BY AMAL A. M. ELGHARBAWY

AND

ANIS NAJIHA AHMAD

International Institute for Halal Research and Training( INHART) International Islamic University Malaysia

In between sit work messages after office hours, a group chat that never resolves, a video that autoplays into the next, and the sense that something is waiting to be answered.

None of this is dramatic, and that is precisely the problem. We stopped noticing how much time we spend on our phones. So, nobody treats it as a health risk. Set against how much of our lives it now occupies, that is a strange omission.

A SOCIETY WITH NO OFF SWITCH

Malaysia is now saturated with connectivity. At the close of 2025, the country had 35.4 million internet users, with a penetration rate of 98 per cent. Social media accounted for 30.7 million active identities, equivalent to 85 per cent of the population.

Cellular connections ran to 44 million, or 122 per cent of the population, meaning many of us carry more than one line( DataReportal, 2026a). The pattern is not ours alone: 6.12 billion people worldwide are online( DataReportal, 2026b).

And being online no longer means what it used to. Twenty years ago, it meant sitting at a desktop, dialling in, and standing up when you were done. Now the connection never switches off, and it travels in a pocket— which means it follows you to work, and home again.

The same connection changes what work can ask of you. Nobody wrote after-hours availability into your contract. No Malaysian statute requires it either. But somewhere along the way, being reachable became part of the job.

Remember the drive home? The traffic was miserable, but it was the only forty minutes when nobody could ask you for anything. The phone took that buffer away. For those who now work partly from home, the drive is gone as well.

A colleague messages at 9.0pm asking for " just a quick one ". The read receipt shows you have seen it. A work group chat posts

shift changes at any hour.

Occupational health researchers have a name for what that drive used to provide: psychological detachment— the off-hours stretch when your body finally stops bracing. Without it, the alertness carries into the next day, and the day after. The working day no longer ends. It just goes quiet.

THE PACE IS THE POINT

Underneath all of it sits something we rarely name: speed. Everything can be shared instantly, so everything expects an instant answer. A document, a photo, a request, an opinion. Each arrives with an invisible deadline measured in minutes.

Volume compounds the pressure. More is published in a day than any of us could absorb in a lifetime, so we skim. We switch. We keep moving. And every switch costs us attention on whatever comes next.

The result is a day that feels full without being productive, and busy without being restful. Speed becomes its own justification: because a reply can be sent immediately, it is assumed it should be, and the standard ratchets upward without anyone agreeing to it. The scarce resource is no longer information. It is uninterrupted attention, and the capacity to be bored.

The pace has a physical price, and it arrives slowly. Any one message is easy to answer. The harm comes from the total: evenings, weekends, and leave that was taken on paper but never in practice.

That is what eventually sends people to a doctor. But people rarely call it what it is. They say they are not sleeping. They say they keep getting headaches. They say they cannot concentrate, and they are snapping at everyone.

The broken sleep, the headaches and the short temper are not a mystery. Each has a known cause. A phone rewards us at random, like a slot machine, and random rewards are the hardest to stop chasing.

That is why the hand reaches for the phone before the mind decides to. Bright screens and an alert mind in the hour before bed make us fall asleep later and sleep less. The downstream effects are consequential: disrupted body clocks, disordered appetite, poorer blood-sugar control, less activity and

family meals eaten apart.

There is also plain physical risk: neck and wrist strain, eye strain, and the person crossing a junction while reading a screen.

OUR CHILDREN ARE WATCHING

Adults, at least, chose this pace. Children did not. Among teenagers, the digital pattern runs deeper, and it is getting worse. The World Health Organisation ' s health behaviour in school-aged children study surveyed nearly 280,000 young people aged 11, 13 and 15 across 44 countries. Between 2018 and 2022, problematic social media use climbed from seven per cent to 11 per cent.

Girls outpaced boys: 13 per cent against nine per cent, and 12 per cent were at risk of problematic gaming. More than a third described being in near-constant online contact, rising to 44 per cent among 15-year-old girls( WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2024). Closer to home, a study of 535 adolescents in Kota Bharu put internet addiction at 48.6 per cent( Sangaran et al., 2024)— nearly half.

The cost shows up in their bodies too. A national survey of 27,497 Malaysian secondary students put internet addiction at 29.0 per cent, with significant associations to poor fruit and vegetable intake, daily soft drinks, frequent fast food, sedentary behaviour and e-cigarette use( Ying Ying et al., 2021).

Digital dependency is not a purely psychological phenomenon. It is a dietary and metabolic one, and in a country already carrying among the heaviest obesity and diabetes burdens in the region, that is not a marginal finding.

None of this is a habit children invented. They learn it at home. A household where a parent answers email at the dinner table has lost the argument about screen limits before it begins. If we want children to switch off, we have to show them what switching off looks like.

Switching off is not a modern invention. In Islamic tradition, rest is an entitlement rather than an indulgence: the night described as a covering, sleep as a mercy, and the body granted a recognised right over its owner.

" And made your sleep [ a means for ] rest;