Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
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.
Ask plainly what they have come across that they wish they had not seen, and how often it happens. There is no preparation before it and nothing afterwards, which is what makes this kind of exposure sit so badly. If something is still returning in flashes or at night, that is the thing to work on rather than the hours. Blocking and reporting help a little, and so does knowing that nobody is soft for still carrying an image months later.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Tell believing men to lower their glances (Quran 24:30). A trained turning away of the eye is offered as something you practise, which is more use than trying not to be affected by what you have already seen.
قُل لِّلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ يَغُضُّواْ مِنۡ أَبۡصَٰرِهِمۡ وَيَحۡفَظُواْ فُرُوجَهُمۡۚ ذَٰلِكَ أَزۡكَىٰ لَهُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ خَبِيرُۢ بِمَا يَصۡنَعُونَ
[Prophet], tell believing men to lower their glances and guard their private parts: that is purer for them. God is well aware of everything they do
Qur’an 24:30read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A literature review of screen time in children and adolescents reports that the total is not the only thing that matters: content, after-dark use and the number of devices all count. It reviews observational work on sleep and cardiovascular risk rather than on graphic material, so it cannot tell you what a violent video does to a fifteen year old. It does support the wider point that treating screen time as one quantity misses where the harm actually sits.
Lissak G. (2018). Adverse physiological and psychological effects of screen time on children and adolescents: Literature review and case study.. Environmental research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Frightening images that arrive with no warning and no one to talk to afterwards are the ones most likely to keep coming back.
When not to
If images keep coming back as flashbacks, nightmares or a constant sense of dread, that is worth taking to someone who works with trauma rather than waiting for it to fade.
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
More hours on social media goes with more anxiety and low mood. That is a reason to aim at fewer hours, a conversation you can actually have, rather than at none, which usually ends the conversation.
One gentle way to name it: those are being used as words to play with, and they were never really words for playing with. Said kindly, it lands without anyone being told off.
Gaming for an hour before you start the work almost never costs an hour. Do the thing that has to be done first, then the thing you want.