Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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1067 practices

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Quiet room, clear desk, phone in a drawer, and you are still nowhere near the work. When the outside distractions go, the restlessness does not leave with them. It moves inside.

Headphones and a tidy desk handle half the problem. The other half is a mind looking for something to do, which will supply its own if nothing else…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 3:191One line of research

Plenty of people now describe attention that fails, memory that slips and a day sliced into fragments. That description on its own is not ADHD, and it is worth being careful before anyone hands over a label.

The environment is producing a version of these symptoms in people who do not have the condition, and calling that a diagnosis does two things badly.…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 102:1One line of research

After a long stretch online people are often not fully there. Something faintly hypnotic settles in, and things get said and done that the same person would not say or do in a room.

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…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 96:6One line of research

It is a genuine relief to hear that what someone did online may not reflect who they are. Say that gently, and say the other half in the same breath: the people who saw it will judge it as though it does.

Both halves are true and they need each other. Offer only the first and you have handed over a reason for nothing to change. Offer only the second…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCore

There is more about focus, starting, and adhd than the practices: the focus, starting, and adhd area has the themes and the courses too.

Qur’an 17:36

One line of research

More hours on social media goes with more anxiety and low mood. That is a reason to aim at fewer hours, a conversation you can actually have, rather than at none, which usually ends the conversation.

Pick a number genuinely below the current one and low enough to notice, then look at what has changed in a fortnight. Sleep and mood are the things…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 25:67One line of research

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.

Worth naming as something the environment is doing rather than a fact about your character, because what an environment produces can be changed by…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 18:46One line of research

Not every app is doing the same thing to you. The ones that tend to hurt have comments underneath, a feed chosen for you, and a number attached to how you did.

One young woman described a picture site as the safe one, because there was nowhere for anyone to reply to her. That is a useful way to sort your own…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 47:36One line of research

Some of what circulates makes being unwell look good. Drugs filmed like a party, low mood styled into something delicate and photogenic, until the illness starts to feel like a personality.

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…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 18:28One line of research

Real footage of people dying circulates without any warning, sometimes buried inside a video that starts off looking harmless. Young people rarely raise this themselves, so it is worth asking.

Ask plainly what they have come across that they wish they had not seen, and how often it happens. There is no preparation before it and nothing…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 24:30One line of research

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.

Once distress counts as ordinary it stops being reported. Nobody mentions it at home, nobody brings it to an appointment, and years can pass with…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCoreQur’an 13:28One line of research

Ask everybody, at the start, what they use and how it goes for them there. Not only the ones who arrive with an obvious phone problem.

Two questions do most of the work: which platforms are you on, and what is it like for you on them. Asked early, without any warning tone, it makes…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 63:9One line of research

You are already off your phone somewhere. In lessons, at work, in the pool, driving. That is worth more than it sounds.

It quietly disproves the sentence people say most often about this, that they can never put it down. They already do, most days, for hours at a time.…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 24:37One line of research

For one week note three things each time: how you felt before you opened it, how it felt while you were in it, and how you feel twenty minutes after putting it down.

Most people find the before and the after are not the same, and that the middle was better than either. Usually one or two apps come out fine and one…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 3:191One line of research

Sometimes the scrolling is not really about the scrolling. It is about the coursework, or the conversation, or the thing you have not let yourself think about since March.

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…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 62:11One line of research

Nobody is asking you to want less of a lift. The ask is to take some of it from somewhere that does not leave you flat afterwards.

Put that way most people will engage, because it is not a demand to become a calmer sort of person. Cold water, music that actually moves you,…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 62:10One line of research

A young person on the sofa with their phone looks like nothing is happening. From the inside it is often the first hour all day that has asked nothing of them.

Both readings are true, and the argument is usually about which one gets said out loud. Naming the second one to a parent takes a surprising amount…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 2:286One line of research

Before a phone gets taken away, it is worth asking what else goes with it. For a lot of young people the group chat is where their friendships actually live, and losing it leaves them alone at the moment they most need someone.

This is not an argument against limits. It is an argument for knowing what you are cutting. If the same device carries the friendships, the homework…

Five minutesScreens and attentionCBTQur’an 25:67One line of research

A screen is a privilege, not something a person is owed. Food, clothes, a warm home, medical care, school, being loved: those are owed, and a phone is not on that list.

Saying this plainly gives a household something firmer than mood to stand on when limits are set. It also keeps two things apart. The care and the…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 7:31One line of research

Who pays the bill does give a household some say. That argument weakens every year a child gets older, and it runs out entirely once they are an adult sitting in front of you asking for help.

With a sixteen year old at home on the family plan, parents setting terms is reasonable and worth saying out loud. With an adult, the same move…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 28:77One line of research

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.

Readiness gives you somewhere to go. You can name the skill that was missing, hand back a smaller amount of access, and set out what would show they…

Five minutesScreens and attentionADHD skillsQur’an 96:6One line of research