Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
Ask two questions and then sit with the difference. How much time on this would you like? And how much do you think is actually good for you?
Almost nobody gives the same answer twice, and the gap between the numbers is more persuasive than anything you could have told them, because they produced it. From there the plan is about closing part of that gap rather than reaching an ideal. Start nearer the honest number than the perfect one and agree what would be different by next week. Announce the limit instead and you will spend the whole session defending it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Wealth and children are the attractions of this worldly life, but lasting good works have a better reward with your Lord and give better grounds for hope (Quran 18:46). A weighing is being invited there, which is exactly what those two questions ask a person to do.
ٱلۡمَالُ وَٱلۡبَنُونَ زِينَةُ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَاۖ وَٱلۡبَٰقِيَٰتُ ٱلصَّٰلِحَٰتُ خَيۡرٌ عِندَ رَبِّكَ ثَوَابࣰ ا وَخَيۡرٌ أَمَلࣰ ا
Wealth and children are the attractions of this worldly life, but lasting good works have a better reward with your Lord and give better grounds for hope
Qur’an 18:46read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A mixed methods study built and evaluated a digital intervention for problematic smartphone use among students, in an area where very few interventions have been evaluated at all. The honest reading is that structured, collaborative approaches are being developed and tested, not that any one of them is established. Use it as a sensible way to begin rather than a proven protocol.
Kent S, Masterson C, Ali R, Parsons CE, Bewick BM. (2021). Digital Intervention for Problematic Smartphone Use.. 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
People argue with a limit handed to them and rarely argue with a number they said themselves.
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
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.
Spend long enough in comment sections and cruelty starts to look like the normal way people speak. It is not. You are reading a very odd sample.
If the phone was giving you company, an evening class in something practical will not cover it. Match what you put in its place to what it was actually providing.