological well-being.

If you’ve been ghosted, you have likely experienced the confusion that happens. You wonder if something happened to them, or if they even got the message, or if they hated you all along and everything you experienced with them was a lie.

Even short periods of not receiving a reply can affect us negatively, according to Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. Our social brains are designed to read social cues.

Think about when you’re talking to someone in person. Imagine you say something to them and they just look away, ignoring you. You may feel a little bad, but you also can read each other’s body language and adjust in the moment. They might even apologize.

When you’re ignored with a text message, you have no context and nothing to go off of, leaving your imagination to fill in the gaps with scenarios that may not be true and may increase anxiety.

People who are ignored and don’t receive messages aren’t the only ones bearing an increased mental load from messages. People who reply often are also disadvantaged.

The flip: The pressure of replying

Knowing the impacts of not replying to people can make you feel pressured, especially when messaging platforms include features like typing indicators and read receipts, which let the other person know that you’ve either read a message or were planning a response.

A good deal of the pressure of replying is because every message notification includes decisions that need to be made: Can you read the message now? Do you read the message now? Do you respond now or later? Is there something in this message that you must take action on, like checking your schedule or committing to plans?

Doing this for dozens of messages a day gets exhausting quickly and contributes heavily to cognitive load, fatigue and emotional exhaustion, according to a study in the Journal of Erciyes Communication.

The fear of missing out (FOMO) is a strong predictor of this exhaustion and increased cognitive load, according to the study. When people are sharing gossip or group chats are bouncing with many messages, our social brains start to feel left out and ostracized if we don’t participate actively, ramping up the pressure to reply, which has its own knock-on effects.

For example, one in six people ignore messages due to overload, according to Psychology Today. A lot of that is down to emotional burnout and guilt that makes responding feel “emotionally expensive.” Ignoring messages from friends can impact your friendships, which makes empathy and communication important.

However, always remember the wise advice of Mariana Bockarova, Ph.D.: a late reply doesn’t mean a lost connection, it just means your friend or family member is trying their best.

Receiving and replying to text messages can be psychologically difficult, but unfortunately the physical act of messaging has its downsides too.

Cognitive and motor demands of messaging

You have no doubt been behind someone when driving or walking and noticed they were acting a bit odd. Maybe they were driving slower or swerving a bit. Maybe they randomly stopped in the middle of a sidewalk, impeding your walk. As you move past them you see that they’re on their phones.

Texting while walking increases cognitive and motor demands while reducing the amount of visual information people observe, according to a study in the National Library of Medicine. In fact, walking while texting affected gait performance, which includes speed, stride length, stride time and variability. The cognitive load increase was the biggest factor while visual information was the smallest.

Your brain is trying to do too much, and in the case of walking the increased load can be dangerous. For example, we’ve not only seen multiple friends walk into poles or stanchions while walking and texting, we’ve also had group members get left behind or slow down the progress of the entire group because they were texting.

Texting vs. calling

You don’t have to just rely on messaging to connect with your loved ones though. In fact, calling may help you solve or lessen some of the problems you could be experiencing with texting.

Firstly, phone calls don’t necessarily come with the stress of not being responded to. When you call someone, they’re either available to pick up or they’re not available and they don’t pick up. There’s less ambiguity for your brain to react to because you naturally understand people don’t pick up the phone if they’re not available to answer it.

Phone calls often are a bigger investment too, which means the understanding we have when we text (that it only takes a few seconds to respond) is out the window. With a phone call you know that someone is going to have to talk to you for at least a minute or two, which makes it easier for you to understand if someone doesn’t pick up.

If you’ve ever hesitated to call someone because you didn’t want to bother them, you have experienced this in reverse.

Most importantly, calling also offers something messaging can’t: the emotional richness of the human voice. The human voice can communicate 24 emotions, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While emojis and GIFs can hint at your emotions, there’s a texture to the human voice that’s difficult to replicate. Researchers found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration” in the human voice. They found that many of the emotions the voice can communicate are interconnected.

That richness is not possible in a text message. You’ve likely exchanged texts with someone that resulted in miscommunication.

One time in a family group chat, a father texted a photo of grapes at the grocery store. The mother responded “Yes,” indicating the father should buy some. The father responded, “Greed is good,” to which the mother responded, “No don’t buy too much, only a little.” The father corrected himself, saying that he meant “green is good?” He was asking if green grapes were okay to buy.

Laughter ensued, but these miscommunications can happen not just because of autocorrect but a lack of tone. Sarcasm often falls flat in text messages unless an emoji is used to make it obvious, for example.

Texting, however, is just easier. Everyone you know is just seconds away. Plus, you’re not necessarily bothering someone if you’re just texting, right? Calling them on the phone is asking too much of them!

Or, well, that’s the thinking. In reality, studies have shown that people don’t mind when someone calls them on the phone and that voice- or video-based communication created stronger bonds and didn’t increase awkwardness. People enjoy phone calls with their loved ones.

Connecting is human

Messaging is convenient and fun. It can give us quick access to everyone we love without too much effort. We can be in meetings and text, we can be in loud places and plan things, but as we’ve explored above the cognitive load of constant messaging can be exhausting.

While a phone call may seem like it would be asking too much of people, our loved ones like hearing us and all of our human emotions. Phone calls strengthen our bonds, and isn’t it just lovely to hear someone laugh on the other side of the line?