Areas › Worry and anxiety › What worry does
The pull you feel towards the screen was built on purpose by people paid to make it strong. That is not an excuse, but it does take some of the shame out of losing an hour to it.
Self blame usually ends in another late night rather than in any change. The steadier position is that the pull is real and engineered, and what you do next still belongs to you. Practical moves beat willpower here: leave the phone in another room, take the app off the first screen, decide where you will stop before you start.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty (Quran 17:11). Haste is precisely what the design is built to catch.
وَيَدۡعُ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ بِٱلشَّرِّ دُعَآءَهُۥ بِٱلۡخَيۡرِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ عَجُولࣰ ا
Yet man prays for harm, just as he prays for good: man is ever hasty
Qur’an 17:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In 56 patients with generalised anxiety disorder, avoidance, safety behaviours and reassurance seeking could be measured, changed over the course of therapy and predicted how people did. Repeated checking to settle unease belongs to that same family of behaviours and it does shift with work. The study was in an anxiety clinic rather than about phones, so the connection here is by resemblance rather than direct evidence.
Katja Beesdo‐Baum; Elsa Jenjahn; Michael Höfler; Ulrike Lueken; Eni S. Becker; Jürgen Hoyer (2012). AVOIDANCE, SAFETY BEHAVIOR, AND REASSURANCE SEEKING IN GENERALIZED ANXIETY DISORDER. Depression and Anxiety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Shame makes people hide the behaviour, while naming the design leaves them free to work on it.
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
Some people are not being lazy when they stall. They are waiting to feel sure about how it turns out, and because that feeling never arrives, nothing moves.
There is a difference between being disappointed with how things are and having given up on how things will be. The second needs a different level of care.
Backing out brings relief within seconds, and that relief is exactly what teaches the fear to come back bigger. The cost is paid later, which is why it is so easy to miss.