Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
When someone says they did not really mean it, that it was not really them, the temptation is to hear an excuse. It is usually better information than that.
Take the disowning seriously and ask what state it came out of. What time was it, how long had they been online, what had happened that day, had they slept. The answers tell you where the work is, which is on the state and the exposure that produced it rather than on a promise to behave differently next time. Someone who cannot recognise their own words will not be helped by being asked to try harder.
Qur’an and Sunnah
When he thinks he is self-sufficient (Quran 96:7). The verse puts the trouble in a state of mind rather than in a single act, which is where the useful questions are.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review has synthesised the maladaptive beliefs and thinking patterns that appear to sit underneath internet gaming disorder and that treatment therefore needs to target. That work is about beliefs in gaming, not about dissociation or about posting, and it is a synthesis rather than a trial. It supports the general clinical move of looking underneath a behaviour for what is driving it, which is what taking the disowning seriously amounts to.
King DL, Delfabbro PH. (2014). The cognitive psychology of Internet gaming disorder.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
If the behaviour came out of a state, then changing the state is what changes the behaviour.
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
You are comparing how it feels inside your own head with what other people chose to show. Those two were never the same kind of thing.
For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.
Screens are easy to start and have no natural end. So the part worth planning is not the getting on, it is the getting off.