Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
One client took two years of steady work to get a single app off her phone. If you are three weeks in and it is still there, you are not doing this wrong.
Change here is slower than nearly everyone expects, including the people helping. Saying so early protects both sides: you do not read a slow month as failure, and nobody quietly decides you were never really trying. Look for the smaller movements meanwhile. An hour later before it starts, a night it did not come to bed, a day it stayed closed on purpose. Those are the thing itself, not the warm up to it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Go at a moderate pace (Quran 31:19). A pace you can keep is the one that gets you there, even on the weeks when it looks like nothing much is happening.
وَٱقۡصِدۡ فِي مَشۡيِكَ وَٱغۡضُضۡ مِن صَوۡتِكَۚ إِنَّ أَنكَرَ ٱلۡأَصۡوَٰتِ لَصَوۡتُ ٱلۡحَمِيرِ
Go at a moderate pace and lower your voice, for the ugliest of all voices is the braying of asses.’
Qur’an 31:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial in 56 adolescents tested an eight session school based group cognitive behavioural therapy for internet addiction and found the effects were still present at longer term follow-up. The sample was small and specific, and it says nothing about how long any one person takes to give up a particular app. It does show this is a course of work with a timescale, which is a fair thing to expect.
Du YS, Jiang W, Vance A. (2010). Longer term effect of randomized, controlled group cognitive behavioural therapy for Internet addiction in adolescent students in Shanghai.. The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something that has been part of every day for years comes apart in small pieces, and small pieces take time to add up.
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
After a long stretch online people are often not fully there. Something faintly hypnotic settles in, and things get said and done that the same person would not say or do in a room.
Not every app is doing the same thing to you. The ones that tend to hurt have comments underneath, a feed chosen for you, and a number attached to how you did.
The quietest damage comes from a young person deciding that feeling like this is simply how it is, because everyone around them feels it too.