Researchers from the University of Florida say, regardless of you pick up your phone or not, just hearing you phone’s ringer or feeling your phone’s vibrations can be distracting.

In a study, consisted of 212 undergraduates, the Florida team sort to figure out if it’s actually phones or the anticipation of being contacted that was the most distracting.

Obvi, it was the second option.

In the test, some students put their phones on silent while others put them on vibrate, or turned the ringer on.

People’s whose phones were silent were more focussed than those who could hear their notifications going off, but didn’t answer them.

Those who picked up their phones were eliminated from the data collection because, for the purpose of the study, the researchers were only interested in participants who genuinely tried to ignore their phones.

Of those left, the results showed even the students who made an honest effort to not touch their vibrating or ringing phones still became more distracted than those whose phones were kept on silent

The authors of the study wrote,

Our results suggest that mobile phones can disrupt attention performance even if one does not interact with the device. As mobile phones become integrated into more and more tasks, it may become increasingly difficult for people to set their phones aside and concentrate fully on the task at hand, whatever it may be.

Moral of the story, if your morning routine doesn’t include checking Insta, Twitter, Facebook, and SnapChat, then you’re doing something wrong.

So don’t listen to anyone who tells you to stop checking your phone, because it’s just the new human nature.