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How many times has this happened to you?
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Your phone buzzes, so you grab it and unlock the screen… but there's no notification in sight.
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You've experienced a phantom phone vibration, or what some experts call phantom vibration syndrome.
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The good news is, it's super common, and not harmful on its own.
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But how often you experience these phantom buzzes may hold clues about your mental health in general.
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Results differ from study to study, but researchers are pretty sure phantom vibrations affect a lot of people.
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Phantom ringing is also a thing, but not all studies look at both at the same time, so we're going to focus on the buzzing.
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In one of the earliest studies of the subject in 2010, they found that around 68 percent of participants experienced some kind of phantom buzz.
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This was before most people carried smartphones in their pocket, so the researchers studied medical staff who always carried phones or pagers on vibrate mode.
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In the years since then, researchers have found some factors that make you more or less likely to feel the vibrations in the first place — like a younger age, keeping your phone on vibrate, and keeping it in a breast pocket.
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But these mystery vibrations themselves don't seem to be doing any harm.
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They're more of a quirk of our normal senses.
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Phantom phone vibes are likely a false alarm in something called our signal detection system, which is exactly what it sounds like.
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Our brains receive some kind of vague stimulus, like a light touch or dull noise, and make a decision about what it means.
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In the case of a phantom phone vibrations, our brain has interpreted some other stimulus as a notification.
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That stimulus could be a familiar noise or a commonplace muscle twitch that kinda sorta maybe feels or sounds like a vibration.
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Plus, we expect to get notifications.
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And that makes our brains more likely to interpret other stimuli, or even a lack thereof, as a phone vibration.
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Getting false alarms from our signal detection system isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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But researchers have wondered if conditions like anxiety or depression might predispose us to experience false vibes more often.
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One 2013 study followed 74 medical interns over the course of a yearlong internship, and measured how often they felt phantom buzzes as well as any symptoms of anxiety and depression.
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The researchers expected the interns would feel more phantom vibrations as their stress and anxiety increased, but in the end, phantom vibes happened totally independent of the participants' anxiety.
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On the other hand, a different study in 2014 looked specifically at tech employees and found that phantom vibes were associated with job stress and burnout.
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So there's no clear answer yet.
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But if you notice yourself checking on a blank screen more often, ask yourself if you've been feeling stressed lately.
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They offer 14 languages to choose from—including French, German and Brazilian Portugese.
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