When I called Gabriela Nguyen, the 23-year-old founder of APPstinent, she picked up on her Cat S22 flip phone.

Technically, because it runs the stripped-down operating system Android Go, you could consider it a rugged smartphone. But because of its style, size, and configuration, Nguyen can’t easily or enjoyably spend the day using social media apps, if she ever downloaded any.

That’s because after years of trying to curtail her use, Nguyen abandoned social media. She’s not even on LinkedIn, which is arguably impressive for a student enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

Now that she’s liberated herself from social media and a sophisticated smartphone, she’s determined to help others do the same through APPstinent, a Harvard student organization that she founded. It offers free coaching for clients to help them create a personalized “Digital Lifestyle Plan.”

Nguyen is particularly invested in helping fellow members of Gen Z to reclaim their lives. She believes they’ve moved from a phone-based childhood, which prevented them from learning “soft skills” like making eye contact and approaching strangers, to an “infantilizing” phone-based adulthood.

They’re supposed to be grownups but still use the same technologies and don’t know how to leave behind the “petty social games” they learned online as teens. She insists that it’s up to them, with support from older generations, to take back what they’ve lost as a result.

“It is not our fault our childhoods were like this, but it is our responsibility for our own lives and the next generation to use our knowledge for course correction,” she says.

What does “appstinence” mean?

Her program APPstinent sounds like what it is: a strategy for permanently throwing off our digital yokes. Given how “psychologically manipulative” social media products can be, Nguyen doesn’t believe it’s possible to “mindfulness” your way out the endless app- and phone-based sand traps designed to steal people’s time and attention.

So Nguyen walks clients through APPstinent’s “5D Method,” which is based on her own experience, as well as addiction research. The plan is designed to gradually wean them off social media, including over a period of 30 days.

This window of time matches most social media platforms’ 30-day deactivation policy. If you deactivate your account and don’t return within 30 days, the platforms will delete it. In Ngyuen’s experience, quitting social media completely was easier once she was sufficiently engaged with the real world. Eventually, the 5D Method includes downgrading your phone.

Nguyen hasn’t eschewed the technology entirely, though. She still has an iPhone that only comes out for very special or necessary occasions, like taking a high-quality photo or sharing images she’s stored on the device. Otherwise, she snaps pictures on her flip phone and even uses it to listen to music and order food and ride-shares.

She understands that “appstinence” has its limits depending on who you are, too. Students and professionals may need certain communication apps, for example. Nguyen primarily uses WhatsApp for school-related exchanges with international students who don’t have U.S. phone numbers.

“You feel a pressure to maintain a version of yourself that’s no longer organic.”

She’s less concerned about those tools than personal social media accounts. Nguyen advises clients who feel they need social media in order to promote a business or their own personal brand to create strict limits on what they share. What you don’t want, Ngyuen says, is to feel like you’re creating a different version of yourself for every platform and constantly seeing yourself through other people’s eyes. That can have a corrosive effect on one’s sense of self.

“You feel a pressure to maintain a version of yourself that’s no longer organic,” Nguyen says, adding that the trade-off between living online to promote yourself may not be worth the gains in the long run.

How to quit social media

Nguyen is also realistic about how difficult it is to step away from social media if you’ve spent years of your daily life engaging with it. For perspective, consider that one-third of teens use at least one of the five major social media platforms “almost constantly,” according to a Pew Research Center poll released in December 2024.

Since social media is deeply intertwined with most young people’s habits, Nguyen suggests taking a measured and personalized approach.

“I would not recommend white knuckling it in the beginning,” she says.

The 5D Method lays out a series of steps that include writing down an honest list of family and friends to whom you want to stay connected, along with a list of realistic analog activities to occupy your time.

This is not the occasion to learn crocheting or rock climbing, at least at first. Nguyen kept it simple by taking a book with her wherever she went, instead of her phone. This satisfied her brain’s need to switch its attention frequently but didn’t create new — and easily disappointed — expectations for developing a skill.

Some people have a “romantic” notion that quitting social media will make way for creative, brilliant ideas to come pouring forth. But Nguyen warns that’s for people at an “advanced stage” in their weaning process. When you start, it’s important to just be bored without needing that to be a productivity hack.

The hard truths of quitting social media

Nguyen doesn’t mince words: Quitting social media may lead to certain friendships falling by the wayside, and harsh realizations, like that all of your social ties were, well, weak.

“It’ll show you who really cares about you,” Nguyen says.

When advising clients who are afraid to cull their contacts by going off social media, Nguyen urges them to focus on the relationships they want to maintain. Then they should make a detailed plan to keep in touch by calling them or seeing them in person, rather than trading likes or re-sharing their content on a social media platform.

Once Nguyen left social media, she set up a weekly phone call with her grandfather, who lives in Vietnam. The standing date has enriched their relationship.

Nguyen also tries to reframe the problem for clients. Once she stopped spending so much time online, she had energy to do other things that mattered to her. Nguyen knows the math well. If teens are online for nearly five hours a day, that comes close to a 40-hour work week, she says.

So is the group chat with former classmates who send the occasional meme worth the extra time you spend on social media platforms as a result? How about the constant maintenance required to be active on any given platform?

“This is a really, really uncomfortable question to ask, but then once you ask it and you realize you’re comfortable with the answer, it brings a lot of peace,” Nguyen says.