Screen Time Feelings Worksheet

A client with ADHD who works in digital marketing uses screens for most of their work and personal life. They have come to coaching with a goal related to focus, not screen time, but initial conversations have revealed that they are using screens in ways that conflict with their stated values - scrolling at family dinner, checking work messages in bed, watching videos instead of sleeping. The client becomes defensive when screen time is raised, arguing that their screen use is necessary for their job and that reducing it is not realistic.

Do not introduce this as a screen time evaluation tool. Frame it as a feelings mapping exercise: 'This is not about how much you use screens. It's about how you feel during and after different types of use. The data might tell us something useful, or it might not - but let's look before we decide.' The emotional impact columns (during/after) are less threatening than a usage-volume tool because they start from the client's own experience rather than an external judgment about their behavior. If the client is still resistant, make it fully optional: 'If this feels like the wrong direction, we can put it aside. What would you rather look at?'

Watch for the client rating all screen use as feeling 'fine' or 'neutral' regardless of context - work email, social media, news, video - with no differentiation. Uniform positive ratings suggest the client is performing nonchalance rather than actually reflecting. Ask about a specific type of use: 'When you are scrolling social media at 11pm and you close the app - what do you usually feel in the three minutes after?' The specificity often breaks through the defensive flatness. Also watch for the client conflating work-related screen use with personal screen use - mixing the two prevents the worksheet from surfacing what is actually worth examining.

Start with the types of use that produced negative after-feelings. Do not editorialize - read back what the client wrote: 'You noted that after late-night social scrolling you usually feel [what they wrote]. What do you make of that?' Let the client interpret their own data before offering any frame. The worksheet's value is that it is the client's own words, not the coach's assessment. Then move to any types of screen use that produced positive feelings: 'What's different about those?' The contrast between the two lists is where the coaching conversation belongs - not in a debate about whether screen use is good or bad.

A client with ADHD who is a freelance consultant uses screens for all their billable work and also to avoid billable work. They cannot accurately distinguish how much of their screen time is productive and how much is avoidance. They routinely lose the second half of their work day to passive screen consumption and bill fewer hours than they need to meet financial goals. Their stated coaching goal is income growth, but the behavioral pattern is screen-use-as-avoidance.

Frame this as building category awareness: 'Right now all screen time looks the same. This exercise asks you to distinguish the types by how they feel - because work email and avoidance scrolling feel different even if they look identical from the outside.' The key distinction for this client is not work vs. personal use but engaged vs. disengaged use. An engaged work task feels different before, during, and after than disengaged scrolling. The worksheet's 'Before' column is particularly important for this client: 'What were you trying to do when you picked up your phone/opened that tab?' The answer reveals whether the screen use was intentional or automatic.

Watch for the client conflating 'work-adjacent' screen use with work - reading articles about client industries, researching tools they might use someday, reviewing content from clients. These activities feel productive and are very difficult for the client to honestly rate as avoidance, but they may be functioning as high-status avoidance. Ask: 'When you were reading that article, did it produce a deliverable or advance a specific project? Or did it feel more like staying in motion without moving forward?'

Map the client's day in two segments - morning and afternoon - and look at where the screen use types shift. Most clients with this pattern have a clear inflection point in the afternoon where intentional screen use gives way to avoidance screen use. Finding that inflection point is the first coaching target: 'What happens at that point that makes the shift? Is it a specific task you are avoiding, an energy drop, something else?' The worksheet data reveals the shape of the problem; the debrief identifies the trigger for the shift.

A client with ADHD who is a nurse manager has noticed that their off-hours screen use spikes after difficult shifts - high patient load, conflict with physicians, understaffing. They do not experience this as a conscious decision but as something that just happens when they get home. They want to understand the pattern well enough to create a different off-hours recovery routine.

Frame this as emotion-to-behavior mapping rather than screen time reduction: 'We are trying to understand what the screen is doing for you after a hard shift. Once we know what it is providing, we can look at whether there are other ways to get the same thing.' The ADHD dimension here is important: emotional dysregulation in ADHD tends to be more intense and slower to recover than in neurotypical adults. Screen use after dysregulating events is often serving a self-regulation function - numbing, stimulation, or escape. Name this without pathologizing it: 'For a lot of people with ADHD, screens after a hard day are doing the same work that other coping mechanisms do. That's not a character flaw - it's a regulatory strategy. The question is whether it's the best available one.'

Watch for the client's 'after' feelings being ambivalent rather than clearly negative - 'I feel kind of okay but also like I wasted the evening.' This ambivalence is actually useful: it means the screen use is providing some genuine relief, but at a cost. Do not position this as straightforwardly bad. Ask: 'What does the screen use give you that you need after those shifts?' The answer (rest, escape, connection, stimulation) is the coaching target - not elimination of screen use but finding alternatives that provide the same thing without the cost.

Start by mapping shift difficulty against screen use patterns: 'Looking at your entries, do you see a correlation between how hard the shift was and how much you used screens that evening?' The client usually already knows the answer but has not made it explicit. Once the correlation is named, move to recovery: 'What did you most need after those hard shifts?' Then: 'Is screen use actually giving you that, or is it giving you something adjacent to it while the actual need goes unmet?' The gap between what the screen provides and what the client actually needs is where the alternative recovery strategies live.