Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
Check, feel the small relief, put it down, feel the pull again a minute later. If your phone use has that shape, it is running like a compulsion, whatever else it is.
The structure matters more here than the label. An urge rises, checking brings it down, and every check teaches the urge to come back sooner. Which means the thing that eases it is the same thing that keeps it going. Working with that looks less like resolving to use your phone less and more like letting the urge arrive and not answering it, over a stretch of time you can genuinely manage, ten minutes rather than a day.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Turn away from them until they move on to another topic (Quran 6:68). The instruction is to leave a space that is doing you no good, not to sit inside it and resist.
وَإِذَا رَأَيۡتَ ٱلَّذِينَ يَخُوضُونَ فِيٓ ءَايَٰتِنَا فَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنۡهُمۡ حَتَّىٰ يَخُوضُواْ فِي حَدِيثٍ غَيۡرِهِۦۚ وَإِمَّا يُنسِيَنَّكَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ فَلَا تَقۡعُدۡ بَعۡدَ ٱلذِّكۡرَىٰ مَعَ ٱلۡقَوۡمِ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ
When you come across people who speak with scorn about Our revelations, turn away from them until they move on to another topic. If Satan should make you forget, then, when you have remembered, do not sit with those who are doing wrong
Qur’an 6:68read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review reports that excessive smartphone use co-occurs with depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD and alcohol use disorder, along with sleep problems, impulsivity and low self-esteem. Co-occurrence is all that is being claimed. It does not establish that checking is a compulsion, or that treating it as one helps, and nobody is diagnosing anything from the shape of your evening.
Wacks Y, Weinstein AM. (2021). Excessive Smartphone Use Is Associated With Health Problems in Adolescents and Young Adults.. Frontiers in psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The relief you get from checking is what teaches the urge to return, so the loop is fed by the very thing that quiets it.
When not to
If not checking brings real panic rather than discomfort, or the checking is tied to something frightening in your life, work on it with someone rather than gritting your teeth alone.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?
Real footage of people dying circulates without any warning, sometimes buried inside a video that starts off looking harmless. Young people rarely raise this themselves, so it is worth asking.
If the screen limit in your house is only your preference, every evening turns into a negotiation about your preference. Borrowing a published figure, roughly two hours a day of leisure screen time for a child over two, moves the argument off you.