Offline and Empowered

Like many in Generation Z, Gabriela Nguyen was an enthusiastic social media user — until it began impacting every part of her life. Then, she did what many find unthinkable: She quit. A master’s student in the Education Policy and Analysis Program at HGSE, Nguyen, 24, is proudly social media — and even smart phone — free. As the founder of the HGSE student organization, Appstinence, she’s helping others reimagine a life without social media.

“It's not obvious to us. It's a lot of either unknown or a lot of never lived without it,” she says of young people knowing how to quit social media. “And so that's why in addiction research abstention plays such a big role because when you remove the stimulus it gives you a lot to learn about how much control it had over you.”

Nguyen, who grew up largely without television, got her first iPad Touch by age 9. She compares growing up in Silicon Valley to being a “rat in a lab.” Gen Z — people born between 1997 and 2012 — became the test generation of kids to have iPads, smartphones, and social media. Even at school, she recalls there was always some form of technology being used or tested. It became such a part of her existence that, like many young people of that time, she didn’t think about it.

“Everyone was still believing largely that technologies were going to save us from our loneliness and democratize knowledge and it was going to be this great thing,” she says. “And it turned out that, largely, that was not the case.” Looking back, she can trace her own personal struggles to the timeline of technology’s evolution.

By 15, Nguyen knew something was wrong when she found herself so distracted by her phone, specifically Instagram, that it took hours to finish simple homework. “I started to realize that it was relating to other things in my life, the way that I was perceiving my friends, my family, the time I was having to focus, all these other things,” she says.

Over the next few years, she tried popular self-regulation techniques like screentime limits, hacking algorithms, or digital detoxes. But they didn’t work. She thought about whether there was another solution like quitting permanently that would be more comprehensive for people struggling with social media or really any digital media use. “Once I fully walked away from these products, I found that peace that I had been looking for,” she says.

Although the payoff wasn’t instant, in time she noticed better focus, less forced multitasking, more face-to-face relationships, and felt better.

By then, Nguyen was teaching English abroad and recognized how the overreliance on phones wasn’t just an issue among young people in United States. She was seeing it everywhere.

When she started reflecting on her own experience and challenges getting off social media, Nguyen began to form the philosophy and idea behind Appstinence. She outlined her 5D Method that provides steps to get off social media. Quitting cold turkey can be too hard, she says. The journey to eliminate social media begins with first decreasing access to apps, followed by deactivating, then deleting, and repeating those steps over until you downgrade to a “transitional device” like a flip phone, and eventually departing. 

When she came to HGSE, she met likeminded folks so the idea of launching a student organization focused on the goal of being social media free took shape. Appstinence’s leadership team is rounded out by fellow master’s students, Kaylee Brubaker from Human Development and Education and Zhao Li from Teaching and Teacher Leadership. 

As part of the organization, they offer coaching services for the 5D method, helping HGSE students and more reach the goal: Reflecting on how being offline has changed your life. She likens the method to working out, where you can do it in a way that is fun, sociable, and easier with an understanding of how it works.

While the student organization has captured attention outside Harvard — from people interested in coaching and wanting to join the movement to colleges interested in starting their own chapters of Appstinence, parents, schools, and corporate businesses, she says. It’s even caught the attention of New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, and Ariana Huffington, who has written about the group.

Nguyen admits there’s only so much they can take on as full-time students and due to limitations as a student organization.

For instance, beyond coaching and raising awareness about life without social media, Appstinence also dives into advocacy and research, especially a push for classrooms, including those at HGSE, to address issues of low engagement and attention due to distractions by laptops and mobile devices. “It is an issue that is largely overlooked, but we have collected a bit of data about student perception and had many positive responses to it. I really do think that it is an issue that must urgently be addressed,” she adds.

After graduating, Nguyen plans to continue working on Appstinence and help more people to get off social media and live in the real world.

“It's not a utopian fantasy of like, ‘Oh, if only I could run out into the woods and leave all my technology behind and get off social media and reinvent myself,’” she says. “It's something that people are actually doing.”