A message arrives. You have not read it, you do not know who it is from, you do not know whether it matters. And already it is harder to return to what you were doing three seconds ago. Ana Asensio, a psychologist with a doctorate in neuroscience, puts it without any drama: "Notifications may look like something very small, but for our brain they are not always small."

The issue is not the message, but what comes before it. "The brain enters a dynamic of constant interruption and anticipation", she says. Every ping opens a blank that demands closing, and until it is closed, part of your attention stays stuck there. Gather ten of those blanks in one afternoon and you no longer finish anything.

The second part is more social than technological. Many people believe they have to reply instantly, as if receiving carried an obligation. Asensio demolishes that with a sentence plenty of people should read twice: "Receiving a message does not mean you have to reply immediately." And more bluntly still: "We can love someone very much and reply to them three hours later or the next day."

Here is the real knot. Response time has become a measure of how much you care about someone, though it measures nothing of the kind. "I am not available right now" does not mean "I do not care about you", the psychologist says, but that is exactly the translation people perform on themselves while they wait.

The suggestions require no new app and no digital detox up a mountain. Switch off the notifications you do not need. Agree on one channel that is genuinely urgent, so you know the rest can wait. Send a short acknowledgement that you have seen it when you cannot reply straight away. And decide consciously when you are available, instead of letting somebody else's phone decide it.

Asensio's conclusion ought to hang above the screen in every office: "Technology should make communication easier for us, not make us feel permanently on call." The question is who introduced that on-call shift, if nobody ever asked for it.