We’ve all been there—mindlessly scrolling through our social media feeds, only to look up from the blue-lit glow to wonder where the time’s gone. Our phones ping and we reach for them without thought. Even when our phone doesn’t demand attention, we feel its gravitational pull.
Gabriela Nguyen founded Appstinence, a peer-led collective, to help people reclaim their lives from the attention-hoarding digital tyrants in our pockets. The group offers Digital Lifestyle Planning services, promotes a social media–free lifestyle, and encourages people to downgrade from their smartphones. At twenty-four years old, she leads by example. After she realized just how much of her day was consumed by hopping between social media platforms, she took it upon herself to change her relationship with her phone and became “appstinent.” Since 2023, she has been off social media. For over a year, she has not used a smartphone as her main phone (she called me from a Light phone). What began as a personal experiment has turned into a movement for digital clarity, balance, and intentional living.
During our conversation, Nguyen shared how her personal journey helped her to formulate Appstinence’s 5D method, offering a practical framework for overcoming digital overuse. As a recent graduate of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a former teacher’s assistant, she also addresses how classrooms can benefit from tech-free environments. Nguyen’s and Appstinence’s work is timely and tangible proof that we don’t have to be at the mercy of our screens.
Caroline Coffey: What did your journey toward appstinence look like?
Gabriela Nguyen: Where I was born and raised played a really big role in my personal journey. I’m Gen Z, I was born in the 2000s, and I was born and raised in Silicon Valley. For anyone who’s familiar with the timeline of the technology use today, that was the lab, that was the place to be if you wanted to work for Apple, for Google, so I grew up on the receiving end of these technologies. I was a kid navigating childhood and adolescence while these technologies were being made to actually take advantage of a lot of the vulnerabilities of human beings in that stage of life. I got an iPod Touch when I was nine, a smartphone when I was around twelve. I got social media when those early platforms—Instagram, Snapchat, and Tumblr—started to take off, when I was entering early adolescence and going through puberty.
That’s how it went during my childhood. It started with the iPod Touch, and then the iPod Touch became a smartphone, and the smartphone became one social media account, which became two then three. Before I knew it, I’d spent about ten years of my adolescence chronically online. That was my life. No one had presented to me the idea that we didn’t need to use these technologies.
I think it took me so long to come to the conclusion that appstinence is the way that I wanted to live my life because I didn’t have a big blowout moment; it was sort of death by a thousand cuts. There was a bit of focus fracturing, and I was also not spending as much time with my family and on work. It was a whole host of things.
I think sometimes there’s this impression that when these technologies changed, immediately the world didn’t feel the same. I personally don’t think that that’s true. Yes, there was a moment that some big names stood on stage and presented this new technology to the world. And yes, things were never the same. But the actual adoption of that technology, in terms of making it so that you realized that your day-to-day life was different, was not fast enough for people to notice that something bad was going to happen in society. When I ask older people who are in their forties and fifties and sixties, they’ll tell me that in the moment it didn’t quite seem like anything huge changed, but then looking back things were different.
Some people think, “Well, this is just the way life is,” or “That’s just the modern tax of being a person these days; you have to have social media, you have to deal with algorithms constantly.” And I came to the conclusion that that thinking was really a resignation.
CC: It’s interesting, my story is almost the reverse. I never wanted a phone as a kid. I was incredibly resistant. I think I got my first phone as a Christmas present; families were giving their kids phones as a fifth-grade graduation present, and my mom kind of thrust it upon me, after holding out for a while. And then I didn’t have social media for some time; I made my first social media profile at a friend’s behest during the pandemic. Even now, Instagram is really my only true social media profile, and with just the one I’ve noticed my usage snowball. I get incredibly distracted by reels. I’ve imposed a time limit upon myself, but I’m always bypassing it. One of the cornerstones of Appstinence is the 5Ds method to get off social media. Can you talk a bit about it and explain how you went about devising this procedure?
GN: There are five general steps that you go through at your own pace, on your own time, to go from being chronically online, as I was, to where I am now, which is being Appstinent, not having social media, and ideally also not using a smartphone as your main phone anymore, and then to be able to do that in a meaningful way that proactively encourages close relationships with the people that you care about.
The first step is not technically included in the 5Ds, but it is really important to prepare for this process. The first thing is to write why you are leaving social media. There’s various reasons why people might do it. They might say, “I have a personal gripe against big tech companies.” Some people instantly go to productivity.
One thing we really emphasize with appstinence is we want to de-emphasize deleting your social media as the ultimate productivity hack that you see all the time. It is true when you delete your social media, you will be more productive, but that should not be a primary goal. There’s so many other ways that technology can distract you. It’s, for one, really demoralizing if you quit social media and you realize that you can just scroll the news and be just as unproductive as you were when you had social media. The emphasis should really be on your personal relationships.
The second thing is to create a list of realistic analog activities that you can do in a given week. I think a lot of times, again, there’s this trendy romanticization of deleting your social media and being free. It’s tied to the productivity thing—people will say things like, “I’ve always wanted to become fluent in this language,” or “I want to do this expensive, time-consuming hobby.” I’m not saying that you can’t do that, and over a long span of time you definitely can achieve those things, but in any given week it has to be what’s most realistic.
First and foremost, you’re centering your wellbeing. There’s only so many hours in the day. So realistically, we don’t recommend people to say, “Alright, now that I don’t have social media, I’m going to kayak every day.” Is that technically possible? Yeah, if you live by a lake. But when I’m focusing on the list of priorities, there are other things to prioritize over hobbies.
This is targeted towards Gen Z, and most of us are adults now, and now we have a lot to take care of. You’d be really surprised how little time you have in a week to suddenly rock climb three days a week. The five and a half hours that Gen Z averages on social media was displacing a lot of things that you should be doing. So rather than filling that time with hobbies, the first thing you should be doing is actually just doing the things you should have already been doing.
Then the third one is hard for people: take a really honest accounting of the people that you care to keep in touch with. When you get off social media, what will inevitably happen is you will lose touch with a lot of people because you’ll find out that social media mediates your relationships. Social media creates so many little ways to passively be in touch with people.
When you get offline, it presents a good opportunity to test who’s actually actively reciprocating a relationship with you. I don’t want there to be so many mediators that I can’t really tell how close we are because it’s so easy for you to just click and send a TikTok as opposed to remembering to give me a phone call and talk to me for half an hour after work. There’s just more friction and effort in that. People are going to fall away, but that time that you spend passively keeping in touch with two dozen people will get reinvested into the people that you say that you really want to be really close with.
Before I knew it, I’d spent about ten years of my adolescence chronically online. That was my life. No one had presented to me the idea that we didn’t need to use these technologies.
Then the first step, the first D, is to decrease your use. Decreasing your use starts off with some basic technological changes. We really emphasize changing your environment. An example of changing your environment is the friends that you’re hanging out with. If you want to get in shape, hang out with friends who go to the gym, as opposed to friends who are eating poorly. Very similarly, start with the type of technology in your home and the platforms that you use and engage with those that actually encourage the type of behavior you’d like.
We recommend certain ad blockers and ad free browsers that are easy, and free, and give more customizability in the search engine. You also can use certain plugins like Unhook, which blocks YouTube recommendations; about seventy percent of the traffic on YouTube is from recommendations. So it’s like, did you really want to watch that video, or did you just click on something that the machine knew that you would click on?
The other part of the decrease step is going back to what we call “calling culture,” or the idea of using phone calls to keep in touch with people and starting to build a habit in this stage of calling people. If you’re switching your habits and social capital over to the phone, you consider who you call, how you talk to someone, how they’ll reciprocate. If I’m calling people more, they’ll get into the habit of calling to maintain this friendship. It’s always so much more vulnerable to get a phone call from someone. That’s why there’s a bit of a generational aversion to phone calls—because it’s vulnerable and synchronous.
The next step is to delete. These large platforms, like Instagram and X, have a thirty-day deactivation window. That thirty-day deactivation window matches the current addiction withdrawal advice around how much it takes for your brain to rewire in terms of its reward setting. A lot of studies will be like, “We had people quit social media for a week and their mental health got worse.” But you’re still in the withdrawal period at that point. You haven’t come out of it. You need the full thirty days to really rewire your brain.
It’s going to be that you switch over onto another platform because your brain just needs dopamine naturally, so it’s not going to feel like anything at first. But the point is just to reduce the number of places in which you can get this hyper-stimulus one by one. Deleting that last account is going to feel a lot easier than deleting the first account. As you’re deleting your platforms, you’re also increasing your participation in the analog world. In the real world, you’re calling people more, you’re just being out and about more.
These large platforms, like Instagram and X, have a thirty-day deactivation window. That thirty-day deactivation window matches the current addiction withdrawal advice around how much it takes for your brain to rewire in terms of its reward setting.
The next of the Ds is downgrade. We suggest that people downgrade their phone from a smartphone as their main phone and just keep the smartphone as a tool. I keep mine, I use it for storing photos, I use it for the camera, but it’s not my main phone. It’s part of changing your environment and your technological environment. Instead of being like, “I’m going to just not overuse my smartphone,” I’m just not going to use the smartphone at all. I don’t like the psychological weight of having to think about my screen time. If I just have a phone that doesn’t ever ask for my attention, I don’t ever have to think about my screen time. I can think about other things. I can think about what I’m writing, what I’m reading, and the people I want to call.
The last stage is depart. This is when you’ve reached the threshold, which is something I notice with my Gen Z clients, where they’ve developed a point of reference for how your life could be versus what it was, when they really feel like there’s a distance between them and the digital world. They’ve developed this social fitness to actually engage with the world because they’re not itching for the dopamine as much. You realize there’s so many other more beautiful ways to get the dopamine and the sense of the sensation and stimulus that we all look for in the world, which is why we scroll on these platforms ultimately.
CC: I’m curious as to how you’ve found that the process differs between people who are in their teens or their twenties, and those who come to you for help and are older.
GN: I feel like the biggest difference is that Gen Z understands what their life could be like without it in an abstract conceptual sense, but it’s sort of like explaining a place that’s really, really far away. I feel like when I say, “It’s nice to write letters to people,” sometimes I feel like what they hear is, “I should buy a carrier pigeon, then have a wax stamp on a scroll written in my blood.” For Gen Z, it’s like you have to literally show them an entire new life they’ve never seen before. There’s a multisensorial way that human beings understand things, and I can sit here and in beautiful, Pulitzer Prize–winning prose explain to you what life is like, but you have to try it for yourself.
One of the benefits of working with young people is that they are curious, energetic, and have this zeal that their life can be so much better. We help them to the threshold, and now they’re just so curious. You just have to get them to this point in which they’re like, “Oh, this is actually what it’s like.” The younger you are, the more willing you are to try new things.
Gen Z also has a more advanced understanding of persuasive design and what makes these platforms so compelling. If you grew up on these complicated, complex platforms, you’re more familiar with the differences of what they offer, stories versus main posts. If you were well into your adulthood when these technologies came out, you don’t use those platforms. You won’t commonly have a forty-year-old who has private stories on Snapchat. Gen Z is more aware of these social chess games that are enabled by various features because we’ve grown up on social media. There’s just a higher baseline level of complexity to the use of these platforms.
Naturally, the younger a client is, the longer the process takes. I had a client in his thirties, a millennial, who was working to decrease his news consumption and did so in less than a month. Again, he had this point of reference. He has executive control and a brain that was developed before social media. I’ll have other clients that take months just to get to the first step. Ultimately, the legwork is obviously with the person who does it. It’s such an adventure, and I am always so proud of everyone who tries this method and makes it work for themselves.
CC: You mentioned noticing missteps in the research that you’ve read. Could you elaborate on that? What deficiencies are you seeing and how do you think studies need to be better reframed?
GN: Jonathan Haidt talks about this. There’s studies that show digital media is not that bad for your mental health, but what a lot of these studies do, as he says, is that they actually blend all types of digital media together. He calls them blender studies, which is the idea that you’re doing an analysis of mental health impacts on a study that blends music and TV with social media. As we know, the impact of listening to music in terms of commonsense experience is different than scrolling on Instagram. But a lot of these studies group these various things together.
There’s different types of social media. There’s social media that’s like WhatsApp, which is more text-based design, but there’s also stories. Then Instagram has stories too but is used for a different purpose, and you have X, and all of them kind of have a different personality. X is you’re witty and cool and clever. Instagram is you’re hot. With Snapchat, things are disappearing and slightly promiscuous. There’s different tones. There should be studies that are very specific to certain age groups and certain platforms.
I feel like when I say, “It’s nice to write letters to people,” sometimes I feel like what they hear is, “I should buy a carrier pigeon, then have a wax stamp on a scroll written in my blood.”
The other thing that some studies do is look at really short-term detoxes. All these studies come up and find that getting off Facebook or Instagram makes your mental health worse. Well, it’s because you’re withdrawing from something that you’re addicted to and the withdrawal period sucks. In Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lemke, she talks about addiction recovery. It takes many months for your brain to rewire, and then you get out of that trough, and then your overall wellbeing gets better.
There’s also a third issue, which is kind of an unanswered question to some extent, which is how do you measure wellbeing? One of the things that seems to be missing from studies is a more holistic way of understanding what happens when you get off social media. It’s not just about quitting social media, it’s about what you do in place of that for overall, higher levels of wellbeing…. Of course, if you quit the only way that you’re interacting with people, you’re going to feel worse. Your social fitness has atrophied so much to the point that you haven’t even thought about the fact that you should replace it with real life friends. You’ve grown up in a world that doesn’t encourage you to see people in real life.
Over time, the research will get better, we’ll write better questions. Right now we’re definitely, from a research standpoint, in a stage where we aren’t yet asking the right questions. I see this a lot with media coverage on this topic, where they ask very binary questions. Is social media good or bad? That’s a very flat question. Good research begins with good questions.
A lot of studies are focused on quitting social media but not on wellbeing. Of course, if you quit the only way that you’re interacting with people, you’re going to feel worse.
In terms of the science side that informs the 5Ds method, it’s a lot of addiction recovery. How long is a withdrawal period? How does rewiring your reward system work? How long does it take? What do you need to do? What’s the importance of abstention in that process?
The other approach is based on thirty years of adult developmental research called the “immunity to change approach.” The “immunity to change” approach was developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education by two researchers, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. Their research basically showed that a lot of the core reasons why we can’t change our habits as adults is because of what they call “competing commitments,” or this idea that we have different goals that are contradictory to each other. The idea being that uncovering the subconscious beliefs that you have keeps you from moving toward your priorities.
In the 5Ds method, I’ve incorporated that, asking people, “What are your reasons for leaving social media?” People will quickly find out that if they figure out what are their reasons for leaving social media, whatever the addictive technology is, they’ll be better equipped to make change.
CC: Have you found that this digital detox process has enhanced spiritual life in any of your clients? Have you heard of people’s experiences where social media has made it harder for them to live out their spiritual practice?
GN: I grew up religious. I don’t consider myself religious anymore, but I went to Catholic school for fourteen years and was raised in the church, so I understand the tenets of what it means to have a relationship with God. I think one of the things that’s so important is simply what you pay attention to. If you want your attention to be on a relationship with God, it has to be that you have to have room in your mind to even just have that.
No matter how much good there is, no matter what incredible idea you might come across on social media, if you can’t focus, good luck.
Secondly, if you’re on social media, what are you not doing? You’re not out in the real world. If you’re building a life of faith and you’re putting your faith first, the test of your faith isn’t in the good times, it’s in the bad times. If you’re not putting yourself in situations for you to grow as a person in the physical world, it’s hard to actually have any kind of litmus test of how much faith you have if you’re constantly on social media, protected in your house where you don’t have to be vulnerable and meet new people and try new things and engage in the world.
I had a client whose faith was high on his list of reasons for leaving social media. In this particular case, this client had three reasons: faith, father, and fitness. Faith, he’s in a devoutly religious family. He is a husband, a father of three children, and he’s really into personal fitness. He had very excessive news consumption. One of the things I was trying to get at with him is, “If you’re going to build your faith, if you want to engage more deeply with Scripture, you have to have the room in your brain for it.” When we took away the news, he found he had a little bit of time each day to actually engage with his faith. He’s not filling his mind with things that push out the thoughts that he wants to have about his family, his faith, and his fitness. Now he also has the opportunity to then replace that time with more intentional things.
CC: I know for the past few years the PTA and board of education in my hometown have advocated for limiting access to phones in schools and have been discussing how that should be instituted. How do you see technology shaping the classroom, and what are your thoughts on instituting limitations?
GN: I have become really invested in phone-free school policies at all levels of education. I see this as a student and as a teacher. Technology has come in many different ways in the classroom. We had Chromebooks, then iPads came out, and I got one in high school. When you get to university, everyone has all the different types of technology and can use it anytime. The amount of technology we had for school slowly increased. From a student standpoint, I didn’t even notice it. No one really seemed to notice that anything was wrong until now.
I noticed the anxiety at the time, but I didn’t know that it was because of the technology I was using in the classroom. For example, there was constant grade anxiety. On the iPad that I had to use for school, we had to have PowerSchool. We would get notifications of our grade changing, even if it was just 0.3 percent, with a color associated with the direction that your grade went. You’d get tons of notifications throughout the day when you’re also trying to learn and socialize. It’s absolutely ridiculous. But it was just normal, because everyone else is doing it.
Kids are all scattered with their attention and concentrating on their technology, as opposed to actually learning. At the school I was teaching at, there was a computer class. The kids oftentimes were more invested in changing their wallpaper and trying to get on certain websites than what we were telling them to do. What was unfortunate was that the task that we were having them do was something that could have been done on paper.
On the iPad that I had to use for school, we had to have PowerSchool. We would get notifications of our grade changing, even if it was just 0.3 percent, with a color associated with the direction that your grade went.
This is a case for a lot of edtech; the task you’re having them do does not need to be on a computer. It’s not like we’re teaching subjects that have never been taught in the course of human history. You don’t need a computer to learn basic arithmetic. And of course there’s the financial cost to buying a computer for every student, and also the cost of attention and classroom management. As an assistant teacher, I felt like I was spending a good portion of the time putting out fires while the teacher was trying to teach. If we don’t set boundaries with technology and are spending more time with classroom management, it takes away from teaching the content.
CC: If a significant minority takes up the Appstinence method and downgrades their smart phones, what ripple effects do you think that might have on technology design, corporate strategy, our day-to-day lives, etc.? How else do you see they might try and hook us?
GN: One of the reasons why Appstinence calls for a full departure from these platforms is that the business model of these platforms is to harvest your attention as much as possible. If enough people left these platforms, the business model itself would prove to not work anymore, they would have to switch strategies altogether. If you’re going to put companies in a bind where the consumer base has voted with their clicks, with their dollars, then the companies will have to change. That would be the ultimate goal.
In that switching of strategies, we would have an open moment to question what would be a good, healthy business model for the people, not something that’s just good for the corporation’s bottom line. What would actually be a healthy business model for the building of technology? If mental health has become really important to consumers, what are ways that companies can restructure, or think of other collaborations, to give the consumer what they want? Corporations can make a profit while not exploiting the mental health and wellbeing of their consumer base.
If we’re thinking of how we would change corporate behavior, if offline is the new online, and we want to get Gen Z out in the real world, companies should create partnerships to get people out and about. If Uber wanted to increase their patronage, they could partner with Fandango. Uber says if you buy concert tickets from Fandango, we’ll get you twenty percent off the ride to that concert, or something along those lines.
I believe these companies can meet the bottom line without exploiting people through what we know is not good for mental health. The solution is not more ads, and I’m not saying we need more ads in real life. I’m saying get us out into the real world if you want us to be patrons of business.
CC: I hope that day comes.