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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
The buzz carries no information about importance. It borrows the feeling of importance and lends it to whatever happened to arrive. Naming it in the moment, out loud if you are on your own, opens a gap between the alert and your hand. In that gap you can ask the only useful question, which is whether anything really changes if you look in an hour.
They scatter towards trade or entertainment whenever they observe it (Quran 62:11). The scattering is described as near automatic, which is exactly why it helps to have a name ready for it.
الجمعة
وَإِذَا رَأَوۡاْ تِجَٰرَةً أَوۡ لَهۡوًا ٱنفَضُّوٓاْ إِلَيۡهَا وَتَرَكُوكَ قَآئِمࣰ اۚ قُلۡ مَا عِندَ ٱللَّهِ خَيۡرࣱ مِّنَ ٱللَّهۡوِ وَمِنَ ٱلتِّجَٰرَةِۚ وَٱللَّهُ خَيۡرُ ٱلرَّٰزِقِينَ
Yet they scatter towards trade or entertainment whenever they observe it, and leave you [Prophet] standing there. Say, ‘God’s gift is better than any entertainment or trade: God is the best provider.’
Qur’an 62:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
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 group comparison and it does not test whether naming an urge helps. It does say something useful about the starting line: if restraint here is harder for you than it looks for other people, that is a documented pattern rather than a story you invented about yourself.
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.
The alert produces the same sense of urgency whatever it contains, so naming it is what lets you check the content instead of obeying the feeling.
For a child who finds face to face conversation frightening, a game where they talk to friends while doing something else may be the only place they socialise at all. Worth noticing before you count the hours.
For some people the online part is not a side issue sitting next to the depression or the anxiety. It is one of the things holding them in place.
Most parents setting rules about an app have never scrolled it for ten minutes. The rules are usually reasonable and the picture underneath them is missing.