Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
One young woman with a history of being bullied found her platform use feeding the depression, the social anxiety, the fear of leaving the house and the checking, until she came close to going back into hospital. Getting better took a long stretch of work and the right medication, and it also took treating the online part as a proper target rather than a habit mentioned in passing. Where somebody is not improving, it is worth asking what happens to them in the hours between appointments.
Striving for more distracts you (Quran 102:1). The pursuit itself is named as the thing that eats a life, which is nearer the mark than treating it as an extra to get to later.
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 a single case, however striking, is not evidence about anybody else. Take both as reason to ask the question, not as a claim about how often the answer will matter.
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.
Something that reaches you every day between sessions can hold a condition in place however good the sessions are.
Taking the phone away leaves a hole the exact size of the phone. Something has to go into it, or the evening just becomes an argument you both lose.
When you wave off what your child is into, they rarely hear a comment about gaming. They hear something about themselves.
A rule that holds in your house and nowhere else is not really a rule. Children locate the unrestricted house within about a week.