To my limited non-Haskellian understanding, you can give a block of expressions to a monad. It then decides which expressions to evaluate, in which order, optionally depending on the value they might return to the monad. So you could have a monad which does "evaluate all these in order unless something goes null" (which is a nuisance to type in C-style languages), or one that expands on the if-then-else concept. None of these carry forward internal/hidden state like an IO monad does, but are there to expand user control for how to flow from 1 expression to another in your custom scopes.

It's somewhat conceptually related to Command or Visitor Pattern programming, but Haskell has syntactic sugar to have them basically work similarly to normal statements. Alternatively, this is a runtime-only version of one specific thing that Lisp macros can do to &body scopes, in constructing custom control flow.

This also is only 1 way to use monads, as they're a technically pretty simple tool (an interface with 2 functions) that can be used in a bunch of scenarios.

[If I'm wrong, and I'm probably wrong, I'd love clarifications for myself, too!]