Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Screens and attention
You can usually tell by what happens when the phone goes. If the hours quietly move into something else equally absorbing and equally pointless, the phone was never the problem. So it is worth asking what would have to be faced in a genuinely empty evening. That question is uncomfortable enough to be asked kindly, and it is often better asked with somebody else in the room.
They scatter towards trade or entertainment whenever they observe it (Quran 62:11). The scattering is away from something as much as it is towards something, and that is the part worth noticing.
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.
A path analysis in medical students placed smartphone addiction on the route from impulsivity through procrastination and short sleep to subjective cognitive decline. Procrastination sitting on that path is the closest thing here to using a phone to avoid something, and a cross-sectional model cannot establish the order any of it happens in. Read it as one plausible route rather than as the shape of your own week.
Hamvai C, Kiss H, Vörös H, Fitzpatrick KM, Vargha A, Pikó BF. (2023). Association between impulsivity and cognitive capacity decrease is mediated by smartphone addiction, academic procrastination, bedtime procrastination, sleep insufficiency and daytime fatigue among medical students: a path analysis.. BMC medical education doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
If the use is a way of not facing something, removing it just moves the avoidance somewhere else.
If what is being avoided is a trauma or a loss, work on it with someone rather than simply removing the distraction and hoping.
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 someone misuses a device, sending explicit messages or piling on to someone or going where they should not, the useful read is that they were not ready for that much freedom yet. Not that they are a bad person.
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.