What is ringxiety or phantom ringing?
For some people, it is not the vibrations, but the ringtone of their mobile phones that they imagine hearing, hence the name, phantom ringing.
The man who coined this word, David J. Laramie, was also, incidentally, the first scholar to formally record this phenomenon
I was numb in my room, reading a newspaper while recovering from Covid-19 when my phone finally started vibrating. But was it, really?
After expecting a phone call for close to two hours, which were spent looking at my phone every fifteen minutes to check if there were any phone calls, I almost gave up. Just when I was falling asleep from boredom, I thought I heard my phone vibrate faintly and then ring. The subsequent tragedy that unfolded was two-fold: it wasn’t a phone call that got my phone vibrating; in fact, my phone was not vibrating at all. The vibrations, if any, were all in my head.
Scientists and researchers like to call these false auditory sensations phantom vibrations – an ugly trick that our minds play at us every now and then, and we start hallucinating our cell phones buzzing. After somehow surviving a never-ending pandemic, whose enduring legacy is as much psychological as it is physiological, I was least surprised at catching myself hearing spooky, otherworldly, non-existent noises.
What is ringxiety or phantom ringing?
For some people, it is not the vibrations, but the ringtone of their mobile phones that they imagine hearing, hence the name, phantom ringing. According to a 2018 study published in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, phantom background sensations like phantom vibration (PV) and phantom ringing (PR) – the sensations of vibration and ringing of the phone when they are not, respectively – are among the latest in the category of “techno-pathology” to receive global attention. Both of these syndromes are fairly common – a research suggests that nine of 10 mobile phone users suffer from them – and briefly, they were clubbed together into ‘ringxiety’, a portmanteau that blends ringer with anxiety.
The man who coined this word, David J. Laramie, was also, incidentally, the first scholar to formally record this phenomenon. In the summer of 2007, he submitted his dissertation to the California School of Professional Psychology, in which as many as two-thirds of 320 adult mobile-phone users, in an online survey, reported that they had heard their mobiles ringing when it had not. For many Gen Zs and young adults, it is the first time in their young lives that they’re having a brush with ringxiety.
Wajiha Haider was in Bangalore, working from home for Qatar-based ed-tech start-up Wise, when she got her first phantom ring. It was March of 2021, the deadly second wave of Covid-19 had again pushed everyone behind the doors, and work from home was now very much a thing. From dawn to dusk, the twenty-two year old marketing manager was glued to screens, mobiles as well as laptops, and rarely stepped outside the dizzy world of the internet.
“So I was in the kitchen, okay,” she told me, over a half-an-hour-long call, “my phone was with me only, I was looking for a recipe on YouTube, so I was sure it was not my phone vibrating.”
She shared her rental apartment in Bangalore with her co-worker at Wise. She knocked on her door, annoyed, and recalled telling her, “Your phone is ringing. Come on, pick it up or either cut it. It’s annoying.” Of course, nobody’s phone was ringing.
Her roommate later told her that she must be on the cusp of a spiritual awakening because, according to her, that is when humans feel a lot of vibrations. Wajiha didn’t give it much thought, but the spooky vibrations never stopped.
“They come out in very, very weird places,” she told me, “you’re around a bunch of people, and you start saying, somebody’s phone’s ringing, somebody’s phone’s ringing, and of course, nobody’s phone’s ringing. I feel ridiculed.”
Lately, along with other people’s mobiles in her vicinity, she has also started hallucinating her own phone vibrating, sometimes twice or thrice a day. I asked her how these regular phantom vibrations make her feel, to which she first chuckled, and then replied, sheepishly, “I ignore most of them. I’m like, maybe, you know, I’m just paranoid or something.”
What causes phantom ringing, as per experts?
This business of hearing imaginary noises, however, is not wholly unnatural. New mothers imagine their babies crying and check on them when in fact the babies are actually asleep. And who on earth has ever walked on a lonely, dark, cobbled street and not thought they’ve heard unworldly, creepy noises?
Or as Adarsh Tripathi, assistant professor from the psychiatry department of Lucknow’s King George’s Medical University (KGMU), explained it to me, “If you’re walking in a calm corridor, you expect insects, and then probably even if there is nothing, your mind starts perceiving
noises that insects make.”
“So people who are engaged in their mobiles, maybe expecting a call or a text or a Facebook like,” Tripathi further explained, “they at times feel that there is a vibration or their cell-phone is ringing.”
In the scarce number of studies we have on phantom vibration syndrome, most participants say that they don’t find it much bothersome. In my teeny-tiny, very unscientific, personal sample of people hallucinating their phones buzzing; again, nobody has yet found it problematic enough to mention it to a medical professional.
But a few studies – you can count them on the toes of your feet – hint at the possible adverse effects that ringxiety can cause. For starters, a study published in the Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal noted in its abstract that phantom rings might cause discomfort or loss of concentration during driving. Phantom ringing is a Covid-19 side-effect as well, according to a May 2022 clinical study.
Last year, in the month of November, a twenty-one-year-old accountant Rupesh Mishra, who, by his own admission, gets up to ten phantom rings a day, indeed lost control of the steering wheel. On a wintry morning, he was driving a maroon Honda City ZX on Old National Highway 1, en route to Delhi from Kurukshetra, when he felt, in his pocket, his phone vibrating.
“I had not informed my father that I was going to Delhi to pick up my elder brother from the airport, so I took my phone out, unlocked it, thinking he’d be the one calling,” Rupesh recalled, “but there was nothing, no one,” But when he raised his eyes from his phone, he found himself – and his car – on the verge of a collision with a heavy-duty truck.
“It was one of those huge, scary trucks with 36 tires. I somehow escaped what could have been a savage accident,” he told me, over an hour-long phone conversation.
What was his takeaway, I asked. “I have now grown accustomed to these vibrations,” he said, half-laughing, “whenever I get them while driving, I try my best to ignore them. I know – most probably – they’re fake.”
Is phantom ringing a serious disorder?
So are phantom vibrations a cause for concern? Is it a disorder? Adarsh Tripathi, assistant professor at KGMU, had an interesting answer: One single phenomenon does not amount to normalcy or pathology.
“Phantom ringing is closely linked to excessive mobile phone use,” he explained, “and nowadays doctors understand it as addiction.”
“As a doctor, what we are looking for in an individual who is coming to us for help is the overall impact the thing is doing on the person. The diagnosis is made in terms of the patient's mobile phone use pattern. Is it a pathological use pattern? Is it some overuse pattern? Or is it within the normal range?” he explained.
So if I get a phantom ring once in a while, I asked Tripathi, with a little hesitation, should I be thinking I am going nuts? “No,” he replied, “unless there are things involved.”
By other things involved, Tripathi meant that phantom ringing, along with excessive mobile phone usage, becomes problematic if it starts affecting the person’s mental and physical health, and their social functioning and personal relationships.
With second-generation social entrepreneur Shrey Saxena, who runs a company that converts waste into biofuel, that was happening. Shrey was perpetually distracted at work as he always felt something was vibrating. He blocked all the notifications on his phone, but that didn’t help much until he stopped keeping his phone on vibration mode.
The frequency with which phantom ringing used to happen drastically – and instantly – dipped.
“I also stopped using my personal phone at work and removed all social media apps from my office phone,” he told me, over the phone. “Now if you’d ask me when it happened last, I can’t even recall,” Shrey said, sounding victorious.
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Anup Semwal
Anup Semwal writes at the intersection of technology and society. He is currently pursuing Convergent Journalism from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia View Full Profile
