Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
Nobody gets far taking the drink away without asking what the drinking was for. It is the same here. Find out what the scrolling is doing for someone before you start subtracting hours.
It is doing something, or it would not have lasted this long. Company at one in the morning. A way to stop thinking. Somewhere they are good at something. A rest that asks nothing back. Ask what would be missing if it went tomorrow. Then the plan can put something into that particular hole, instead of leaving a hole and calling it progress.
Qur’an and Sunnah
The love of desirable things is made alluring (Quran 3:14). The pull is described as real and built in, which is why it needs replacing rather than only resisting.
زُيِّنَ لِلنَّاسِ حُبُّ ٱلشَّهَوَٰتِ مِنَ ٱلنِّسَآءِ وَٱلۡبَنِينَ وَٱلۡقَنَٰطِيرِ ٱلۡمُقَنطَرَةِ مِنَ ٱلذَّهَبِ وَٱلۡفِضَّةِ وَٱلۡخَيۡلِ ٱلۡمُسَوَّمَةِ وَٱلۡأَنۡعَٰمِ وَٱلۡحَرۡثِۗ ذَٰلِكَ مَتَٰعُ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَاۖ وَٱللَّهُ عِندَهُۥ حُسۡنُ ٱلۡمَـَٔابِ
The love of desirable things is made alluring for men- women, children, gold and silver treasures piled up high, horses with fine markings, livestock, and farmland- these may be the joys of this life, but God has the best place to return to
Qur’an 3:14read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review and meta-analysis has quantified how much more steeply people with internet addiction discount delayed rewards than other people, so that a small reward now outweighs a larger one later by a wider margin than usual. These are group comparisons rather than tests of a treatment, and the direction is not settled. The implication is narrow: whatever goes in the gap has to arrive soon, because a benefit weeks away is a weak competitor.
Cheng YS, Ko HC, Sun CK, Yeh PY. (2021). The relationship between delay discounting and Internet addiction: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Addictive behaviors doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A behaviour that is meeting a need keeps coming back until the need is met some other way.
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 one week note three things each time: how you felt before you opened it, how it felt while you were in it, and how you feel twenty minutes after putting it down.
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.
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.