United States

Gabriela, the Harvard GenZer who helps 'social junkies' get sober

In US universities his Appstinence method has become a student movement to free themselves from smartphone slavery. Here's how it works

by Enrico Marro

28 May 2025

L’università di Harvard, dove è nato il movimento studentesco Appstinence.

2' min read

Key points

Dependency.
Appstinence
How it works

2' min read

She was born and raised in Silicon Valley. Chewing technology since childhood. And like so many GenZers, she was nourished by the absolute myth of Big Tech, of brands such as Apple, Facebook, Google, which replaced TV and have accompanied her for as long as she can remember.

At the age of nine, he received his first iPod Touch as a gift. Also at school, in California (like in faraway little Estonia), technology was and is at home: experienced, embraced, consumed without limits. It became part of the existence of millions of young people.

The addiction

But it was around the age of 15 that Gabriela Nguyen discovered the flip side of the social hangover. Her smartphone addiction was consuming her little by little: she could no longer concentrate, she needed hours and hours to finish her homework.

The diabolical touch screen was altering her very perception of the world, she explains, from her relationship with her friends to her family.

Appstinence

To detoxify, he tried all the classic methods: online time limits, digital detox, but without much success.

Arriving in Harvard, she discovered that thousands of her peerswere suffering from the same addiction.

It was then that the idea of Appstinence was born. An avenue for detoxification, which over time has become a real student movement across many American universities.

How it works

Inspired by the detoxification of alcoholics, Appstinence is based on five steps, the so-called '5D method': decrease, deactivate, delete, downgrade and depart.

The basic idea is not to get rid of the phone completely, an objectively impossible undertaking nowadays for anyone without strong urges towards hermitism. But that of succeeding step by step in returning to trivial, 'stupid' mobile phones without social extensions.

The approach, inspired by the logic of abstinence used in the fight against addiction, aims to break the toxic link with the stimulus. Also by leveraging the group. In fact, Gabriela's organisation offerscoaching, practical tools and moments of confrontation. 'It's like training,' explains the 24-year-old Californian, 'if you do it methodically and with help, it works better'.

The goal is ambitious: reinvent your life without social media. In a real, not virtual dimension. Difficult of course, in 2025, but not impossible.

"In a world that has made the digital an extension of the self,abstinence from apps is not just a renunciation," Gabriela concludes, "it is an act of self-defence. And, in the age of the internet, a revolutionary gesture'.