Phone Notification Overload

I turned off all push notifications on my phone except calls and text messages for a week as an experiment. The most surprising result wasn't that I felt calmer but that I didn't miss anything important. Every app had been sending notifications that felt urgent in the moment but turned out to be entirely optional: sale alerts, social media likes, news updates, and weather warnings for cities I don't live in. The phone went from buzzing 40 or 50 times a day to buzzing maybe 8 times. By the end of the week, I had stopped reaching for it reflexively.