Areas › Worry and anxiety › What worry does
Treat the whole of social media as poison and you will never hear anything true about it again. Some of what happens there is genuinely good for people.
Drawing, making things, finding others who share an unusual interest, keeping up with people who live far away: none of that needs fixing. What deserves attention is the particular pattern, the scrolling that leaves someone flatter than it found them, the comparing, the checking through the night. Ask which parts of it a person would actually miss and which they would not, then work on the second list.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If God touches you with affliction, no one can remove it except Him, and if He touches you with good, He has power over all things (Quran 6:17). Harm and good are not kept in separate places, which is roughly the situation with any tool.
وَإِن يَمۡسَسۡكَ ٱللَّهُ بِضُرࣲّ فَلَا كَاشِفَ لَهُۥٓ إِلَّا هُوَۖ وَإِن يَمۡسَسۡكَ بِخَيۡرࣲ فَهُوَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدِيرࣱ
If God touches you [Prophet] with affliction, no one can remove it except Him, and if He touches you with good, He has power over all things
Qur’an 6:17read 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 found that internet delivered treatments for generalised anxiety disorder are effective and widen access to help for a condition that often goes untreated. The same screens carry both some of the harm and some of the treatment. That finding concerns structured programmes rather than ordinary internet use, so it is a caution against blanket verdicts and not an endorsement of endless scrolling.
Eilert N, Enrique A, Wogan R, Mooney O, Timulak L, Richards D. (2021). The effectiveness of Internet-delivered treatment for generalized anxiety disorder: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis.. Depression and anxiety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A blanket verdict gets you shut out of the conversation you needed to be in.
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
When a young person seems impossible to satisfy, the complaining is usually a symptom rather than ingratitude. Saying that plainly to a parent changes what they feel.
Strong feeling about injustice can look a lot like being argumentative. Do not file conviction as defiance without checking.
Your alarm learned from something real, then started answering to things that merely resemble it. A rustle in the grass gets the same jolt as the animal that first taught you to run.