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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
This is worth spotting because of what it does to recovery. If sadness has become part of how someone is known, getting better means losing something as well as gaining something, and nobody mentions that half. It helps to say it plainly with another person: who would I be without this, and what would I be to these people. The pull is not vanity. The look offers somewhere to belong, and belonging is hard to hand back on your own.
Content yourself with those who pray to their Lord morning and evening, seeking His approval, and do not let your eyes turn away from them (Quran 18:28). Real company is set against a more attractive display, which is the choice sitting underneath this one.
الكهف
وَٱصۡبِرۡ نَفۡسَكَ مَعَ ٱلَّذِينَ يَدۡعُونَ رَبَّهُم بِٱلۡغَدَوٰةِ وَٱلۡعَشِيِّ يُرِيدُونَ وَجۡهَهُۥۖ وَلَا تَعۡدُ عَيۡنَاكَ عَنۡهُمۡ تُرِيدُ زِينَةَ ٱلۡحَيَوٰةِ ٱلدُّنۡيَاۖ وَلَا تُطِعۡ مَنۡ أَغۡفَلۡنَا قَلۡبَهُۥ عَن ذِكۡرِنَا وَٱتَّبَعَ هَوَىٰهُ وَكَانَ أَمۡرُهُۥ فُرُطࣰ ا
Content yourself with those who pray to their Lord morning and evening, seeking His approval, and do not let your eyes turn away from them out of desire for the attractions of this worldly life: do not yield to those whose hearts We have made heedless of Our Quran, those who follow their own low desires, those whose ways are unbridled
Qur’an 18:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review across 21 countries brought together work on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and short-form video and their relation to health, sleep quality, body image and mood, using a narrative rather than a statistical synthesis. Body image is the nearest thing in it to what is described here, and nothing in that review tests the glamorising of illness. So this is a pattern that clinicians and young people report, sitting alongside evidence about mood and self-image, and not a finding of its own.
Behera N, Khuntia S, Pandey K, Shankar S. (2025). Impact of Social Media Use on Physical, Mental, Social, and Emotional Health, Sleep Quality, Body Image, and Mood: Evidence from 21 Countries-A Systematic Literature Review with Narrative Synthesis.. International journal of behavioral medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
When a symptom becomes part of who you are to other people, getting well starts to feel like a loss.
If the identity has grown around self harm rather than around mood alone, that belongs with a professional rather than in a conversation at home.
There is a rough ladder for tech overuse. Build a schedule together with some outside control at first, add substitutes once the person can stop for a while, then more intensive care, and residential only when someone is entirely taken over by it.
There is a rough benchmark for homework: about ten minutes a night per school year, so a child in their first year does ten minutes and a final year student tops out near two hours.
Things posted in ten seconds have got young people excluded from school, and worse. It is worth asking about online conduct in the same routine way you would ask about anything else that could go badly.