Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
Try one hour with the phone away and out of reach, then talk about what came up. The hour itself is the information.
What surfaces is usually specific and useful. The twenty minute mark where the hand starts moving. The exact worry about what is being missed. The flatness once nothing is arriving. None of that is available while the phone is still in the room. It is also a small contained version of what will be asked for later, done somewhere safe, and it often ends with somebody noticing they lasted longer than they expected to.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Hurry towards the reminder of God and leave off your trading (Quran 62:9). Something is allowed to outrank whatever you were in the middle of, which is exactly what putting the phone down for an hour asks.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوٓاْ إِذَا نُودِيَ لِلصَّلَوٰةِ مِن يَوۡمِ ٱلۡجُمُعَةِ فَٱسۡعَوۡاْ إِلَىٰ ذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ وَذَرُواْ ٱلۡبَيۡعَۚ ذَٰلِكُمۡ خَيۡرࣱ لَّكُمۡ إِن كُنتُمۡ تَعۡلَمُونَ
Believers! When the call to prayer is made on the day of congregation, hurry towards the reminder of God and leave off your trading––that is better for you, if only you knew––
Qur’an 62:9read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
People with high levels of smartphone addiction have been shown to have measurable deficits in the behavioural and cognitive self control needed to limit their own use. That is a comparison between groups and it does not test a phone-free hour. It is worth knowing beforehand, because it makes the difficulty expected rather than a sign that this person cannot be helped.
Fabio RA, Stracuzzi A, Lo Faro R. (2022). Problematic Smartphone Use Leads to Behavioral and Cognitive Self-Control Deficits.. International journal of environmental research and public health doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You learn more about a pull by sitting in it with nothing to answer it than by discussing it with the phone in your hand.
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
Check, feel the small relief, put it down, feel the pull again a minute later. If your phone use has that shape, it is running like a compulsion, whatever else it is.
An alarm that marks the end of a session rather than the start. A written list of what these apps give you and what they cost. The phone's own usage figures. An agreement that an hour of scrolling gets matched with an hour of something else. Pick whichever you would actually do.
When someone misuses a device, sending explicit messages or piling on to someone or going where they should not, the useful read is that they were not ready for that much freedom yet. Not that they are a bad person.