Are we freezing out the phone call?
On the rise of phone call anxiety and the wonders to be gained from overcoming it
“Please call to make a booking” is a request I rarely get as a woman who mostly frequents middle-of-the-road dinner spots and holidays in Airbnbs. Scrolling through the website of a quaint B&B in Yorkshire I wanted to book, my heart sunk a little when I realised I was going to have to phone up.
There’s just something so clean about booking something with a few clicks of a buttons, isn’t there? In 30 seconds flat in between tasks at work, it’s ticked it off my to-do list. And usually, can be cancelled with the same ease.
So with (almost) all we’ll ever need a click of a button away, are we inadvertently freezing out the phone call? Research shows that 76% of millennial UK office workers and 40% of baby boomers have anxious thoughts when their phone rings and because of this, 61% of millennials will completely avoid calls.
Maybe that’s why ringing up to book this Bed & Breakfast feels so alien to me. Once the nice Yorkshireman who picked up the phone asked for the necessary information, he wanted to chat. What was I in Yorkshire for? What kind of thing was I looking to do? Have I been before? Will I have a car with me? When the conversation ended, I hung up with a B&B booking secured, a detailed mental map of where we’d be staying and three recommendations of places to eat. This, I thought, is the sort of gold dust you get from a good phone conversation.
I think about my tendency to choose a click of a button over real-life phone conversation. Among my friends, I often send out headline news via text. New job! Bad day! On holiday! We decorated! Sorry, too busy to catch up! Miss you! It’s an edited snapshot but never the full picture. What is really missing in between our WhatsApp exchanges are the bits in middle, the context. The fact that with everything in life there are good parts and bad parts and a lot more in between.
Phone conversations give us that. They are messy and meandering, free-flowing and agendaless. Sometimes there are awkward pauses and questions you didn’t expect. But within that meandering middle ground we pick up nuggets of information that might appear insignificant but always tell us something. Maybe something our friends haven’t processed yet and need to talk through, maybe a sense of hesitancy or concern from their voice. And surely this – the stuff below the headlines - is where deeper connections are made, and our friendships thrive.
“You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” says Sherry Turkle psychologist and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other in an interview with The Atlantic. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”
It seems to me we tend to opt for the most scripted option available to us. We can tinker with emails but work calls require raw, unedited conversation. Among friends and family, we can re-record voice notes or delete WhatsApps whereas a live phone call might surprise you with a reaction or new direction. If we continue to choose curated conversation, will we miss out on the magic? It certainly limits the conversations I’m having.
Because almost all my interactions with friends are on voice notes or texts and so often, I’m answering them with divided attention. I see a message pop up in between work, while cooking dinner or reading and I’ll quickly reply. I wonder whether, because we aren’t setting aside time for conversation, friendships based on headline news shared on WhatsApp and the odd voice note will begin to lack depth. A 30-minute phone call, at least, requires us to set aside time to focus and give our undivided attention.
I’m reminded of Cal Newport’s theory on ‘deep work.’ He talks about context-shifting in the context of the workplace. It’s where we’re constantly moving our attention from one thing to the other and he explains that it’s ‘expensive’ for our brains as it struggles to respond to each demand. He calls that ‘shallow work.’
I imagine our brain behaves the same when it comes to the conversations we have. When I open WhatsApp and quickly read updates from peoples’ lives, I can feel that my mind isn’t able to focus properly, to really think about the person at the other end of that message and illicit empathy or share in their joy.
When we are flitting between one chat and another, one friend and another, we are constantly context-shifting. We don’t give that person the attention we would if we had one voice to listen to, one person talking to us on the phone.
Cal argues that ‘deep work’, where we have time without distraction to focus, is the type of work that we need to protect and prioritise. In relation to the conversations we’re having, this is when you’re giving your brain the space and time to immerse yourself in it - to really understand what that person’s life is like right now. That’s when we have the headspace to ask meaningful questions and give thoughtful answers. Just like that friendly Yorkshireman who reminded me why phone calls need a revival.
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I avoid phone calls where at all possible, but because, like you say, I’d have to set aside time to give my undivided attention to that person.
Time I usually don’t have. It’s sad really.
I remember as a child using the house phone to call my friends and chat, even though we’d spent all day together at school. Obviously I’d have to speak to their parents first and ask if my friend was in 🤯. It still baffles my children that mobile phones weren’t invented when I was their age 🤣