Kat Zilka was sitting on her living room floor in late 2022, a Christmas tree glowing beside her and a stack of essays in her lap, and she felt close to tears. She had asked her 12th grade digital journalism students in Milwaukee to write about their relationships with their devices.
"The things they were writing were deeply disturbing," she said.
Teenagers were quietly putting up with online abuse. They were using their phones all night without their parents knowing. Some were stuck in a loop of deleting social media apps and downloading them again. Zilka had been watching her students for years and noticing that the light in their eyes seemed dimmer, especially after Covid. The essays made that hunch concrete and showed how big the problem really was.
"It was like they were just waiting for someone to ask," she said.
That semester changed the direction of Zilka's career and put her near the front of a conversation that was just starting to take shape: kids' fractured attention and what it does to their health. Back then, there were no surgeon general advisories on the subject. Nor were dozens of state legislatures racing to crack down on phones. What existed was a handful of people like Zilka, working on the ground with very little guidance, trying to push back against a mental health crisis that was already moving faster than the institutions meant to respond to it.
Over winter break, she drafted an elective called "Digital Detox." Students liked it, partly because it didn't look like anything else they did at school. Each class opened with 10 minutes of sitting quietly with their own thoughts. "Halfway through the semester, they were, like, hankering for it," Zilka said.
Still, the course had a built-in contradiction. It added to the academic pressure students already felt, even as it tried to ease their mental health. Zilka never fully resolved that tension.
Her students didn't want more homework. They wanted a support group.
Zilka started thinking about models like Alcoholics Anonymous, or the church youth groups she'd gone to as a kid. "The opposite of addiction is connection," she said. Around the country, other grassroots efforts were starting up too. What set them apart was that young people were shaping them, and they were driven by a sense of urgency that mainstream politics and the slow pace of science didn't match.
"Young people are developing today. They don't really have time for us to wait 10 years to find out how to help them," said Rachel Hanebutt, a Georgetown University researcher who studies teens' relationship to technology.
Regulators and researchers are already playing catch-up, and they're struggling to keep pace with platforms that change constantly. Hanebutt's argument is that homegrown efforts have one real edge: they can move fast.
Some of these projects teach teenagers to draw hard lines around social media and lean on real-world experiences to pull them out of digital isolation. Others are openly political, trying to channel teenagers' rebellious streak toward Big Tech itself.
Taken together, the goal is to give a generation raised on iPads and schooled on Chromebooks a way out. The aim is to move them from the disorienting blue glow of the screen into the sharp, open air of the real world.
Meetings built around a filing box
Zilka was convinced enough by what she'd seen in Digital Detox that she founded a nonprofit, dis//connect, and left her teaching job. The first meeting happened in May 2024.
The budget is modest. She raised around $1,200 to start. About a year ago, she brought in clinical psychologist Thekla Ross, a leading voice in the emerging field of "digital harm reduction," to measure whether the program works and to figure out how to scale it.
Now most Monday and Thursday nights, Zilka and Ross run sessions with about eight high schoolers each. Each hourlong meeting follows the same pattern. Teens log their average daily screen time by hand, then slide their silenced phones into a filing box. They talk about the "slow media" they've been consuming, and then sit quietly for 10 minutes.
Fidget toys, coloring books, and word searches sit on the tables, giving restless hands something to do. The conversation covers what's weighing on them: breakups with friends, teachers who frustrate them, and the habit of toning themselves down in public because someone might be filming. In a forthcoming book, Zilka and Ross call that last habit "flatlining."
Caroline, a competitive rower with a darting gaze and a mouthful of braces, came in anxious about making the team for an upcoming tournament in Boston. By Thursday night she'd made the boat, but something else was bothering her.
That night's reading was from Anna Lembke's "Dopamine Nation," a chapter about how the author became hooked on romance novels. It's a parallel to the way social media hijacks the brain's reward system. Caroline recognized herself in it. She'd recently found it hard to read anything other than love stories.
"I didn't even think about it until now," she said. She's well short of her goal of 150 books for the year.
A copy of "To Kill a Mockingbird" sat on her shelf for weeks and went back to the library unread, because she kept reaching for romance instead. Zilka acknowledged the underlying mechanism: the harder a pleasure is for the brain to earn, the more delayed the reward feels.
"It can be really hard in our world to convince ourselves to do the delayed gratification thing," she says.
The whole situation reminded Caroline of a recent discussion in her literature class about how fewer people read for pleasure at all. She and Tala, a curly-haired friend new to the group, complained about the lack of other bookworms at school.
The boys, they said, are even less likely to read for fun, and they rarely show up to groups like this one. Instead, the boys at school are absorbed by the mind-altering pull of Clavicular and online gambling.
"They act … not real," Caroline said.
(Earlier in the evening, a polite overachiever named Ethan said dis//connect had eased his anxiety about being left out on apps like Snapchat. He now makes a point of wishing classmates "happy birthday" in person. Recently, one girl told him he could have just texted her.)
Boys and girls use the internet at roughly the same rate. Four in 10 U.S. teens say they're online almost constantly, according to a 2025 Pew survey of 13- to 17-year-olds. The pressures differ by gender, though. Boys are getting pulled into sports betting apps, which experts say borrow the most compelling design tricks from other platforms.
"Convince me that Kalshi, predictive markets, FanDuel, and DraftKings are not social media companies," Hanebutt said.
That argument matters because betting apps could make digital addiction harder to see. They could also blur who is most at risk, and why.
Here's the uncomfortable part: we still don't fully know what phones are doing to us.
Researchers can't agree on the word "addiction"
Search "phone addiction" on any social platform and you'll get an endless feed of videos on the topic. Yet the experts who study this for a living are far from unified. Some, including the Digital Mental Health Group at the University of Cambridge, question whether social media activates the same neurocognitive mechanisms as addictive substances.
Others argue that infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds are addictive by design. In their view, heavy users can show addiction-like symptoms: cravings, withdrawal, failed attempts to quit, and relapse.
"It's akin to each time you smoke a cigarette, the cigarette itself increasing in nicotine content to you in particular," said Vikram Bhargava, an assistant professor at the George Washington University business school who studies the ethics of technological innovation.
(As part of its historic $17.1 billion settlement with dozens of states, Meta agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and add time limits to teen Instagram accounts. The company denies its products are addictive.)
The uncertainty goes deeper than terminology. More than a decade after Instagram launched, researchers still aren't sure whether social media causes mental distress. It may simply amplify problems that vulnerable people already have. It may do both. And two people given the same platform for half an hour can walk away with wildly different experiences.
"It might not be the dose of use — how many hours an adolescent uses social media — but actually the nature of that use," said Kelila Kahane, a psychiatrist and fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at NewYork-Presbyterian.
That's the maze researchers are stuck in as they face the reality that kids are struggling. Kostadin Kushlev, who leads the Happy Tech Lab at Georgetown University, is working through those unknowns directly.
His lab received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study how social media affects teens' mental health, and the design is ambitious. Researchers are giving 10- to 14-year-olds their first phone. For three months, half the group gets as much social media access as their parents allow. The other half gets none. Over six months, every participant fills out brief daily surveys plus three longer ones.
The phones also track movement, sleep, and online activity, including which apps get the most use and when participants open them.
"That sort of addresses a second critical issue in the literature: A lot of the evidence is based on these very basic, rudimentary, almost laughable measures of screen time," Kushlev said. A typical question asks how often someone used their phone in the past week, with answers ranging from "not at all" to "several times per day."
The biggest datasets still sit inside tech companies, and they could help researchers separate out differences between users. In the U.S., though, those companies aren't required to share them with outside scientists. Most of what the public knows about how deeply companies extract data has come from Silicon Valley whistleblowers, Kushlev said.
"It's so stark when you think about it," he said. Researchers spend years designing studies and chasing grants, then spend heavily on data that's less useful than what the companies already hold.
And that weak evidence is shaping policy.
"All we have is these negative correlations, and it's sort of like, 'Oh, I guess it's bad, so let's ban it all,'" he said.
Policy is moving faster than the evidence
Dozens of states have passed phone restrictions in recent years, and the Trump administration has encouraged others to adopt "bell-to-bell bans." Congress has also floated screen time bills, including a recent bipartisan proposal that would limit social media use for anyone under 16.
Whether these bans actually work is an open question. The evidence is mixed. Australia offers an early test. In 2024, lawmakers there barred kids under 16 from holding accounts on certain social media platforms. Initial data suggest that little changed in how much teens report using these apps, according to a BMJ report.
School-based restrictions look a bit better on narrow measures. They've been shown to cut phone use during class and to modestly improve grades in some subjects. But they can also bring more disciplinary actions, and in the early months of some policies, school performance dipped. Whether any of it translates into long-term mental health benefits remains unclear.
The evidence on attention interventions is thin, and anyone selling a fix with confidence is overselling. Still, a recent review from a Cambridge research group found a few things that look promising. Measures that add friction, like a pause or a prompt before opening a certain app, showed potential. So did programs that teach practical digital skills. Sessions led by teachers or peers, focused on attention and self-control, produced some benefit, though mostly in the short term. That qualifier is doing a lot of work.
The researchers were careful about what they could actually claim. "The underlying mechanisms of change may be more important than the intervention level itself," they wrote. Translation: it matters less where you intervene, whether in a classroom, at the dinner table, or inside an app, than what actually changes a kid's behavior. That's a more useful question than most policy debates ask.
People running attention projects have a blunter read. Take the phones away and you haven't fixed much. Teens need something else to want. A kid who scrolls for hours doesn't turn into a reader because the device disappeared. Mostly, they just end up bored with a hole in their day.
Human fracking
Picture a bright September day on Washington Street in Brooklyn. Tourists drift in every direction, necks craned, photographing the Manhattan Bridge as its towers poke up between the old brownstones.
Then a half-dozen teenagers cut across the cobblestones with their arms raised, hands curled into the shape of a phone holder, gripping nothing at all.
For five minutes, this group of "attention scholars" pretends to photograph the bridge, surrounded by people who are actually photographing the bridge. Within minutes they've become a human barricade, and then a spectacle. Cameras swing toward them. Some people giggle. Others frown.
A woman in a sunhat tries to fill the empty claw with her own phone, silently asking one of the teens to take her picture in front of the bridge. Nobody does.
Jahony Germosen, who has been standing nearby holding a timer, rings a bell. The teens file back into their building's lobby and collapse into giddy laughter.
That was a "public intervention," staged by "attention activists" who train at the Strother School of Radical Attention.
SORA, as insiders call it, is probably the best-known U.S. group doing this kind of work. Academics and artists started it in 2023, and it has become a hub for a movement that wants to free people's minds from Big Tech. Its pitch is that attention isn't just a personal habit to fix. It's a shared resource being mined.
"You can think of this as a health problem. You can think of this as a productivity problem. We're thinking of it as a systemic problem," Peter Schmidt, SORA's program director, told STAT. "You need collective action."
Its weeklong summer camp, now in its third year, teaches young people to see attention as political and worth defending. "Our attention is the precondition for our freedom," Schmidt said. Some campers have never had social media at all, and they say that gives them a sharper view of how dependent their peers have become. (STAT agreed to identify participants only by age.)
A 14-year-old science fiction fan wasn't allowed a cellphone until seventh grade, later than most American kids. She says that made her a regular outsider in conversations about group chats and shared memes. Camp has felt like a relief. "It helps that other people are noticing the same thing."
Sitting beside her is a 17-year-old with thick eyeliner and a stack of beaded bracelets. She recently found the New York City Luddites, an anti-smartphone group that holds events around the city.
The phrase that grabbed her was "human fracking," SORA's term for tech companies forcibly breaking open people's attention, capturing it, and selling it. She already distrusted the fossil fuel industry, so the comparison landed fast.
Her own habits point the same way. She got sick of how she felt after mindless sessions on TikTok and Pinterest, so she deleted both apps. Now she's teaching herself to hand-code a website, and she tries to talk with her parents over breakfast instead of scrolling. Sometimes, she admits, her parents are the problem. "Screenagers," she said.
A 14-year-old in a black hoodie was sent to camp by his dad. He's found some of the discussions genuinely thought-provoking, though he's not ready to call himself a convert. That may be as far as it goes.
When he called a friend at the end of August to describe his week, turning off his phone, staring at a sculpture like a little kid, and talking about "extractive profit models," the friend just scoffed. "What the hell is that?"
The campers ended up with some pointed conclusions. They decided the New York City subway is a prime site of human fracking, since so many riders are locked into their screens during the commute. Instead of asking AI chatbots for answers, they worked through "questions to live with," like what their lives would be like as fish, or how long it would take to swim to Manhattan from here. They've also been reading "Attensity!," the movement's manifesto published this year.
Consuelo "Leo" Burnett, 17, knows this world from the inside. Her father, Princeton history professor D. Graham Burnett, co-founded SORA. Still, she's built a personal stake in the subject, and she now translates the ideas for younger campers.
Her path to that stake was rough. During the Covid pandemic, her family tried to protect two immunocompromised members, and Burnett barely left home for more than a year. She got her first cellphone around then. "The internet was my one way of feeling connected with the world," she said, her blue eyes wide.
She'd struggled with anxiety and panic attacks since childhood. Searching for queer community, she landed in online groups that treated mental illness as a "badge of honor," Burnett said. Her mental health cratered, and she developed an eating disorder.
SORA gave her a new frame for that history. Her dependence on TikTok for quick hits of dopamine stopped looking like a personal failing and started looking like the product working as designed. "It's a multibillion dollar industry trying to control young people's attention," she said.
"My phone is fake"
One view of the attention crisis treats it as a runaway train. Nothing can slow it down, and the only question is how much damage it does on the way.
The other view is more hopeful, and it's the one held by many people who work with young people. They have to believe in some kind of optimism to get through the day. They argue we have more control than we think.
"Attention spans have not, in some deep, permanent way, been hampered," said Michael Vazquez, associate director of UNC Chapel Hill's Parr Center for Ethics. That's a bold claim, and it isn't settled.
Vazquez and his colleagues are running one of the largest academic tests of that idea so far. Last year they won an almost $800,000 grant for a three-year experiment called "Educating for the Virtues of Attention," or EVA. The modest budget is worth noticing next to the revenue of the platforms the project is trying to counter.
Why treat attention as a virtue at all? Because, Vazquez argues, it sits "upstream of a lot of other things we care about," including learning, flourishing, and building relationships. Fix the upstream problem and the downstream problems might follow.
Every Chapel Hill freshman now gets some exposure to EVA's curriculum, which looks at the demands on our attention and how they shape well-being. Some courses have gone deliberately analog. Students hand in assignments in a physical journal instead of a web portal. Other professors add hoops to jump through before anyone can use a device in class. Friction, in other words, made by people rather than by software.
Everyone gets a taste, "and then we have deep dive opportunities for those who want to continue," Vazquez said. Those deep dives range from reading ancient poetry aloud at a local bookshop to a phone-free picnic in the university arboretum.
The most ambitious piece is "Carolina Unplugged." This fall, more than two dozen undergraduates agreed to cap their social media use at a set number of hours per week. They meet for weekly dinners to talk through their progress and plan campus cultural events.
Each participant received a Brick, a small physical device. Tap your phone against it and it disables selected apps. They stay blocked until you tap again. For Natalie Easley, a 20-year-old junior from Bethesda, Md., the free gadget was what got her in the door. She'd already tried every built-in screen-time tool her phone offered, and none of them stuck.
Her history with apps is a familiar loop. Since middle school she'd deleted her apps, caved, and reinstalled them. How many times had she gone through that cycle? "This is not even exaggerating: Probably like 50-plus," she said.
Within days of having her phone Bricked, unable to undo it until evening, she noticed something. She felt better. "I didn't even realize how much of a compulsion it was, just to pick up my phone," said Easley, a math and philosophy double major. Then she started seeing how many people walked between classes with their heads down, scrolling. Her nights on X stopped feeling rewarding.
"Twitter is fake. My phone is fake. Why is something that is not tangible ruining my day or making me pissed off?" she said.
She deleted X and Instagram and cut her average daily screen time by a third, to four hours. What's left is narrower use: taking photos, looking things up, texting friends. That's a different relationship with the device, not a rejection of it.
Freed up, her mind started wandering in useful directions. One day it landed on Aristotle's line that we are what we do. Then she ran the math on her own life. If a third of her waking hours went to the internet, "then maybe I am, like, my phone."
"When you're not distracted, you're actually able to think about it."