July-August. 2026 | The HEALTH
COLUMN
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And made the night as clothing; And made the day for livelihood "( Quran, An-Naba: 9-11 ]
If rest is a right rather than a reward, it has to be claimed. Claiming it now means limiting what is allowed to reach us after dark.
WHAT ACTUALLY HELPS
Regaining that command does not mean giving up the technology. Silencing nonessential notifications is the single highest yield change most people can make, and it takes four minutes. Beyond that: no screens in the bedroom, an evening hour after which work alerts are muted, phone-free meals, and a half-day each week offline.
Employers should state after-hours expectations in writing rather than leaving them to be inferred and make use of scheduled sending. Clinicians might ask about screen and sleep patterns as routinely as they now ask about smoking. But every one of these measures asks someone to hold a line that nobody has actually drawn.
" 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."
Government has not been idle, but its attention is elsewhere. The Ministry of Health ' s Persada programme now spans 150 hospitals and 2,488 public healthcare facilities, with 4.21 million registered users by April 2026. A Digital Health Act is targeted for tabling this year( The Star, 2026).
Digital wellbeing has begun to appear on the national agenda, including at a recent dialogue of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission( 21 – 22 July 2026). But these efforts concern delivering health services digitally. They do not touch the question of who is responsible for saying how much is too much. For now, individuals are left to answer it alone.
Until that question is answered, the responsibility falls where it always has. The technology is not going anywhere, and it should not. But nobody ever sat down and designed a life lived at the pace of a notification. Which means none of us is obliged to keep living one.
Tonight, leave the phone in the other room. See how you sleep.- The HEALTH