Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
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.
Keep the sentence short enough to actually use, because you need it while your thumb is still moving, not an hour afterwards. Somebody's holiday photo is the best four seconds of a week you know nothing else about. Your own version of that week includes every dull hour and every worry in it. The comparison is not unfair because you are being hard on yourself. It is unfair because the two sides are not made of the same material.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not gaze longingly at what We have given some of them to enjoy (Quran 20:131). The instruction is about the looking rather than about what they have, which is where the ache actually starts.
وَلَا تَمُدَّنَّ عَيۡنَيۡكَ إِلَىٰ مَا مَتَّعۡنَا بِهِۦٓ أَزۡوَٰجࣰ ا مِّنۡهُمۡ زَهۡرَةَ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَا لِنَفۡتِنَهُمۡ فِيهِۚ وَرِزۡقُ رَبِّكَ خَيۡرࣱ وَأَبۡقَىٰ
and do not gaze longingly at what We have given some of them to enjoy, the finery of this present life: We test them through this, but the provision of your Lord is better and more lasting
Qur’an 20:131read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a survey of 296 people, fear of missing out was the thing most closely related to problematic smartphone use, more so than negative mood or fear of being evaluated. It is a cross-sectional survey, so it cannot say which came first. It does suggest that what holds people in the feed is often a sense of what everyone else is having, which is the machinery this one sentence is aimed at.
Wolniewicz CA, Tiamiyu MF, Weeks JW, Elhai JD. (2018). Problematic smartphone use and relations with negative affect, fear of missing out, and fear of negative and positive evaluation.. Psychiatry research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You know everything about your own week and almost nothing about theirs, so the comparison is rigged before it starts.
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
A rule that holds in your house and nowhere else is not really a rule. Children locate the unrestricted house within about a week.
Taking the phone away leaves a hole the exact size of the phone. Something has to go into it, or the evening just becomes an argument you both lose.
Sitting with one long unrewarding task has got harder for almost everyone. If you are planning work for yourself, or setting it for someone else, build the variety in rather than hoping for stamina.