Gen Z battling with phone anxiety are taking telephobia courses to learn the lost art of a call

There was once a time when picking up a phone call was the main mode of communication, but now with endless choices available, some tech-savvy Gen Z are consumed with anxiety by the ringing of a phone.

Generation Z — born between 1997 and 2012 — are struggling with telephobia, a “relatively recent phenomena” describing people who fear phone calls, according to Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College, a U.K.-based school for pupils aged 16 to 18 and older.

“Telephobia is a fear or anxiety around making and receiving telephone calls,” Baxter told CNBC Make It in an interview.

“They’ve [Gen Z] just simply not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls. It is not the main function of their phones these days, they can do anything on the phone, but we automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill,” she explained.

Baxter said that many of the college’s older pupils are expected to take telephone interviews as a pre-screening for job applications and were “falling at that hurdle,” because they lacked the awareness and confidence of navigating a call.

“In a class of 25 to 30 students, I would imagine at least three-quarters of them will experience and admit to anxiety about not using the telephone,” she said.

The college’s telephobia seminar is part of a series of career-related sessions to help bring pupils’ phone skills back up to scratch.

The session involves practicing a series of scenarios where you have to make a phone call, for example, calling the doctors to make an appointment, calling in sick to work, and other everyday scenarios. The pupils are expected to sit back to back to mimic a regular phone call where they can’t see the person on the other end and practice by using scripts.

Baxter said attending just one session boosts pupils’ confidence because it demystifies how phone calls really work.

She said the rise of telephobia can partly be blamed on the Covid-19 pandemic, during which young people became incredibly isolated.

“If they’ve missed out two years’ worth of social interaction and ebb and flow, then that obviously plays into how they’re feeling about being in social situations [and] in larger contexts, especially when they’re feeling uncomfortable.”

Gen Z’s anxiety around responding to phone calls stems from a fear of the unknown, according to Baxter.

“They associate the ringing phone with fear,” she said. “I don’t know who’s on the end of it. I don’t know how to deal with it.”

A Uswitch survey of 2,000 U.K. adults in 2024 found that almost a quarter of 18 to 34-year-olds never pick up phone calls. Around 61% of the age group prefer to receive a message rather than an audio call.

Over half of 18-to-24-year-olds think an out-of-the-blue phone call means bad news, while 48% prefer to communicate using social media, and over a third prefer voice messages.

Gen Z are also concerned with how they sound on calls as they have no visual feedback to confirm how they’re doing, Baxter noted.

“Strangely, a lot of our students are really comfortable on Microsoft Teams because they can see the visual clues. They can read your face. They can judge your reactions. They can see how they’re doing.

“I think that plays into a large part of the anxiety when it comes to audio only calls. They can’t see you. They think that you’re laughing at them, or they think that you are judging them, so they’re not getting that response back from you in order to assure themselves of how they’re doing.”

Phone calls don’t have to be scary, Baxter said, emphasizing that there are some easy ways to prepare to take a call if you are expecting one.

“The great thing about phone calls and audio calls, is that you can cheat. You can use post-it pads, you can write yourself cheat notes… the non-visual aspect of a telephone call can actually work in students’ favor when it comes to supporting them to come up with the right answers.”

This starts with preparing your environment, so making sure you’re going to be in a quiet safe space, where you’re not interrupted, and your phone is charged and working, Baxter said.

The careers advisor explained that if the call is for an interview, then researching the organization is helpful.

“So write yourself a little script. Think about what you are going to say. That can help to minimize your anxiety,” she said. This can be aided by writing cheat notes, which can remind you of what you want to say.

Finally, the telephobia seminar also encourages practicing breathing exercises, if a call makes someone feel anxious or overwhelmed.

“We encourage students to breathe in deeply, hold their breath, let it out slowly, and then notice the resulting difference in slowing your heartbeat and making you feel much calmer,” Baxter said.

Young people are accustomed to associating phone calls with negative things, but Baxter teaches her pupils that someone could be calling to congratulate them for passing on to the next stage of the interview, or that they’ve passed their exam.

“So it’s trying to see that actually answering your telephone call shouldn’t be dangerous, and that they are very much in control… it’s encouraging our students to take back the power and [know that] if this telephone call is something that I do not want, I have the choice to end the phone call, and that gives me power.'”