Fear of Phone Calls

The numbers have been moving for decades. In 1993 it was reported that about 2.5 million people in Great Britain had it. A 2019 survey of UK office workers found anxious thoughts on hearing the phone ring in 40 per cent of baby boomers and 70 per cent of millennials, and 61 per cent of millennial respondents said they would show physical anxiety-induced behaviour when alone in the office and the phone rang. The severity runs across a wide range, and the milder end has its own name, telephone apprehension, for anxiety about telephone use that falls short of a phobia.

The distinguishing detail is that face-to-face conversation is often untouched. Many sufferers have no difficulty at all in person.

What makes an incoming call hard

Fear of receiving calls can attach anywhere between the ring itself and the act of answering. The ring alone can start the sequence, since it announces that speaking, performing and conversing are about to be required. The other end may be perceived as threatening or intimidating, and the anxiety can be about who is calling and why: bad news, upsetting news, a prank.

What makes an outgoing call hard

Making a call raises different problems:

• finding an appropriate time to ring, and the fear of being a nuisance by choosing wrong
• calling a household or office where several people are known, and failing to recognise which one has picked up
• performing in front of an audience at the caller's own end, which is the difficulty for anyone required to use a phone at work with colleagues within earshot

What the medium takes away

Fears attached to using a phone at all, in either direction, tend to be about the channel. Sound quality may be poor. One party may not understand the other, which means misunderstanding, repetition, further explanation, or some other awkward negotiation. Body language is absent, and with it the ordinary means of telling how a conversation is going, which registers as a loss of control. The limited duration adds pressure of its own, and what sufferers typically report fearing is failing to respond appropriately or running out of anything to say, ending in silence or stuttering. Past experience feeds all of this, particularly a call that brought traumatic news or an unpleasant and angry one.

The physical symptoms are the standard anxiety set: nervous stomach, sweaty palms, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, nausea, dry mouth, trembling, and at the far end panic, terror, dread, hyperventilation. Thinking about a call produces them as reliably as making one.

What it costs and what people do instead

The phone remains the route to a great many services, so the avoidance is expensive. The same object is the one nomophobia cannot be parted from. Events go unscheduled, information goes unclarified, and careers that depend on phone use come under strain.

The coping strategies are mostly preparation. Planning the conversation in advance, rehearsing it, writing down what needs to be said. Privacy helps, since it removes the worry about being overheard. The avoidance strategies are delegation and substitution: asking a relative to take calls, relying entirely on the answering machine, and moving to text-based channels wherever possible. That last one has changed the landscape. Email, internet and text messaging have given sufferers alternatives that feel considerably less stressful, and a younger generation raised on digital communication increasingly describes calls themselves as intrusive, preferring media that let them join a conversation at a pace they choose. A spokesperson for the price comparison service Uswitch, which ran the 2024 survey, put the preference in terms of low-pressure voice notes that signal less urgency about replying.

Explaining the phobia to friends is recommended for a specific reason: so that unanswered messages are not read as rudeness or unwillingness to talk.

How people work back up to calls

The usual therapies apply, cognitive behavioural therapy, psychotherapy, behaviour therapy and exposure therapy, and practice does much of the work. Increasing phone use slowly is the method: automated calls first, then conversations with family and friends, then longer conversations and a wider range of people to have them with.