Your phone is not the (biggest) problem
Digital wellness should not be abstinence-only
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Five years ago, resources for anyone who had a bad relationship with their phone were pretty thin on the ground. That’s when I first found #HalfTheStory which, while it was not targeting my demographic (it’s for teens), was still one of the few places I could find actually acknowledging the issue. The digital wellness movement has since exploded, especially among young people, but no one will be surprised to hear we’re not exactly “nailing it.”
While it’s great that the phones-are-bad issue is being taken seriously, too often the suggested solutions are unrealistic, meant more for parents rather than children and teens. Meanwhile, there are the initiatives that are really just thinly-veiled attempts to shoehorn unprecedented privacy violations and the ability to restrict information through the courts under the guise of “mental health” (think: age verification and blanket social media bans).
It can be hard to take a clear stance in this environment, which is one of the reasons I was so interested in attending #HalfTheStory’s NYC Teen Tech Council Training Day last month.
You can read about the event itself in the post above, but I also found my full conversation with founder Larissa May fascinating. We discuss some of these gray areas, like how the “abstinence-only” approach to digital wellness does not work, and neither does parent surveillance. Instead, #HalfTheStory is tackling this issue from the outside-in.
Over the past few years, the digital wellness movement has exploded. What has that been like as someone who’s been doing this for a decade?
What I always imagined and dreamed of is that digital wellness would be taken seriously as a new form of wellness, and that was really the revolution that I wanted to be a part of. And now that that moment in time has transpired, I think it’s about getting it right. And I think we’ve seen with a lot of other movements, like physical wellness in the nineties, that it actually ostracized a lot of people. I wanted to ensure that we were also looking at digital wellness as digital equity, and you’ll see the room that we have of students today is incredibly diverse in so many forms—socioeconomically, all over the state. And I just think it’s important to build this movement with everyone’s insights from the beginning and not the end, because we’re leaving people behind. And for some kids, phones are the only devices that their families can afford. For other kids, their parents are not digital natives and they’re also not native to America. And there’s so many more challenges than I think the media really understands.
What are the main pain points that you hear teens have?
It really depends on where they are in the space that they’re in. I think one of the biggest things is abstinence is still not teaching us how to have a healthy relationship with it. So at #HalfTheStory what we’re really focused on through our education programs, that are also co-led by teens, is: How do we teach emotional regulation in the digital world? Because if we can’t learn how to regulate our emotions and then we add technology, it becomes a magnifying glass. And so I think what we feel and see a lot is, “I’m feeling so overwhelmed. I’m feeling not enough.” All of us have felt those with or without technology, but it’s really that magnifying glass. The feelings feel much bigger.
I think the second thing that we really see is this challenge with, “What do I do if I put my screen down?” And so we like to say we teach them how to swap screens with fun. I kind of joke, but that’s why we had junk journaling [at the training day], because you can expect that when you put a group of teens in a room that don’t know each other, and if you take their phones away, that there is a period of massive overwhelm. That’s why they need to be either making friendship bracelets or coloring or doodling to really re-channel that energy, because they’re just used to preoccupying their brains all the time to the point where it’s actually quite scary when there’s nothing to do.
And I think the third thing, and the big challenge that we really see with young people, is that adults are only stalking them or surveilling them. At the end of the day, it’s not supporting their emotions. The reality is that you could stalk your child and they could still kill themselves. And I think we’re moving into this moment in time where we have to move out of just making a parent feel like they’re doing the right thing. How do I get the parent and the child to connect around the challenges that they’re having, and how do we really sit with them in this and understand where they are?
I really relate to this because in the past few years my therapist and I came to the realization that I have OCD, and being able to then address my phone issues through that lens has been instrumental in changing things. Everyone’s very much like, “What can we do in the phone to fix this?” when it seems it’s often actually the stuff around it.
What we’re finding through a lot of the research is that typically a very challenging or dysregulated relationship with technology is a comorbidity with something else. So whether it be, you know, one in four kids is either neurodivergent or dealing with IEPs and OCD, I mean that could show up—I can’t even imagine needing to clean your phone, needing to read every text message. It’s the amount of things that stem from that. And I think that is the problem, is that we’re so focused on the phones that we’re missing out on, “What are the real human challenges that are actually just showing up as a phone challenge?” And how do we think about it as technology being a signal for the things that we are really going through as humans and getting to the root cause of what’s actually going on? And that’s a lot of what #HalfTheStory is focused on, because in other places and spaces, we know that a lot of this is rooted in a disconnection with your own emotions and a feeling of loneliness and loss.
Now that digital wellness is mainstream, do you feel there are any misconceptions about what the movement is?
I think the story that we have told young people, because fear sells, is that they’re out of control and they don’t want to do anything. And they are doing something. Like, we have kids that came here on a bus for 10 hours. And so if you have teens that are traveling 10 hours to show up on a Saturday for four hours, just to be a part of this, you can’t tell me that young people don’t want a different reality for themselves.
One of the sticking points in all of this is that as people are realizing what problematic relationships with technology are doing to them, so much about how the world works is becoming increasingly reliant on these devices. How do you approach having those two truths coexist?
I think that is the really interesting part that we’re not talking about. You can take phones away, but then if you give kids Chromebooks or iPads, and you’re still not teaching them how to develop a healthy relationship with technology at large, you’re not solving the problem. I always say wicked problems need wicked games. So what that means is actually Trojan horse-ing these things in playful environments. Nothing about this is scary. We’re like, “How do we create a phone-free pep rally?” The same way that we design games like Crash Out or Jenga, things that are actually analog games that engage kids’ senses to teach them things and refine their motor skills. Quite frankly, it’s not even about mental health now. You don’t have to believe in mental health to care about this. And the reason why is because now it’s really about brain health. And I think when you position it that way of not just depression or anxiety, but also like, “Hey, you’re gonna actually have cognitive loss and that that is one of the only things that can protect humans against technology,” you’re gonna take it a little bit more seriously.
If everything plays out exactly as you hoped, what does the future of #HalfTheStory look like? What are the concrete things you’re working towards?
The vision would be to make digital wellness accessible to every young person on the planet. And I think accessibility is actually really critical, because technology can actually move people forward or deepen a lot of the inequities that already exist in society, which we’ve seen a lot with AI. And #HalfTheStory’s program in every school around the world, and creating incentives for Big Tech, almost like the environmental tax, but for human change and saying, “If you’re gonna make decisions for your users that actually hurts your bottom line, but is better for mental health, you should get a tax credit for it.” Right now we don’t have any of those systems in place.