Bay Area Harvard grad student launched new ‘Appstinence’ movement to quit social media

SAN JOSE, Calif. - It’s a concept hard to fathom among many Gen Zers — ditching your smartphone and retiring from social media. But it's what recent Harvard alumna 24-year-old Gabriela Nguyen has fully embraced as she works to help others do the same.

Local perspective:

The Bay Area native grew up in the Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the digital and tech world. She attended Presentation High School in San Jose, a school that identifies technology as "a pathway to success." 

Nguyen is part of what’s often referred to as the first generation of "social natives," people born into a world in which social media has always existed.

But around the age of 15, Nguyen developed an awareness that something about this way of life was inherently detrimental to her development, her ability to focus, and mental health.

"It was just this sort of a general dissolving of your quality of life," Nguyen shared with KTVU.

'Series of wake-up calls’

Nguyen, who completed her master's at the Harvard Graduate School of Education last May, explained that the awareness of social media’s effects didn’t happen overnight but was a slow process.

"You don't notice it until years in, and it's sort of like this little price that you pay for every funny video that you watch. For every funny video you watch, you sacrifice a little bit of your attention, a little bit of your time to focus, a little bit of the development of X skill, Y skill," she said. "But you don't think about those trade-offs that you're making at the time… Every YouTube video I watched. When was I watching it? Probably when I should've been talking to my dad, asking him how work was. Or wasn't hanging out with a friend."

She reflected on those moments as a teen in high school, especially growing up in an environment in which technology is ingrained in the culture. On her smartphone, she was doing what her friends were doing: watching YouTube, communicating with peers through social media, scrolling from post to post. 

But it wasn't a single one of these actions, but a culmination in which she would come to realize that each one of those digital engagements was taking away from real-life opportunities. 

"It would be like, oh man, it's really hard to focus to do my homework. Or oh my gosh, it's already 1 a.m., and I've been watching YouTube for like three, four hours already," Nguyen shared. "It's sort of these series of wake-up calls until you get to a point you’re like something is not working."

She said she tried to slowly wean herself off social media.

She attempted to use methods like decreasing her screen time and other tricks to control how much of her life was spent on her phone. 

Abstinence from social media

But it wasn't until she practiced full-on abstinence from her social media apps that she was able to truly disconnect, as she asked herself, "Could I just leave these platforms altogether?" 

It was a challenge she was willing to try. She started by deleting her Instagram account.

"I made it through the 30 days before my account fully deleted, and then I was like wait, this is kind of nice," she recalled, "And then that was sort of the reverse floodgates where it's usually one account, and then the second goes, then the third goes, and then before I knew it, I had changed my phone. It was over several years that this process happened because I went on a very organic system of self-discovery," Nguyen explained.

This experience was also what ultimately led her to launch this movement she’s cleverly named "Appstinence."

Her group offers support through free online educational resources, including bi-monthly meetings and weekly "office hours" during which team members, described as experienced Gen Z educators, present alternative phone options and methods to "reclaim your life from tech," the group's website said. 

Through her program, she offers guidance on how to start gaining control of digital addiction.

The 5D method 

Nguyen calls it the 5D method. Instead of cutting yourself off cold turkey, it’s a step-by-step process to help get off social media. 

The 5Ds are: decrease use, deactivate social media accounts one-by-one, and delete your apps, which happens automatically after 30 days of deactivation. Step 4 is to downgrade your device from a smartphone. And the final step is to depart from the digital/social media world.

"The 5D method is what I would have wished I had when I was 14, so I didn't have to take almost eight years to try to get off-line. I could do it in, I don't know, maybe six months, a year or less?" the movement's founder said. 

Designed to be addictive 

Nguyen said making these changes is about creating new habits to take the place of your relationship with addictive technology with its algorithms that cater platforms to align with users' interests. 

"It's setting guard rails to keep the ever persuasive platforms away from trying to invade themselves into our lives because that is how they are intentionally designed. What makes this sort of last 15 years of technology so different than the other ways of technology, is that they're designed to take as much of your attention as possible," Nguyen explained, saying that’s how these companies make money.

"Selling your attention, and they make a profit, so it's any kind of benefit you get from it, is like a happenstance byproduct of the product," she said.

The biggest change toward achieving appstinence, Nguyen said, is ditching your smartphone as your primary mode of communication, to prevent at-your-fingertips access to social media.

Instead, people are encouraged to use a brick phone or flip phone which offers basic functionalities like texting. 

Nguyen said this move will help shape new habits like seeking new ways to connect with friends, eliminating the practice of doomscrolling on social media, and creating more time face-to face-interactions.  

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"As you progress in the appstinent lifestyle, the sort of high intensity technology also just kind of starts to fade away naturally in the background. I mean, you just start to create habits, and you just don't really end up using it anymore," she said, adding, "For example, I have my smartphone to take high-quality photos, but as I was getting off social media, I was just finding that I just wasn't taking as many photos of things in general anymore."  

Dig deeper:

A big part of the movement also involves rewiring the brain to learn how to function without being attached to social media, which, she said, slowly takes a toll on your brain. 

"It's like the equivalent of just paying the minimum on your credit card for like a decade, and you're like, oh my gosh, the interest rates, I'm so much more in debt than I was if I just paid it off in full or just lived within my means. It's like living within the means of your brain, like if I knew that my brain couldn't handle watching hours of TikTok a day. But no one said any of these things. You didn't learn it in school," Nguyen reflected, saying that social media’s emergence happened essentially unchecked.

"In Silicon Valley, you know, the ideal thing was that you study computer science, and you went to robotics colloquiums and did science, technology, engineering, math. No one said, ‘Is this okay we're building this product, the ethics of it?’ Nope. None of that. Zero."

Without much questioning, people just got on board.

"And then you're like, oh my gosh, I feel like I'm now, I'm struck with sort of like a mental psychological emotional debt in a way these platforms cause. Okay, now where do I find out about things I wanna do? News? Keeping in touch with people?" she asked, adding, "All these different things that you'd relied on these platforms for, but because they've price gouged me, I can't afford it anymore. So I'm like okay, now I need to leave."

The Appstinence founder wants her movement to act as a support for those who want to leave, helping them get off their overdependence of social media. It’s a challenging proposition but one she feels is worth every effort. 

"That's what I've been trying to do the last couple years, and it's been very much worth the challenge, and I see a new way of living now, the way people just frankly lived before all of this, but it's not easy. It's worth it, right? But it's not easy, and it's not an overnight thing. That's really important to know," Nguyen said.

Global movement

Nguyen, who is now back in the Bay Area, said her group has gone global, noting that Appstinence is holding an event in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, this coming weekend. 

What began on a college campus, targeted mostly at fellow Gen Zers, participants now include adults of all ages around the world. 

"We really want this to be a very inclusive effort in the sense that you know we wanna make it clear, this is not just like an American issue or like an upper rung, you know, city goer issue," she said. "This is a problem that it seems to copy and paste itself in different communities and regardless of their demographic differences."

Here at home, Abstinence promotes ways for K-12 classrooms to implement low-tech or no-tech policies, calling it the "gold standard of learning." 

The group also noted phone bans in the classroom have been a step toward controlling tech use in educational settings.

Wider tech resistance movement

Nguyen said she officially launched her Appstinence movement last summer, building off a wider tech resistance movement, in which hundreds of thousands of people have now joined. 

The movement has had a larger presence on the East Coast, especially among young adults in New York City, Nguyen said, but there's evidence that the push to disconnect has been gaining momentum out here.  

"I always joke with my team that we know that we've made it because we've penetrated ‘headquarters’ and somehow made our way back to Silicon Valley," she said.

She said the emergence of every new technology has historically been accompanied by pushback from skeptics who question that technology.

But this pushback, she said, is different.

The effects on youth

"The difference with this last round is the sheer magnitude and intensity in adoption in which we've seen these technologies, are younger than ever," Nguyen explained, noting she was 10 years old when she set up her first social media account.

She pointed to the findings by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book "The Anxious Generation," which identifies social media smartphones as major contributors to the mental health crisis among youth in the present day. 

"The fact that the average age that a kid gets a smartphone right now, it's younger than 12,"  Nguyen said. "If someone who's well into adulthood can't put their phone down during a work meeting, how are you going to expect a 10-year-old to just be like, ‘Oh, just focus in school. Just keep the phone in your pocket.’ It's a very unrealistic expectation."

And being in the Bay Area, the pressure to adopt this way of life as normal is even more pervasive. 

"I think that's what took me so long to come to that conclusion," she said, "like something is wrong, and I need to change, is because as you know, in Silicon Valley, there was this expectation that we're just forward moving."

That belief that moving forward means consuming technology as a way of life has been confusing and contradictory for many, she noted, saying it's a "sort of subtle expectation that we adopt a bit more technology in every facet of our lives while at the same time being expected to not become addicted to it or overdependent." 

So, those who turn to Appstinence have questions about existing in a world where addictive technology is taking up more and more spaces but want to resist being beholden to it. 

It's a challenge that she finds contradictory and requires folks to think forward, by looking to a time before people were so dependent on their smartphones and reliant on social media to feed a digital need for stimuli. 

Irononic role model 

Nguyen said when she thinks about her role in this tech resistance movement, she said she’s oddly and paradoxically inspired by a revolutionary figure in the modern tech world. 

"When I think about who am I actually modeling when I try to do this work and, ironically, it's the visionary ability of Steve Jobs… he stood on stage presented this product and said, ‘There's a product every once in a while that comes and changes the world.’" Nguyen said. "It’s an idea that he had, an idea of how the world could be."

Jobs’ vision of what the iPhone would become was one that many people could not even imagine. Even he himself didn’t anticipate how it would lead to products like TikTok, Nguyen speculated.  

"As much as I disagreed with the tenets of that idea, it's the idea that you can see the world and believe that it could be a different way, even if you don't have all the answers," she said, as she also drew parallels with her efforts and that of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg who built his product some 20 years prior on the same college campus where she launched Appstinence.

"I don't know exactly what this world is going to look like in 10, 15 years, if the world becomes appstinent. I just know that I have some kind of vision for the way that human beings are just going to be allowed to be a bit more mortal than we are, because at the core that's what that contradiction is. It's like, oh, just a lot more technology, but don't be enslaved to it. It requires a transcendental level of self-control, willpower, mindfulness. It's really tough."

The irony of Jobs being her inspiration for this movement stems from her embracing this role of being a creator, a visionary, and a product of the Silicon Valley.

"That was part of the entrenchment, if you think about it really, of me growing up in Silicon Valley, which is, how do I learn what it means to make something for other people," she said, "make something that people feel like really close in their heart. And I think that's a lot of people who join the Appstinence movement. They feel so deeply that something isn't right with the way that they use technology but don't know how to then change it."

At the core of its message, Nguyen’s group wants to empower people to choose how to use technology, not let technology run their life.  

"The mission of the appstinence movement is to restore the fiber of the human experience —— the depth and care of our relationships," the group’s website said. "So choose technology that helps you matter to others and others to you." 

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