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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
This is not only teenagers. Adults describe it too: an hour that vanished, a message that reads as though somebody else wrote it, a flatness afterwards. Knowing the state exists changes what you do about it. Rather than arguing with the behaviour on its own, you look at what put someone into that state, how long they were in it and at what hour, and you work on making the state less likely instead of making the person more guilty.
Man exceeds all bounds (Quran 96:6). Going well past the point you meant to stop at is named as an old human tendency rather than a new failure of yours.
العلق
كَلَّآ إِنَّ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنَ لَيَطۡغَىٰٓ
But man exceeds all bounds
Qur’an 96:6read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
There is a clinical account of adapting dialectical behaviour therapy for problematic interactive media use, written after clinicians kept seeing disrupted sleep, inattention to schoolwork and social withdrawal among heavy users. It describes adapting a treatment rather than testing one, and it does not measure anything dissociative online. Take it as a sign that clinicians think this is worth treating as a state, not as proof of the mechanism.
Pluhar E, Jhe G, Tsappis M, Bickham D, Rich M. (2020). Adapting Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Treating Problematic Interactive Media Use.. Journal of psychiatric practice doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Long immersion dulls the ordinary sense of being present and answerable, so behaviour that would never survive a room survives a screen.
Spend long enough online and people start arriving as types rather than as people: brilliant or worthless, with nothing in between. The flattening happens to how you see yourself as well.
The quietest damage comes from a young person deciding that feeling like this is simply how it is, because everyone around them feels it too.
When a death is filmed and passed around, some of the people who watch it are not all right afterwards, and a few are put in real danger by it. Ask what has been going round.