Phone Anxiety: Why Don’t You Answer the Phone Anymore?

Your phone rings. A good old fashioned phone call, and the number means nothing to you. You glance at it and let it go to voicemail, because you already know what it is.

You’re usually right. Almost nobody who wants something reasonable from you calls without asking first. Friends send a message, work puts it in the calendar, and the dentist emails. An unannounced call is more likely a pitch for a warranty on a car you don’t own or a survey about your cellular service. And during election season, well, forget about it.

Your instinct is trained on evidence. U.S. consumers receive an average of 10 “robo” or spam calls per week, and the number is continuing to increase as AI-powered systems ramp up the volume.

Where this leads is to a phone call being as interesting as a car passing on the highway. And to genuine anxiety about answering the phone. A 2024 Uswitch survey of 2,000 people, reported by the BBC, found that a quarter of people aged 18 to 34 never answer the phone at all. They ignore the ringing, reply by text, or search the number online before deciding. Nearly 70% of that age group would rather get a text than a call.

Why an unknown number feels like spam

Because it likely is. More than half of the young people in that Uswitch survey said an unexpected call means bad news. “It’s either scammers or cold callers,” 26-year-old Jack Longley told the BBC. “It’s easier to just ignore the calls instead of sifting through to find out which ones are legitimate.”

Older people do the same thing. A YouGov survey published in March 2026 found that 42% of Gen Z wait for someone calling from an unknown number to speak first before they say anything. YouGov attributes it to the volume of spam. Everyone is checking whether there’s a human on the line.

Screening a phone that mostly delivers strangers who want money is a sensible thing to do. What it costs you is the practice you used to get from picking up.

What the surveys say about Gen Z and calling

That YouGov survey takes apart most of what gets said about Gen Z and phones. On the claim that they panic at an unannounced call: 13% of Gen Z say it’s unacceptable for a friend or family member to call without warning, vs 8% to 10% of every older generation saying the same. On the claim that they answer in silence: 3% do, when it’s someone they know. And 82% say they’re comfortable calling the people they love.

The difference shows up with strangers. 65% of Gen Z say calling someone they don’t know makes them uncomfortable. Comfort with making calls in general runs 67% of Boomers vs 49% of Millennials vs 33% of Gen Z.

What’s gone missing is practice at opening your mouth in front of someone you’ve never met, with no chance to draft it first.

Why a live call is harder than a text

A call asks you to hold a thought, listen, and answer, without revising or editing your words before they’re shared. You’re tracking words and tone at once with about a second to produce a sentence. Texting splits those jobs apart and gives you as long as you want for each one.

Getting into a call costs something too. Organizational psychologist Sophie Leroy showed in 2009 that when people switch from one task to another, part of their attention stays on the first task and their performance on the second one suffers. She called it attention residue. If the phone rings while you’re an hour into a scrolling binge, you answer with a piece of your attention still back where you were, making the transition to human interaction a difficult one.

Anything you stop doing regularly gets harder, and talking to strangers is no exception. Years of group chats, DMs and comment replies practice and develop habits around different skills.

Colleges and employers have noticed

Nottingham College runs coaching sessions on phone confidence and etiquette for students who find calls difficult. “Phone anxiety is something we come across regularly,” careers adviser Liz Baxter told the BBC. People sign up for that class the way they’d sign up for anything else they want to get better at.

Employers see it from the other side. George Heritage, a client services manager at Express Recruitment, told the BBC they have “definitely seen an increase in phone anxiety in recent years,” particularly since Covid, both in their own hiring and in recruiting for clients. That positions having comfort in phone conversation as a valuable skill.

Kyle Butterworth, 28, made himself practice, and said that after a few calls “you realize it’s just another human being on the other end.”

Where conversation used to happen

Watch a few minutes of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility or Bridgerton and it isn’t only the outfits that look foreign. People walked through parks and courtyards and started talking to whoever was nearby.

Regency England built rooms for it. Assembly rooms existed so people could walk in slow circles and make conversation. Paris had salons where people argued about ideas over coffee. Vienna built an identity around the coffee house, where sitting for hours over a single cup was the whole point, a tradition Austria has protected as intangible cultural heritage since 2011. Teahouses across China did the same job, a fixed place where regulars turned up daily to talk. In much of the Middle East and North Africa, the souk and the majlis were a marketplace and a sitting room built for the same unplanned mixing.

Italian towns still hold the passeggiata, an evening walk through the piazza where running into someone is the reason you went. The US had front porches, which lined nearly every street so you could sit out front on purpose and let neighbors walking by stop and talk. None of it needed planning; it was what a normal day involved. Now you clock out, drive home, and open a different screen from the one you stared at all day.

Meetups fill some of that gap. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg named the “third place” in 1989: somewhere that is neither home nor work, built for people to gather. Those places thinned out for a few decades and are being rebuilt on purpose. Run clubs, supper clubs, book clubs and board game nights are only partly about the activity. Strava’s Year in Sport report recorded a 59% rise in running club participation worldwide in 2024, and Forbes reported in August 2026 that 53% of ClassPass users aged 18 to 34 had booked a workout or a wellness class instead of going out for drinks at some point in the previous year. Forbes calls those studios third places, using Oldenburg’s term.

The case that nothing needs fixing

Not everyone agrees there’s a problem here.

Dominique Pritchett, a psychologist and organizational wellness strategist, told SUCCESS that it’s a mistake to write off Gen Z’s discomfort with calls as disinterest or laziness. “The world is telling them they’re lazy or they’re not interested,” she said, when what they’re doing is staying inside a comfort zone that a digital-first upbringing built for them. Declining a call puts a limit on what gets to interrupt you, which is a reasonable thing to have in a week that already contains too many interruptions.

Both can be true at once. Live conversation is worth keeping in working order for the moments that need it, like a work call, a first date, or a hard conversation with someone you love, and a lot of what looks like avoidance is a sane response to strangers with autodialers.

How to get the practice back

Order your coffee without headphones in, or suggest a call to one friend instead of another thread. When you’re stuck in a line, say something to the person next to you rather than scrolling until it’s your turn. A low-stakes conversation every day will get you further than one high-pressure conversation a month.

Pay attention to the transition as much as the conversation. Most of the discomfort is in the first ten seconds, when your head is still half loaded with whatever you were looking at, so a short buffer helps: the walk to the meeting room, a minute of quiet before you dial.

If you want to start

If phone anxiety doesn’t feel like a problem you need to solve, that’s fine. Plenty of people have decided the phone is for people they’ve already agreed to talk with, and the world has mostly reorganized itself around that.

If you do want the practice and you’d rather not make an event of it, skip the research phase. Find the quietest person near you and ask them one real question about something they do. A conversation with no preparation at all.

And if you need to pause some noise and get ready for a call, start a Freedom session and give yourself some distraction free time to be alone with your thoughts.