Santa Barbara Teens Are ‘Rebooting’ Their Relationship with Screens

Santa Barbara Teens
Are ‘Rebooting’ Their
Relationship with Screens

‘Project Reboot’ Camp Helps Young People
Reduce Screen Time and Use Social Media
More Mindfully

By Callie Fausey | August 29, 2024

Feeling awkward? Anxious? Stressed? Depressed? Can’t cope?

There’s an app for that. 

It is a widely understood phenomenon that we are still wildly resigned to: We have become increasingly dependent on the dopamine machines in our pockets, falling into a vicious cycle of using digital content to escape discomfort. 

Even when we try to set limits on screen time, that hourglass reminder on our phones can be banished with the touch of a button. And it’s not the user’s fault — these apps are designed to keep you hooked.

Perhaps there is no cure (short of throwing your iPhone off a bridge), but there is a treatment. “Project Reboot,” a boot camp designed to help people ditch their digital pacifiers, is starting with Santa Barbara’s teens. 

Got Milked?

“Imagine you’re a cow, and your free time is your milk,” said a straight-faced Dawson Kelly.

Kelly is a former San Marcos High School student who, along with his brother, Patrick, “rebooted” his relationship with screens and is now leading the initiative on his own college campus. 

Founder Dino Ambrosi started the project two years ago out of the Santa Barbara Mental Wellness Center, aiming to reduce local students’ screen time and encourage them to use social media more mindfully. 

“Social media companies are like farmers — trying to squeeze as much milk out of you as possible,” Kelly continued. “The apps are designed to be addictive.”

Literally. Scrolling on an app like Instagram is built to replicate the same compulsive feelings as using a slot machine in a casino. It is programmed with content highs and lows, keeping users itching for that “win.”

Kelly explained that out of an average 18-year-old’s remaining lifetime as measured in months, 334 of those months are “free time,” according to recent data. He then asked how much of that time I thought would be “screen time.” I aimed high and guessed half. 

Out of those 334 months, it turns out, screen time is expected to suck up a whopping 312. That is 26 years, leaving less than two for, well, anything else. 

In fact, Netflix’s CEO once admitted that their biggest competitor is sleep. (By the way, based on the same statistics above, screens are winning. Sleep is expected to only take up 288 months). 

“Our goal,” Kelly emphasized, “is to take this time back.”

‘I Don’t Want to Live My Life Like That’

Part of the reason why scrolling, watching, liking, commenting, posting, etc., is so addictive and time-consuming is because of the “digital pacifier” effect. When we experience an uncomfortable feeling, such as boredom, stress, or anxiety, we turn to this “digital pacifier” to quell those feelings. Ultimately, though, that leads to avoidance, which leads to more discomfort, which leads to more scrolling. 

From August 5 to 8, the Kelly brothers helped lead the Mental Wellness Center’s three-day reboot camp for Santa Barbara teenagers to change these habits. They went over how to reset and redesign the students’ relationships with technology — making it more intentional and less compulsive, addressing the underlying urge to escape, and learning how to confront discomfort.

“It’s easier not to put in work, and it’s easier to get immediate satisfaction from online content, but this showed me that I don’t want to live my life like that,” said Caitlyn Early, a San Marcos High School graduate attending the University of Notre Dame in the fall. 

She and the other students looked their screen time in the face, mapped out their current content consumption, and set goals and strategies for logging on and off with intention.

Early added that she and the other boot camp participants are going to make a group chat to hold each other accountable to these goals while they are in college.

“I reflected on how I want to spend my time moving forward,” she said. “My screen time was about four hours, 40 minutes, every day…. I want to find something I’m passionate about to put my time into.”

According to a research study of American teens ages 12-15, those who used social media more than three hours each day faced twice the risk of having negative mental-health outcomes, including depression and anxiety symptoms.

“In the long run, you’ve conditioned yourself to run away from you and turn into your phone,” said Ambrosi, who came up with Project Reboot when he was a student at UC Berkeley, inspired by his own unhealthy relationship with screens. 

“I got super addicted; it became my coping mechanism for any discomfort I was feeling,” he said. “It’s this vicious cycle that I really struggled with for a long time, and it didn’t feel like there were resources out there to help me.”

Teethe on This

To wean off this digital pacifier, and make tech habits “more intentional,” Ambrosi workshopped a formula:

Reboot:  Separate yourself from social media, specifically with the intent of identifying ways in which you subconsciously turn to it. One of the things that happens to people who delete social media apps off of their phone, Ambrosi explained, is they will catch themselves navigating to the app even though it’s no longer there. “Reboot” is about understanding that habit of hiding in your phone, taking a step away to realize the parts that have not been adding value to your life, and starting to change your perspective on how you use it.

Rethink:  Orient your mindset around technology in a new way. For example, you pay for social media with your time. “It’s not that you shouldn’t use it,” Ambrosi said, “but you should strive to get a good deal out of it.” Another way to think about it is as a diet. You should treat what you consume online with the same respect and thoughtfulness as what you consume nutritionally. Longer-form content, such as movies, which took more time and thought to create, have a higher mental-nutrition value than the 15-second “brain rot” videos you get on TikTok — “the fast food of the internet,” Ambrosi said.

Redesign:  Make changes to your environment that strengthen your willpower. “You can’t just solve this problem through will alone, or if you can, you’re a unicorn,” Ambrosi said. Instead of engaging in negative self-dialogue when you struggle to kick the habit on your own, add friction to getting on social media (such as other apps that hold you more accountable than your phone’s passive screen time limits), control and limit your notifications, charge your phone in the other room, or employ other habits to make it easier to be intentional.

Retrain:  Focus your habits. “Deleting Instagram or YouTube for one week isn’t gonna solve the problem, because it’s just a manifestation of a deeper issue, which is our tendency to escape discomfort by seeking distraction,” Ambrosi explained. “It’s just the shortest path to distraction you’ve ever had.” He suggests making the habit of responding to discomfort by seeking satisfaction, as opposed to seeking pleasure. “That means making sure that you spend time learning, moving, thinking, and doing your most important work to give you this armor that makes you less susceptible to falling into rabbit holes and escaping things on your phone,” he said. 

Starting Young

Although all ages are susceptible to screen-addiction, Ambrosi wanted to focus on teenagers, “because I think that the impact of changing this for them is going to have the greatest knock on effect.” 

Project Reboot began two years ago at the Mental Wellness Center, but after his TEDx talk at Laguna Blanca School last year went viral, Ambrosi has “schools reaching out from all over the world,” he said.

“What started here has cascaded into Project Reboot being something that’s been delivered in six countries to over 15,000 students — it’ll be 30,000 by the end of the semester,” he said. His goal, he added, is to empower teens to lead conversations with their peers and inspire a cultural shift.

“The elephant in the room is like, you can ban phones in schools, you can get parents involved to do all these things, but you’re fighting an uphill battle if the students aren’t bought in,” he said. 

People want to have these conversations, he explained, but they usually have negative connotations. Oftentimes, parents’ well-intentioned approaches to address their children’s technology usage just reinforces the shame and guilt they already feel and leads to denial and resistance to change.

What Ambrosi found that works well is avoiding conversations that are accusatory, and instead, approaching them with empathy. Because social media is so deeply ingrained in cultural norms, and socially reinforced, changing may feel like a Sisyphean task for teenagers.

“It’s about helping them see that it’s not their fault and they’re not the only ones, defusing that shame, and then giving them reasonable, tangible next steps,” he said.

“We’re not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I still use Instagram every day. So, I think if you approach it in that way, students are actually yearning for this conversation.”

Before and After

Before Ambrosi made Project Reboot, there would not be a moment in his day where he was just alone with his thoughts, “other than showering,” he said. From the moment he would wake up, he would seek constant stimulus, which was usually scrolling or listening to podcasts. He would spend four to five hours on Instagram per day, and fall asleep watching YouTube. He was chronically sleep-deprived. 

Now, he has maybe two hours of “non-productive” screen time per day. 

“And it still fluctuates — like, I’m not perfect at all,” he said. “That’s one thing I always try to tell the kids: Don’t have the expectation that you’re just going to snap your fingers and resolve this indefinitely, because you’re setting yourself up for disappointment when you inevitably have some relapses.”

To learn more about Project Reboot, visit projectreboot.school.