AMATUL SABHOO SHAHID, QADIAN
You open your phone for two minutes. Forty minutes later, you are still scrolling.
Nothing urgent happened. Nobody called. You weren’t even looking for anything specific. You just scrolled. And somehow, forty minutes of your life quietly disappeared into a screen.
Sound familiar?
We are all hooked, and we know it
Here is an uncomfortable truth nobody wants to say out loud: most of us already know social media is affecting us. We feel it in the restlessness after we put the phone down, in the strange emptiness after thirty minutes of scrolling through lives that aren’t ours, in the way we reach for our phones first thing in the morning before we have even fully woken up.
We know this, yet we just keep scrolling anyway. But what exactly is it doing to us? And why is it so hard to stop?
The comparison machine
Social media did not invent comparison. Humans have always compared themselves to others—it is wired into us.
What social media did was to industrialise it.
Every time we open an app, we are instantly exposed to hundreds of curated, filtered, carefully selected moments from other people’s lives: the perfect holiday, the glowing skin, the thriving career, and the relationship that looks effortless.
But none of it is the full picture, even though our brains do not fully recognise that. Instead, they simply register: ‘they have something that I don’t’. This happens over and over again, dozens of times a day, until that feeling becomes background noise we no longer notice at a conscious level. However, its impact still quietly shapes our mental well-being.
A report published by the Royal Society for Public Health identified social media as a significant contributor to youth mental health issues.[1] A 2018 study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that limiting social media use to 30 minutes per day significantly reduced feelings of loneliness and depression among college students.[2] Research consistently links heavy social media use to increased anxiety, depression, and loneliness—across diverse age groups and demographics.[3]
This is not because social media is evil, but because the human mind was simply never designed to process this much comparison this fast.
Yet, comparison is only one part of the problem.
The noise that never stops
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being constantly connected.
It is not physical. It is that low-grade mental noise—created by notifications, updates, opinions, outrage, trends, and endless streams of information—that never fully quiets, until our minds become so overstimulated that we no longer know how to truly rest.
Real rest, however, requires stillness and real stillness requires putting the phone down—a step that, for most of us, is often the hardest part.
What we are actually looking for
Here is what is worth understanding: we do not scroll mindlessly because we are lazy or weak. We scroll because we are looking for something—connection, comfort, distraction, or simply the feeling that we are not alone in whatever we are carrying.
These are fundamentally human needs. The problem is that social media offers a fast and easy substitute for meeting them, one that satisfies only briefly and incompletely, much like drinking saltwater when thirsty.
It looks like what we need, but ultimately fails to provide what we actually require.
What wisdom has always known
Long before social media existed, every major faith tradition and philosophy arrived at the same conclusion: the human soul needs balance, stillness, and gratitude to truly thrive.
Islam calls it mizan—equilibrium. It is the idea that too much of anything, even something good, disrupts the balance we need to function well. There is a reason that Islamic teachings emphasise guarding our time as one of the most precious gifts we have been given, because time spent mindlessly is time that cannot be recovered.
Then there is shukr—gratitude: conscious, genuine thankfulness for what we already have. It is perhaps the most powerful antidote to the comparison trap, because when we are truly grateful for our own lives, the highlight reels of others begin to lose their grip on us.
Closely connected to this is muraqaba—awareness. It is the practice of being present, noticing where our attention actually is, and choosing it intentionally rather than surrendering it to an algorithm.
You don’t have to delete everything
This is not a call to throw your phones into a river. Social media does have genuine value. It connects, informs, inspires, and builds communities that would not otherwise exist. The goal, therefore, is not absence but intention.
Thus, the next time you feel like opening an app, ask yourself one simple question: ‘Why am I opening this right now?’ Sometimes the answer is valid. Other times, it will reveal that you are simply avoiding silence, while silence is exactly where you need to sit.
It is also necessary to protect the first and last hour of your day from the scroll, to unfollow what consistently makes you feel smaller, and to allow your mind stretches of real, undistracted quiet.
Always remember that behind every perfect post is a human being with their own private 3am—their own doubts, their own mess, their own moments that never make it onto the feed.
No life exists as a highlight reel, not even the ones that appear in your feed, making it look that way.
Life on the other side of the screen
There is a kind of quiet that only comes when you put the phone down and simply exist in your own life—unfiltered, unperformed, unscrolled.
It feels strange at first, because silence always does when you are not used to it. But it is in that quiet that you begin to remember who you are when nobody is watching—when there are no likes to count, when it is just you and your actual life, and the present moment passing whether you are in it or not.
That life—the real one—is worth showing up for.
So put the phone down sometimes. It will still be there when you pick it up again.
The author is…
END NOTES
[1] #StatusOfMind: Social Media and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing, Royal Society for Public Health, 2017
[2] No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression, Melissa G. Hunt et al. (2018), Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology
[3] Cultural Background Measurement of Usage Moderate the Association Between Social Networking Sites (SNSs) Usage and Mental Health: A Meta Analysis, Xue-Qin Yin et al. (2018), Social Science Computer Review
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