5 Step Method For Teenagers To Wean Off Social Media With Gabriela Nguyen

 

In this new podcast, Dr. Jordan interviews Gabriela Nguyen, founder of Appstinent, about her 5D Step Method to wean off social media.

Despite teens’ fears of losing friends, this process encourages them to replace social media with meaningful activities, including alternative ways to stay connected via phone calls, video calls, and texts, as well as more in-person connections.

5D Method: Decrease, Deactivate, Delete, Downgrade, & Depart

Prepare

• Journal your deepest fears about quitting social media.
• Identify your ultimate reason for leaving.
• List realistic daily activities to replace social media.
• Recognize that campers don’t miss their phones when replaced with real connections and fun.
• Write down the most important people in your life.

Decrease

• Unfollow ALL “junk” accounts—gossip pages, news stations, your ex—anything that negatively affects you or steals your time.
• Remove social media apps from your phone and laptop. Only access them via your laptop browser without saving your password.
• Turn off all non-urgent notifications.
• Increase real-world engagement using your list of analog activities.
• Prioritize close family and friends—schedule phone calls and meet-ups.
• Stop multitasking—be present and take more time for what you’re already doing.

Deactivate

• Once you notice your social media use decreasing (this may take weeks or months), deactivate the account you use the least.
• Major platforms provide a 30-day window before permanent deletion.
• During this time, continue increasing real-world engagement.

Delete

• After 30 days, your account will automatically be deleted.
• Repeat the Deactivate and Delete steps until all accounts are gone.
• Do not rush the process—allow yourself time to adjust.

Downgrade

• If possible, switch to a “transition device” that is less advanced than a smartphone but more functional than a basic flip phone.
• A device like the Cat S22 has a small, slow display that discourages excessive phone use.

Depart

• By now, you are months or even a year into your journey.
• Review your initial list of fears—did they come true? How did they make you feel?
• Reflect on your reasons for quitting social media—was it worth it?
• Understand that, like any lifestyle change, there are trade-offs, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Resources

• Find more information on Gabriela Nguyen and the 5D Process at appstinent.org.
• Check out Dr. Jordan’s previous podcasts on social media:
  • How Parents Can Know When Their Daughter Is Ready for Social Media
  • Worried About Unhealthy Messages About Beauty on Social Media? Teach Your Daughter to Become Media and Image Savvy
• Watch for Dr. Jordan’s new book:
  • Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying By the Seat of Your Pants (Revised edition, publishing in late March 2025).

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

5 Step Method For Teenagers To Wean Off Social Media With Gabriela Nguyen

The Impact Of Social Media On Teenagers

I am back with a brand-new episode of the show. For those of you who stop by every episode, we talk about issues that relate to girls, mostly grade school through college age. I hope to raise your awareness about what’s going on for girls, what they’re thinking about, and what’s in their hearts, and also give you some tools to help support them maybe in more effective ways.

In this episode, we are going to talk about a topic that always comes up. Every talk that I give all over the world no matter where I’m at, people are always asking about phones and social media, but I’m going to talk about a little piece of that pie, not the whole pie. I wanted to do this for two reasons. One of them was, I saw a girl in my counseling practice. She is in seventh grade. Her parents were worried because she was falling apart. Her grades are going down. She wasn’t turning in her schoolwork, behind on her work, and having meltdowns at home. She has always been a dramatic, intense kid, but it has worsened.

It got to the point that they allowed her to get on Snapchat. Also, she had a little bit of time on Instagram. That was one of the only things that had changed. They made some agreements with her and she kept breaking them. They would take it away for a day. She’d get it back and break agreements and they’d take it away again. She would have a meltdown, threaten to hurt herself and jump out of her window. These parents didn’t know what to do, so they brought her in.

They expressed so many fears about how she would be able to manage her life in seventh grade if she did not have Snapchat and social media. That’s a common concern that a lot of kids, teens, and parents have. I decided to bring in an expert or someone who has been thinking and researching about this. I found her in an article.

There’s a site called Substack and After Babel. Jonathan Haidt, which a lot of you may know the name because he came up with the book The Anxious Generation, which I read. It has gotten a lot of press, thank goodness. He’s one of the people behind the movement to have phone-free schools and to go back to more of a play-based childhood.

 

 

I invited a woman, Gabriela Nguyen, who is a grad student at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She’s done a couple of things that are awesome. One of them is she created a site called APPstinent, which is a way for her to give people some tools. It’s like, “If you want to wean off or if you want a lesson, here’s how you can do it.” It’s not a 1, 2, and 3 things. There are a lot of good, interesting things that went into this. That’s why I invited Gabriela Nguyen to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

First of all, I want to thank you and your audience for being a channel for us to spread the APPstinent message to everybody and generally, for the invitation.

It sounds like you went through a period where you were pretty inundated with social media and then you decided to wean off. I’m curious about what triggered that and what were the benefits to you when you did it.

This is something I want to always emphasize as the general theme of my story. I am also from the Silicon Valley. I’ll add that too as a double whammy. I had these technologies when I was very young. Around the age of nine years old, I started with the iPod Touch and then slowly got all of the social media. Post-2010, things started to pick up. For about ten years, I was what they call chronically online, which is your whole world, and your perception is mediated through these platforms. Whatever happens online feels very real to you.

The point that was my “breaking point.” It was not this grand moment that was going to make the news. It was not something that was a big blowout fight or anything like that. I grew up in a more academically intense environment and I had these commitments where I wanted to do in school and to learn but I was very committed to my online life because of the amount of time I was spending.

It came to a crossroads one night. It was very late at night. I was in high school. I was having such a hard time this particular night to not look at my phone while I was trying to do an assignment. This isn’t a huge glamorous moment where I was like, “There was a huge epiphany.” I had this intense moment of, “My phone feels like it’s my best friend but I also hate it. It feels like it’s betraying me and sabotaging me when I’m trying to do well in life, focus on school, make my parents proud, and do all these things.”

I started to see posts over the next year or two from other people who are like, “I’m detoxing from social media. I’m going to go off for 1 week or 3 days,” or something like that. I thought, “Maybe I can try that.” For a good 3 or 4 years, I tried the moderate use philosophy, which is I was going to maximize the benefits of social media. I was going to minimize the harms, set the right screen time blocks, and set the right boundaries.

I was going to perfectly optimize the system so that my attention is only ever mine, even though I’m still giving it away to these companies. I was convinced that that was the way to move forward. It wasn’t until I got to the point that that was not working. I realized, “If this is a more drastic situation than I thought, what else could I do? What if I deleted my account?” I had this feeling that I needed to back away.

For a long time, I went back and forth. This is something that’s important that I built into the method that I use to help people get off of social media. The major platforms like Instagram and X have a 30-day deactivation window, so you can’t immediately delete your account. You can only deactivate it and then after 30 days, it will delete. All your information will be erased on your end anyways.

I tried to do that. I tried to make it past the deactivation window, and it was hard. In one intense push, I made it past that window with my Instagram. The way it works is you have built up all this grand social capital. You had all these followers, posts, highlights, and things. Once my account was deleted, it was that extra boundary where if I had to make accountant again, I’d have to re-follow people and go through all the social friction of people realizing why they thought I unfollowed them. That kept me away from Instagram.

Over time, I started to realize I started to fall asleep a little bit better and my attention was a little bit better. One after the next, the dominoes started to fall. This whole philosophy of APPstinent was not something that I woke up to one day and be like, “This is what’s going to do it.” It was a natural end to going through each stage of the process of trying to figure out what I could do about this habit. It was completely natural.

Technology itself is not just changing. It is also piling on top of itself, and its compounding effect is something to be aware of. Share on X

How Social Media Is Changing Generations

It was nothing I preconceived of this grand idea before and then it was going to turn into this thing. It changed so much about my life. If I were to tell my fifteen-year-old self, “There’s one thing that you could change that would make your life better, it would be to get off social media and not fight that uphill battle.” One thing else I’ll say about this is that I’m in an interesting end of Gen Z. A lot of people call Gen Z the digital generation. One thing in addition to that that I would argue is that if you were going to go along with the measurement of technological innovation, you can split Gen Z up into three generations.

The older third is anyone maybe 21 and above. I’m on the younger end of that. I grew up with Instagram as the brown Instagram before it changed to the new pink hip one. It was pre-algorithm. It didn’t have stories. It was that version. The mid-tier of the generation is the TikTok short-form generation. They went through the pandemic with TikTok. It took off in 2018 and started to change the game in 2020 and 2021. The bottom third are the ones who are dealing with character AI and AI companionship. The overarching theme here is that it’s not one stage ends and then the next begins.

The youngest generation has to deal with all three categories. Through puberty, I didn’t have AI companions. I didn’t have short-form videos either. It was not until I got to my later adolescence that I had those. These are piling up. That’s something I want your audience to know is the intensity of living in the digital age as a young person is also intensifying. It’s not that the technology itself is changing. It’s piling on top of itself. That compounding effect is something to be aware of.

As you were talking about growing up and all that stuff, what I heard in your voice is what I hear in a lot of girls’ voices on my retreats, camps, and counseling practice, which is stress. Even the way you’re describing it, I was getting stressed hearing your story, which happens all the time to me when I hear girls talking about how it affects them.

Stress is a good way to put it. It’s also like work in that sense, too. The average screen time for Gen Z on social media is a couple hours a day. If you were to add that up for a week, and this is the average as a part-time job for a considerable portion of that population. It’s over five hours a day, which is almost a full-time job.

It is stress as it is work because you have a lot of adults who always have their email on them. That’s their text message because they’re always attached to work. Imagine doing that while you’re also a teenager as well. Not only that. You’re in a period in your development that’s also sensitive to social reinforcement. It was like having a job except nobody was paying me and other people were making money off of it.

One of the things I read in Jonathan Haidt’s book, the Anxious Generation. It’s not what they’re doing. It’s what they’re not doing when they’re spending five hours on TikTok or whatever. That’s an important question. What are they not doing?

When I look back, I have no regrets, but if you were to advise the next generation, which I hope that we are, it is even thinking about the time that you spoke with your parents. It was very rare that anyone ever had Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter and had their parents also follow them on there. If you think about it, you’re not even interacting with your parents on there. Anytime you’re interacting with people online, you’re not talking to your parents.

Oftentimes, people didn’t have their siblings on their social profiles as well. You are turning away from your immediate family members, which, to me, in my own life are the absolute bedrock of everything that I’m able to do. To be able to look back and say that I gave so much of that time away to people that I wouldn’t even know if they’re alive is a trade-off that I want to advise other people.

Sit down and take an honest accounting of the time that you spend online and who you are talking to when you’re there. You can even calculate the amount of time like, “Between how many hours my dad works and my mom works and my brothers are away at school, how much time do I have with them in between all of that? How much of that time am I spending talking to them?” You’d be very surprised what you come to.

Let’s get into the meat of it because this is what I want parents to hear. Lots of teens want to lessen and let their time go off, take breaks, forget as you did, and go cold turkey but a lot of them have a hard time doing that because they don’t know how. You have what you call a 5D method, five steps that you can take. This is not just teenagers, by the way. This is also adults. This is anybody to help people learn how to lessen or wean off. Let’s talk about that. The first step is about preparing.

There is a lot of information that comes through social media that it makes you feel the need to know something even though it has no real impact on your life. Share on X” via=”no”]

I’ll give a general outline of the 5D method, which is a little bit of the background of how I’ve come to that. I wanted people to also understand that we didn’t have to wait for this movement against the misuse of technology and social media to get big enough to make a change or policymakers or government officials to make a change or Congress to do something, or even for parents to make that change for their children. I wanted Gen Z to know that you, for free, can make this change.

The 5D Method: Decrease, Deactivate, Delete, Downgrade, Depart

The 5D method is a combination of my personal experience, developmental research, addiction research, and also retirement lifestyle planning that I pulled into the 5Ds of getting off of social media and downgrading your phone from a smartphone. The first 5D is to decrease your use. The second is to deactivate your accounts. The third is to have those accounts deleted, which is a passive step. The fourth is “optional” but highly recommended, which is to downgrade your phone.

Honestly, I wouldn’t even say it’s optional. I recommend it. Do it. The last is to depart. It’s s that moment you feel like there’s a distance between you and the digital world and you fully re-oriented back to the real one. Before all this though, it’s important to prepare for this process. Something that I want to make very clear for anyone who isn’t Gen Z is how big of a change it is to not use social media. That is a big change but it’s doable and worth the trade-off.

In the preparation stage, there are a couple of things that I recommend. The first is to make a very honest list of the people in your life who are worth keeping in touch with, your parents, siblings, and close friends. I’m not talking about the people that might be nice to have in your network at some point. I’m talking about the people who you didn’t hear from in a week or in ten days. You would probably be concerned like, “What’s going on?” It is those people.

Another is a realistic list of analog activities that you can do. Realistic is a keyword here. Maybe you love rock climbing but saying, “I’m going to suddenly start rock climbing twice a week,” isn’t realistic for most people. Think about taking a walk around the block. I’m not talking about a long trek. Spin around the block. Maybe read a book or pick up a pen and paper if you like drawing or doing any kind of art. Maybe get into dancing again or any old hobbies that might have fallen by the wayside.

The other two things are, what is your ultimate reason for leaving social media and your specific reason. Not the reason that read in magazines and the researchers tell you. For you in your own life because social media’s so personal, what’s the thing that you think is the reason that you should stop? The last one is, what are your fears?

If you were to leave social media or even try to engage in the process of leaving social media, what do you think would happen? If that thing happens, what is the worst-case scenario for that situation? Write them out and keep all these little questions and preparation steps on a piece of paper. Once you’ve done that, you can get into the practical, “We’re going to start making some of the changes.” The first D is decrease.

I want to ask a question before you for into about preparing. What I hear a lot from parents and teens is the hardest part about the preparation is their fear of losing their friends, that they’re going to be alone, people are going to forget them, or not going to be asked out, and not know what’s going on because everybody’s talking. How do you address that?

For every single way that I’ve removed social media, I replaced it with another way to communicate with them. It wasn’t as if I was like, “I’m off social media. I’m going to entirely fall off the map with my relationships. If they want to get in contact with me, they will find a way.” You have to be very proactive in that case to find a way to keep in touch with people. There’s a way to do it without having a very complicated mediator, which is Instagram, Snapchat, X, and what have you.

What APPstinent calls for is abstaining from social media but replacing it with phone calls, video calls, and text messages. As I find most people conclude, that ends up super sufficient to keep in touch with people. It also is a good compromise between having no way to be contacted, which is very difficult, to have no way that my grandfather could call me. At the same time, not having all these different ways the other people express themselves for me to engage with them.

If I want to talk to somebody, I’ll hop on a phone call, a FaceTime, or maybe a Zoom call or send a text message if perhaps it needs to be a little bit faster. I want to emphasize that worked for a long time before we had social media. It was like, “Give me a phone call.” It has to do with making sure that we cultivate a culture where people expect that. Part of it is when I switched to that, my friends were a little bit jarred at first. It was a little bit, “If I don’t have you on these social media, then the rhythm of the friendship does reset.”

It’s part of setting boundaries and building relationships. How do I feel comfortable communicating with somebody? How can I also accommodate how they feel comfortable communicating with me? Having those conversations explicitly is important to building the intimacy of the friendship and asking, “If you feel like you don’t see me on social media, is one call a week enough for you to feel that we’re in touch enough?” Maybe they say yes or no. Calibrating that for each person and each of the relationships that you find should be important.

The other thing too is in terms of missing out on a lot of things, it’s one of those where you’d be very surprised what you don’t know about. This is stuff that continues. I have friends who come to me to sort out certain drama that they’re going through. The vast majority of the time, simply having social media was the way that they got into this drama in the first place.

If you centralize productivity as a reason to get off social media, you get into that territory of over-optimizing your life. This can lead you back to technology a lot of times. Share on X

There’s a lot of information that comes through that you feel like once you’ve known it, you would’ve wanted to know, but if you didn’t know it, it wouldn’t have impacted your life and have some amount of complications. I want to very simply push back on the idea that simply knowing more is always better. That’s not the case.

When girls come to my weekend retreats and summer camps, at the check-in table, one of the questions we ask is, “Where’s your phone?” It’s a very tense moment for some of the girls because they’re so attached. They’re spending 5 to 7-plus hours a day on it. They’ll have all these excuses like, “I need it as an alarm clock. I need some music before I go to bed.” We say, “We have ways. We can do that without your phone.”

At the end of a week without it or without any of that sort of thing, I always ask the girls, “Did you miss your phone?” The answer 100% of the time is, “I didn’t miss it at all,” because they replace it with talking to people and connecting. We’re walking and talking. After dinner, we sit around at the picket tables and we talk. No one whips out a phone so now there are eight phones out. That connection was the replacement that most of them said like it wasn’t that big a deal because they were getting their needs met.

That’s something that’s so key to the 5D method. For everything that you take away, there is a replacement for it. Making sure that replacement fits your style of communication and the needs that you need for your lifestyle is the part where it becomes very personalized. I’ve found the same to be true.

The first step was decrease. Tell us about that first.

In the decrease stage, this is the part where there are a bit more technical changes that you can make. Decrease are all the different ways that you’ve probably read to decrease your engagement with social media. You’re not deleting it. This is to dip your toes in the water. There are a lot of things at this stage. It involves a couple of certain changes to your actual phone and your laptop, for example. It could be things like removing the apps on your phone. It’s not that you won’t have access to these apps. You just won’t carry it with you every second of the day.

Turning off all non-essential notifications and charging your phone outside of the bedroom are widely recommended for a reason. They work. In terms of your laptop, it’s setting certain blockers if you feel like you need them. I don’t believe in overlying on blockers. Sometimes, people think if they had their computer with the right screen time blocks and the right parental controls, it would change their behavior. That’s a very whack-a-mole situation. They’re more of a gentle guide. Physically removing yourself from the technology does more than the screen time blockers tend to do. That’s the first part. It’s the technical changes of the decrease stage.

The second part of the decrease stage is increasing your engagement in the real world. You’re reverse displacing. If engaging in social media displaces time in the real world, real-world time will displace time on social. That’s engaging in that. Take out that list from the preparation stage of the realistic analog activities that you said you would do.

Make time that you’ve written out in a schedule like, “I’m going to do 30 minutes a day of learning this language. I’m going to do a twenty-minute walk every evening after dinner,” and stick to that. You’ll be very surprised how much additional time in your life you engage in these little hobbies. Even if you don’t think it’s anything grand. It doesn’t have to be. It will take up your time.

There is one note I want to put in the decrease stage that I think is important because I see a lot in articles and things like that. Quitting social media is the ultimate productivity hack. I want to decentralize productivity as a reason to get off social media. It is a happy byproduct. If you centralize productivity as a reason to get off, you get into that territory of over-optimizing your life, which can lead you back to technology a lot of times. Put that to the wayside and start to allow yourself to take more time to do the things you’re already doing.

People ask me, “What hobbies and things did you start doing again?” Honestly, the manual was reading. I didn’t suddenly decide I wanted to learn how to unicycle. I didn’t learn how to juggle and things like that. It was nothing grand. I was able to do laundry and only do laundry. I didn’t have to listen to a lecture at the same time I was doing laundry because I had more time to do things one at a time. If I’m walking to class, I have a little time to kill. I can stop and talk to somebody. I wasn’t rushing because I left my homework at the last minute. That’s the decrease stage generally.

We’re talking to Gabriela Nguyen who is a grad student at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a founder of what you would call an organization called APPstinent. It’s offering help to people who want to decrease or get off of social media. She has a nice 5D method to help all of us and our teenagers to do that.

I have a dear friend, when she was in college, got engaged. It got to the point where they had a date and sent out invitations. A month or two before the wedding, she got cold feet and started thinking, “This isn’t right. This doesn’t feel right. I don’t want to do this.” She called it off even after all that preparation and everything.

I asked her, “How did you get to that? You were able to access your intuition and to know what’s right for you and all that.” She’s around my age. She said, “I used to walk around campus at night. That was my time to think. That was the time I got a chance to go inside and know what was right for me.” It’s one of the things you’re talking about when you decrease. When you stop multitasking, you have time where you’re doing the laundry or taking a walk without all that other noise. It is a time to gather yourself and/or be with yourself.

That reminds me, there’s a space on the internet that has become very popular for both men and women, which is the self-development side of the internet. It’s a huge industry. A lot of the time, they provide helpful information. You can get into this trap of over-consuming that content, which a lot of times is through social media. What ends up happening is it displaces walking at nighttime. I’m not necessarily advocating for walking at night, but the idea of having time to reflect and process information.

The whole selling point of the digital world is it is so frictionless. But everything you lose out there can be regained in real life. Share on X

The ultimate trap is over-consuming self-development content about how to get offline. There’s a lot of social media content about how to get offline that you’ll find in the forms of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and things like that. You can spend several hours a day consuming that content, and by consuming that content, you never go offline. It’s this weird trap to get into with self-development. I see it all the time. It’s still important to have that.

It doesn’t have to be a long period either and it doesn’t have to be, “I meditate for three hours straight on my life every evening.” It could be ten minutes before you go to bed. You reflect, “How was my day? What am I grateful for? What do I have to do tomorrow?” They don’t have to be grand thoughts. They can be like, “I should probably do laundry before dinner time.” It can be passive thoughts. Allow your brain to be only with itself, is very important.

Your first step for getting off of social media is to deactivate. Your second step is delete.

The first step is decrease. The second step is to deactivate. That’s the first big checkpoint. You deactivate the account that you use the least. The reason why I put the least is because the way I find it is that for young people who use social media, a lot of times the ones you use the most are the ones that your friends are also on the most. If you’re able to start to slowly decrease these sources of stimulus that you can get, it starts to make it a little bit easier if you’re not so scattered between different platforms.

You start with the platform that you use the least and you deactivate it. For most accounts, it starts a 30-day window. It very conveniently matches the four-week abstention period that’s recommended by Dr. Anna Lembke who wrote the Dopamine Nation. I forget what exact field she’s in, but she does addiction research out of Stanford. She recommends at least four weeks. That 30-days matches that 4 weeks perfectly, so I thought I’d construct the program around that.

After you’ve done that, you continue doing all the things you’re doing in decrease. You keep your texts a certain way. You keep the phone out of the bedroom. You keep engaging in your hobbies. The idea is that you’d be doing that so robustly that you wouldn’t even notice that 30-days has passed and your account was deleted. You don’t have to write down, “It’s January 1st. On 31st is when my account deletes.” Deactivate it and don’t look back, then keep engaging and turn away. Now you have one fewer account.

It’s probably not going to feel like anything. Naturally what happens is you delete one account, you spend more time on other accounts. The idea is that’s supposed to be a gradual change. You may have five accounts, and then you have four accounts then you let another 30 days pass and then you have 3 accounts, and then 2.

I want to emphasize this. Do not jump ahead. Maybe you can get excited. You’re like, “This feels great. I deleted one of the accounts. I didn’t reactivate it. Let me delete all the other 4 in 1 day.” Go that same 30 days at a time and expand it. If you’re like, “This is tough for me. I’m not getting through it,” extend the 30 days a little bit farther. It might not be the four weeks that you need. It might be more.

The next stage is delete and that’s a passive stage. There’s nothing you have to do. If you got over the hurdle and let the account be deleted. After that is downgrade, which is what I did. I had an iPod touch first when I was 9 years old or 10 years old, then I got a smartphone. I remember I got the iPhone 5S. That was my first smartphone. I had an iPhone ever since then. I had the 5, and then the 6, and so on and so forth.

I was thinking, “I’ve been off social media for a little while. What if I went the extra step to see what would happen?” I downgraded my smartphone to the Cat S22. It’s still a smartphone in the sense that it runs Android Go but it’s in a flip phone form factor and it is limited in other ways. For one, the screen is small. It has a T9 keyboard, but it has a touch screen so you can type on there. I can download any app that I need if I need the verification app for my school account or WhatsApp to be able to call my grandfather who lives in Vietnam and do all those different things.

I downgraded my phone, and that was huge. I recommend this. What happened to me is I got off social media but I still had that habit of scrolling. If there’s a will, there’s a way. I started looking at social media through the browser on my iPhone. I then started to regress a little bit, so I thought, “We need to do something else.” I switched out to this one and have never looked back.

I hope there will never be a day when I have to switch back to my iPhone. I’m even trying to downgrade even further from this phone if I can. It seems to me this phone is 8 out of 10. I still have my iPhone though for certain things that this phone can’t do. For example, a mobile deposit, but honestly, and I hate to say it, I don’t have too many people writing me checks so I rarely ever use my iPhone. This one works. Ninety-six percent of the time, I’m using this phone and I love it.

The last thing is depart, which is a passive step. It’s that moment you start to realize and see a difference. You go to the doctor’s office or at the gate waiting for your flight and you’re like, “Everyone in this waiting room is sitting on their phone.” You notice that so much of what your friends are talking about starts to be around social media and you realize, “If they didn’t have social media, it would probably make their life a bit simpler.” You start to have this distance between you and the digital world, and it will feel good. That’s a good sign that you re-oriented yourself back to the real world and you’re not caught in that matrix like I did for ten years and was convinced that the digital world was real in the same way the real world is real.

We’re talking to Gabriela Nguyen who is a graduate student at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She created a site called APPstinent. She has a nice 5D method to help you and/or your kids off of social media. Part of the depart thing is going back to what you wrote about in the prepare section where you asked yourself, “What are my biggest fears? What do I want to gain?” That’s an important piece, I imagine.

In the depart stages, it is essential to go back, do your original reflections, and ask yourself, “I wrote down these reasons for leaving social media. Did I gain the benefit of these things that I thought were going to benefit me?” If someone says, “I want an additional two hours in my day to be able to commit to language learning.” Did you have an extra two hours in your day? Did you commit it to language learning? Maybe the answer is yes or maybe the answer is no. More times than not, you’ll find that you at least started to have more time. Maybe you didn’t get all the way to committing to language learning but you were moving in the right direction.

The government and big tech have a role in mitigating people’s overuse of social media. But you always have the freedom to make the right choice. Share on X

The second part is to reflect on what were the fears that you wrote down. The fear is, “People are going to think that I was ignorant because I didn’t know about this event that happened because I didn’t see it on my Instagram feed since I had deactivated my account.” Did anyone come up to you and say, “I cannot believe you didn’t know that that happened. You’re ignorant. How are you so out of the loop? Do you live under a rock break?” Did anyone come and genuinely thought less of you because you were so out of the loop?

An honest accounting is important. It’s important to keep the integrity of this process. It’s not going to be a painless process. It doesn’t have to be painful, but it’s not going to be painless. It will be uncomfortable at times. The theme here is also that there’s a certain amount of friction that real life will incur because it’s real life. That is the whole selling point of the digital world to a large extent. It’s so frictionless. What do you lose out when you don’t have that friction and then regain in real life? You’ll realize that there’s a good return on investment with that.

You said at the beginning that when you’re going through this process, it’s important to reach out to people, be proactive, and build your relationships. That’s one of the things I’m finding in young women who are in college who I counsel. They talk about how socially awkward everybody feels. COVID was a piece of it, but I think the whole phone-based childhood made it harder for young people to be proactive with their relationships because they feel so awkward. I wonder if they’ll have to push through that as well.

For one, yes, you have to push through it, but what is necessary for Gen Z is a rewriting of our social norms. What I notice is that when you spend a lot of time online, what is considered acceptable social behavior, and this is something that you don’t have to be Gen Z to know, is different online than it is in the real world.

If you’ve spent so many of your developmental years where you learn to put up with these social situations mediated through the laws of online life, which are largely a lot of times not transferable to real life, when you then do get into real life, you’re realizing, “My whole automation isn’t the same as everyone else’s around me who wasn’t perhaps raised chronically online.”

If they were, you all equally feeling like the medium because if you remove the medium, the message changes. If I suddenly say, “I’m hanging out with a bunch of other people who were also recovered online people.” The way we would interact if I hadn’t explored free internet forms of socializing, it’s this weird friction where you keep up with some norms from the internet but you realize that you are in real life so there are certain real-life social norms that you have to deal with.

You end up being in this weird mix where there are no set rules. It’s almost like you have online rules and then you have in-person rules. Gen Z has created this half online, half in-person but there’s no institution and no book that gives us what those rules are. A lot of times, things can feel awkward. I’m trying to change some of those rules.

For example, one of the ones that I’m trying to push for is when two young people meet each other and maybe they’re new friends or whatever and they hit it off. The default thing to ask at the end to keep in contact is not, “What is your Instagram?” It’s, “What is your phone number?” That’s an example of those interesting social rules.

Before the internet, it was, “What’s your phone number?” There wasn’t an alternative. Now, it’s always, “What’s your Snapchat?” With the slightly older part of Gen Z, it’s, “What’s your Instagram?” With the younger part of Gen Z, it’s still, “What’s your Snapchat?” It is changing those little things that seem very minor but are not.

Full disclosure, I remember this when I was in my late teens. We would talk about meeting with my girlfriends. We would talk about how we felt differently about a guy if he asked us for our Snapchat or our phone number. It’s an indirect communication. There are no written rules for this. If you asked me and if a guy asked for my Snapchat versus my phone number, I would feel differently about his intention, as an example.

That’s something that everyone somehow knew but no one explicitly said, “If he asked for your Snapchat or Instagram, that means something different,” than if he asked for your phone number or email.” He wouldn’t ask for your email, but for the sake of the comparison. It means something different. I’m trying to hard reset these rules to go back to before we had all this craziness with social media.

We have gatherings sometimes with our camp counselors, some of whom were in high school or college. We have a whole range of ages. When they come to our house, besides taking off their shoes at the front door, we have a rug out. We also put a basket because one of the things that they decided might be a good thing was they would put their phones in the basket. If it’s not in their hand or in their pocket, they’d be less likely to want to look at it. We were all connecting and doing one thing at a time and all that. That wasn’t a rule but it became a rule. I imagine if you have like-minded friends, it makes it easier to go through this process.

I always recommend that if you’re going to get off of social media, you do it with other people. It’s always better to do this in community. I also want to make it clear that if you don’t have community, you can still do this on your own, but it does make it easier. It’s something that I wish I knew. Only through the advocacy work in the group that I’m building and I’m meeting more people my age who don’t have social media.

Before this, I would’ve wished for anybody to give me some friends who didn’t have social media. It changes how they interact with you but it also changes how they understand what interaction is. Their set of social rules changes depending on how much time they’re socializing online or in the real world. It’s always nice for the harmony of the group to have everyone following the same social rules.

We’ve been talking with Gabriela Nguyen who’s a grad student at Harvard Education Program. She created an organization called APPstinent. I’m curious about all of your experience thinking, writing, and researching it. Parents always ask my wife and me in our talks at what age. They want an age rule. Jonathan Haidt in his books and other people as well have given out information. They think you should wait until blank. I’m curious. With all your experience, what would you say to a parent who has a daughter? When would they be ready for a phone and/or social media?

 

 

Besides never, an ideal situation would be waiting until you’re of legal age, which is eighteen. For most people, it would be through high school, which for a lot of people is very tough socially. It’s not to say that college isn’t tough socially, but it’s different. You’re a bit more of an autonomous being. In high school, you’re still linked to your family or a lot of people are still at home. I would say eighteen to set a benchmark.

To some degree, set an age, even developmentally because everyone can vary on that. There’s pushback like, “Sixteen is arbitrary.” To some degree, setting 21 as an age to be able to do something, or 25 to rent a car. Setting the age is arbitrary but there has to be some benchmark. I want to emphasize that you never need to have a Snapchat or an Instagram ever. It’s hard once you’ve built up social capital through it to leave it. If you never start on it, you are off to a much easier life than what a lot of Gen Zs are having.

Thank you so much for coming on the show and also for all the work you’ve been doing and the way you’re putting it out there with articles and things to give parents and kids a way to look at this in a different way like how you can get yourself off. It is hard. Our dopamine receptors get all jacked up. It’s like any other “addiction.” You don’t have to be addicted, but we know that phones and all this stuff is addicting. To have a process to go through that’s not to get off of it cold turkey, that’s a nicely well-thought-out process for parents and their teenagers to remove themselves from social media.

Taking Control Of Your Digital Life

Thank you for inviting me to the show. I hope that your audience, regardless of what age they are, feel that they have the agency to start. They don’t have to wait for anyone else to do it for them. I truly believe that the government and big tech have a role in mitigating this issue but I want to especially be eye to eye level with my peers. You have the choice. You can make the right choice. I hope that I’ve given you the tools. The whole APPstinent community is here rooting for you to be able to do it. There is not a race. It is not a competition. We’re all moving toward a better life for us all. Thank you.

If people want more information about your program, how could they find you?

We don’t have social media, but if you would like to keep up with us, we do have a “newsletter.” It’s a glorified email chain. There are no bells and whistles on it. On the website, APPstinent.org. At the very bottom of the landing page, you can find a place to put your name, your email, and maybe a little message about why you joined the community so we can get a little more familiar with you. We’ll send out updates as they come out and things change.

Thank you so much for being on the show and for all that you’re doing with this important issue.

Thank you, Tim. It’s good to be here.

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That was a great conversation. I hope this was a helpful perspective from a Gen Z-er but also from someone who has looked at this, worked with young people, and works with people her age. Her 5D Method is awesome. She’s trying to get it into a course at Harvard. She’s putting that together. We’re going to be hearing more from Gabriela Nguyen in the near or not-too-distant future.

Thanks so much for stopping by. Read this episode with your daughter. That should be a great way to stimulate conversation about social media, phones, how to lessen it, get off of it, and take breaks from it, and/or for you personally to also use your time in maybe perhaps more fruitful ways. I’ll be back with another brand-new episode. Thanks so much.

 

Important Links

• Substack
• After Babel
• The Anxious Generation
•  APPstinent
• Dopamine Nation
• How Parents Can Know Their Daughter Is Ready For Social Media
• Worried About Unhealthy Messages About Beauty on Social Media? Teach Your Daughter to Become Media and Image Savvy

 

About Gabriela Nguyen

Gabriela is the founder of Appstinent.org. She kickstarted APPstinent to show others that living without social media is not the romantic utopian lifestyle it seems, and to crystalize my message to Gen Z (but is generalizable to all ages): The frustration you feel with you screen time isn’t your fault— you are not morally deficient because you can’t put your phone down. Fighting for “balanced use” isn’t worth the fight, not nearly. Walk away. Pick your battles. Just because we grew up on these platforms does not mean we have to continue depending on them for our social lives. We can choose differently. We can live fully without them.