How to turn off notifications on iPhone (and keep the ones that matter)

Why every notification pulls you back to your phone

A lot of the times you pick up your phone, you didn’t decide to: a notification asked you to. In a 2014 study presented at the MobileHCI conference, researchers logged every notification 15 people received for a week. They got 63.5 a day on average, mostly from messaging apps and email. They usually looked within minutes, even with the phone on silent, and more email and social notifications went along with more negative emotions.

You don’t even need to open them to lose focus. In a 2015 experiment published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, people who got a call or a text during an attention task made more mistakes than those who got nothing, even if they never picked up the phone.

The interesting part is what happened when someone changed the timing. In a study by Fitz, Kushlev, Ariely and colleagues (Computers in Human Behavior, 2019), more than 200 people spent two weeks on one of four schedules: normal notifications, batched hourly, batched three times a day (9am, 3pm and 9pm), or none at all. The three-times-a-day group felt more attentive, more productive and less stressed, and unlocked their phones less. Turning notifications off entirely did no better than the control group and raised anxiety: people worried about missing out.

The takeaway: you don’t need to switch your phone off. You need to decide what can interrupt you right away and what can wait for a set time.

Before you change anything: a 5-minute audit

Open Settings › Notifications and go through the list of apps. Put each one in one of three piles:

• People writing to you. Messages, WhatsApp, calls. These keep instant alerts, though you can mute noisy group chats inside each app.
• Things that need action now. Your bank when you pay, verification codes, your calendar, a delivery at the door. Also instant.
• Everything else. Likes, “you might like”, sales, news, games, reminders to come back to the app. This is usually most of the list: turn them off or send them to the summary.

A quick test: if a notification exists to get you to open the app rather than to tell you something you need, it goes in the third pile.

How to turn off notifications for an app on iPhone

From Settings

1. Open Settings › Notifications.
2. Scroll to the list of apps and tap the one you want to quiet.
3. Turn off Allow Notifications. If you’d rather not kill it completely, the same screen lets you turn off just sounds or badges (the red number on the icon), or choose where alerts show up: Lock Screen, Notification Center or banners.

From the notification itself

When a pushy app pings you, swipe left on the notification and tap Options. You’ll see Mute for 1 Hour, Mute for Today, View Settings and Turn Off. It’s the fastest way to clean up as you go: every time something interrupts you for no good reason, turn it off right there.

Many apps also have their own notification settings, finer-grained than iOS (for example, alerting you to direct messages but not likes). It’s worth opening your social apps’ settings once and switching off everything that isn’t from a person.

Batch the rest with Scheduled Summary

Scheduled Summary is the closest thing your iPhone has to the study’s “three times a day” group. Apps you add stop alerting you in the moment, and their notifications arrive together at the times you pick.

1. Go to Settings › Notifications › Scheduled Summary and turn it on. The first time, tap Continue.
2. Choose the apps to include: the third-pile apps you didn’t turn off (news, shopping, social, games).
3. Set the times. Two or three a day is usually enough, for example 1pm and 8pm. You can add more.
4. Finish setup to turn the summary on.

You can also send a single app to the summary from its own screen in Settings › Notifications, by choosing scheduled delivery instead of immediate delivery.

Don’t put apps in the summary if they alert you to something you need to do at a specific time (alarms, calendar, reminders you care about): they’d arrive late.

Tidy up your Lock Screen

Every time you check the time, your Lock Screen shows you what’s waiting inside. Two settings in Settings › Notifications make it less tempting:

• Display As. Choose Count and you’ll only see how many notifications you have, not what they say. The other options are Stack and List. You can also switch by pinching the notifications on the Lock Screen.
• Show Previews. Set it to When Unlocked or Never, and a message can’t hook you from the Lock Screen. Each app can override this.

For the moments that matter: Focus and priority notifications

Everything above sorts out the whole day. For specific stretches (work, study, dinner, sleep), a Focus silences everything except the people and apps you allow, and it can switch on by schedule. You create one in Settings › Focus; there’s a full walkthrough in how to not get distracted by your phone while studying.

If your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, Settings › Notifications also has Summarize Notifications, which condenses long or grouped alerts, and Prioritize Notifications, which moves the ones that look most urgent to the top of Notification Center. They help you read faster, but they don’t cut how often you’re interrupted: the steps above do that.

If you’re on Android

Same idea. On most Android phones, go to Settings › Notifications › App notifications, tap the app and turn off all its notifications or just some categories (Android lets you keep messages and drop promotions from the same app, for example). You can also touch and hold a notification and tap Settings to jump straight there.

Some versions also let you allow notification snoozing, and have Notification cooldown, which lowers sounds and pop-ups when lots of notifications arrive in a short time. Exact names vary by manufacturer.