When Gabriela Nguyen wanted to do some spring cleaning as a teenager, she’d organize the apps on her phone.
“That was cleaning; it would make me feel better,” the 24-year-old tells CNBC Make It. “My actual room was in complete disarray, but it would feel better because my life was on my phone.”
Conflating her real and online lives was one of “a series of cracks” signaling her technology use had gotten out of hand, she says. “The apps became the center of gravity of my life in which the other things would orbit.”
Today, Nguyen has no personal social media. She practices what she calls appstinence, a play on “app” and “abstinence” that refers to “a firm push for young people to remove social media from their personal lives,” according to the website for her advocacy group of the same name, where she and other members of Gen Z help their peers take the leap. Founded in 2024 as a student organization at Harvard, the group encourages what it calls the 5D method: decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade and finally depart social media.
But appstinence is not “a hard and fast line,” Nguyen says. “The idea is that you’re moving in that direction.”
Ditching her social media ‘trinity’
Nguyen’s own road to appstinence was winding. She grew up in San Jose, steeped in the “techno-optimism of Silicon Valley,” she says. “It’s the local culture.”
She got an iPod Touch when she was 9 and her first social media account at 10. Her “trinity,” as she calls it, was Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok. Instagram was your “public-facing portfolio,” she says. Snapchat was “where the business really went down in the day-to-day.” And TikTok was the “the maximal brain rotty thing.”
Nguyen felt like they degraded her attention span, sleep, energy, self-esteem and confidence, she says.
Social media companies have fought back against accusations over the years that their platforms are harmful to young people’s mental health.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified in February, as part of an ongoing, landmark social media trial, that he doesn’t think people can be clinically addicted to social media. However, he said some people may experience “problematic use” of Instagram, including “spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about.”
In response to a lawsuit in 2024 alleging TikTok had “addictive features” and was “harming young people’s mental health,” TikTok said it was “proud of and remain deeply committed to the work we’ve done to protect teens,” citing “safety features such as default screentime limits, family pairing, and privacy by default for minors under 16.”
In 2024 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in prepared remarks, “We want Snapchat to be safe for everyone, and we offer extra protections for minors to help prevent unwanted contact and provide an age-appropriate experience.”
But Nguyen says her experience on the three apps had a harmful domino effect in her life. “It’s not just that the scrolling itself gets worse; your perspective on the world gets worse as the doomscrolling keeps going,” Nguyen says. Still, she felt, “You can’t lose the only way that you know how to find out things that are going on or things that you like or keep in touch with people.”
A straight-A student in high school, Nguyen’s final straw was when she “couldn’t focus.” She recalls doing an assignment at 14 that took much longer than expected because of this “technological distraction,” she says.
“The apps became the center of gravity of my life in which the other things would orbit.”
Gabriela Nguyen
Appstinence founder
Nguyen tried temporary digital detoxes and screen time limits for years; none worked. So she cut back more drastically. Early in college, she deleted Instagram, thinking, “This is kind of nice.” But then she spent more time on Snapchat. For a while, she says she had “a toxic relationship” with Snapchat and TikTok, repeatedly deleting and redownloading them.
She had a realization that “my real life had to outweigh the draw” of those apps, Nguyen adds. That meant “pursuing what I felt like they were giving me, but in the real world,” so she joined more clubs and student communities in her senior year.
Over time, she says, she got off social media for good.
One initial challenge was convincing friends she wasn’t cutting ties with them by going offline but rather that she wanted to invest more time and attention in her relationships in real life, Nguyen says.
“Me not wanting to Snap you anymore doesn’t mean that I feel like we’re drifting or you’re a bad friend or whatever,” she explains. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite.”
‘No ads, no algorithms, no AI slop’
After getting off social media and being better for it, Nguyen says, she wanted to help others do the same. She and her appstinent colleagues offer what they call “digital lifestyle planning,” or peer-to-peer coaching to help people “re-design [their] relationship with technology,” the website says.
Nguyen says they’ve seen “overwhelming” demand for the service, with “several hundreds of people” reaching out to express interest in appstinence and roughly 2,000 people attending the organization’s in-person events worldwide.
One key element of it is that the coaches are digital native Gen Zers. “It’s not, ‘Okay we’re here on the top of the hill preaching down to you,” she says. “I know how it is; I was literally there as well.”
And sometimes Nguyen still struggles with it. Her own de-entrenchment, as she calls it, will likely be lifelong, she says.
Today, she uses a “dumb” phone, which can call and text but has no internet, and she’s dropped streaming services. (It’s okay if a friend puts on a Spotify playlist when they’re together, she says, but otherwise, to listen to music, she has her car radio.) She uses ad-free browsers, keeps her bedroom screen-free and only checks email at a computer.
To talk with friends or family, she calls or texts. That way, she says: “There’s no ads, no algorithms, no AI slop.” Nguyen says she now has “much deeper relationships with a lot fewer people” than before.
Many of her friends today are off social media, too. “If we were all to suddenly make an Instagram, that would just be redundant because I already see them and talk to them on the phone,” she says. “What else could we possibly do on Instagram?”
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