Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
Asked what all the scrolling had done to her most, one young woman did not say sad. She said angry, more or less all the time.
Constant irritability in a teenager usually gets worked up as depression or ADHD, and sometimes that is right. Saturation belongs on the list too, and it has the advantage of being testable. Two weeks at a genuinely lower level of use, with somebody noting how the evenings go, tells you more than another round of guessing. If the anger lifts you have found something. If it does not, you have ruled something out and lost very little.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Man exceeds all bounds (Quran 96:6). Going far past the point that was ever good for you is named as an old human tendency, which describes an evening that began with five minutes.
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 the whole claim: it does not show that use causes irritability, and irritability is not itself on that list. Treat the fortnight as a small experiment for one person rather than as something the research has settled.
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
A day spent inside outrage and comparison leaves a person primed for anger before anything in the room has even happened.
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
For a child who finds face to face conversation frightening, a game where they talk to friends while doing something else may be the only place they socialise at all. Worth noticing before you count the hours.
There is a rough ladder for tech overuse. Build a schedule together with some outside control at first, add substitutes once the person can stop for a while, then more intensive care, and residential only when someone is entirely taken over by it.
Quiet room, clear desk, phone in a drawer, and you are still nowhere near the work. When the outside distractions go, the restlessness does not leave with them. It moves inside.