How to escape the smartphone doom loop | Larz May, Elise Hu

Summary

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Podcast Summary: How to Escape the Smartphone Doom Loop | TED Talks Daily

Guest: Larissa May (Digital wellness innovator, founder of Half the Story and Ginkgo)
Host: Elise Hu
Date: June 1, 2026

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Overview: Rethinking Digital Wellness in a Hyperconnected World

In this episode, digital wellness activist Larissa May joins Elise Hu for a candid, hopeful conversation on breaking free from the "smartphone doom loop." Drawing on a decade of experience, Larissa outlines why the solution to digital overload is not abstinence, but education, intention, and centering young people in the conversation. The discussion flows from Larissa’s personal story to systemic barriers, practical strategies, and the role of both families and technology makers in shaping the future of digital wellness.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Larissa’s Origin Story: From "Digital Sickness" to Wellness Activism

• Personal Crisis:
  • Larissa describes spending 10–12 hours daily on her phone in college, leading to serious mental health struggles.
  • Quote: “The beginning of digital wellness started with digital sickness. I literally was scrolling to death… I was scrolling more than I was walking, sleeping, or socializing.” (04:07)
• Systemic Blind Spots:
  • Mental health professionals asked about traditional vices but ignored tech overuse.
  • Recognized that “digital wellness is the new wellness.”

2. Why the System Is Broken—and Individual Action Isn’t Enough

• Systemic Failures:
  • Policies like phone bans in schools are insufficient:
    “Creating a policy that you can't have phones in school does not fix all of the problems.” (06:14)
• Need for New Incentives:
  • Advocates for financial incentives for big tech to improve platform design, akin to tax incentives in the environmental movement.
  • Quote: “We actually need to ensure in the future that there are financial incentives for big tech to actually edit these platforms.” (06:14)

3. Young People at the Center

• Youth Leadership:
  • Young people want involvement and agency in decisions about technology in their lives.
  • Creative programs (like screen-free proms and “phone-free fun”) are more effective than simple abstinence.
  • Quote: “They want to show our school how to not just take away phones, but how to make sure the kids that use phones at lunch because they didn't have a place to fit in can sit at our friendship table.” (07:45)

4. Technology: Food Metaphor and the "Joy Loop"

• Media Metabolism:
  • Tech is likened to food: every individual and family needs to understand their own "media metabolism."
  • First exposure to devices is happening before preschool (40% of toddlers).
  • The key is intentional and creative engagement, not passive consumption.
• The Joy Loop:
  • Shift mindset from doom to creativity and imagination.
  • Quote: “When we retrain our minds and we teach our kids to engage with technology with an intention to lead with creativity and the imagination muscle, we can actually activate joy and fight against the doom loop into the joy loop, which is really where we take back our creative power.” (12:12)

5. Emotional Support & Modeling Healthy Digital Habits

• Golden Rule:
  • “You should never have more devices than people in a room.” (11:04)
  • Family and relational modeling are critical—kids watch adults for cues on digital behavior.

6. From Passive Consumer to Active Creator

• Empowering Creativity:
  • Technology was designed for passive consumption, but that can change with intention.
  • Teach kids to "hack back"—become creators, not just consumers.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Systemic Change:
  “This is not something that's going away. In fact, in five years, we're gonna be sitting wishing that you asked people to put their phones away because our tech is going to be embedded in our bodies. And so what we need to figure out is how do we preserve the part of us that makes us human?” (15:28)

• On the Right to Their Minds:
  “It would look like young people believing that they have a right to their mind.” (16:56)

• On Agency and Reflection:
  “I'm watching kids every day say, I'm going to put my phone down and I'm going to take back control of my thoughts. I'm going to think before I search. I'm going to reflect before I say.” (17:03)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 04:07 – Larissa’s personal journey: digital sickness and the start of her activism
• 05:52 – Broken systems and the need for youth-centered solutions
• 07:45 – What young people want and the importance of involvement
• 09:21 – The challenge of incentivizing tech companies and parallels to food
• 10:26 – Supporting kids emotionally and educational approaches
• 11:04 – Modeling behavior and family strategies
• 12:12 – Passive consumption vs. creativity (“joy loop”)
• 13:25 – Introducing Ginkgo: AI for proactive digital wellness
• 15:28 – Digital wellness as the next healthcare frontier
• 17:47 – Actionable steps for families (see below for details)

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Actionable Tips from Larissa May

“Swap screens with analog fun. Have a notebook and paper. Get your knitting, put your phone down, keep that at your desk. It’s a great way to tap that into yourself.” (17:47)

“Challenge yourself one day a week to not use any, any AI.” (18:09)

“Actually try to do a screen-free scavenger hunt ... leave your phones at home and just go out and do it. Go, be free. Escape the wild, wild web and get some screen peace, which is really just peace of mind.” (18:09)

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Practical Takeaways

• Model digital wellness—adults need to demonstrate healthy tech habits.
• Educate and empower youth to be drivers of tech reform, not just subjects of regulation.
• Emphasize creativity and family connection over passive engagement.
• Advocate for system-wide incentives that align tech industry goals with public health.
• Practical activities: Screen-free days, analog hobbies, joint tech projects, scavenger hunts.

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Closing Thoughts

Larissa May’s message is clear: The solution to smartphone overuse is not to ban technology, but to reimagine our relationship to it—through joy, creativity, and putting young people at the center. With intentional actions, both individually and systemically, we can “escape the wild, wild web” and reclaim our peace of mind.

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End of Summary

Transcript

[A]

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Digital wellness innovator Larissa May was scrolling herself to death in college. She says she was spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind a screen, more time scrolling than she was sleeping, walking or talking to anyone. Eventually she got help and then she decided to do something more. Today she's talking about what young people can do to escape the smartphone doom loop.

[B]

Do we want to chase our dreams or do we want to be behind these things that are making billions of dollars for a couple guys in Silicon Valley?

[A]

Larissa is the founder of Half the Story, a nonprofit she started in her college Dorm Room with $250 and she's co founder of Ginkgo, a clinician backed AI platform for families. I sat down with her on the TEDNext stage to talk about her work and her vision for the future. She makes the case that the answer to digital wellness isn't abstinence, it's education, intention and putting young people at the center of the solution.

[B]

I think we really need to get out of the consumer seat and into the driver's seat when it comes to technology. And what I mean by that is that you can literally retrain your mind or your child's mind by engaging with technology. 20 minutes a day and doing something

[A]

Joyful Conversation is coming up right after a short break.

[C]

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[D]

Tell us a little bit about what led you here and what it means to you to be a digital wellness entrepreneur.

[B]

Well, the beginning of digital wellness started with digital sickness. I literally was scrolling to death. I was a college student spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind my screen. I was scrolling more than I was walking, sleeping, or socializing. And luckily I had an RA that saved my life. But I was going to the psychiatrist every day and I found it really interesting that they asked me about drugs, sex and alcohol, but not the drug that was in my pocket. And that was the beginning of the big idea 10 years ago, which was maybe digital wellness is the new wellness in that as humans, we have to cultivate a healthy relationship with technology if we want to be around for another millennia.

[D]

Right? Right. How did you, how did it show up for you when you said that you were kind of feeling sick?

[B]

Well, I think the thing that I've Learned on the 10 years of exploration is that screens are really just symptoms. So many young people and adults, too, we go to our screens because it's more comfortable than actually dealing with the emotions, whether it's sadness, depression, anxiety. And for me, I just didn't have the skills, the emotional resilience, and the digital age that I needed. But I was given a device and was told to, hey, go through this life milestone, go to college, figure out how to be a human. And by the way, you're going to have a stage in your pocket the entire time. And then I started Looking into it, I think most of us, we look around, we see our kids, our parents on their phones. And then I realized, hmm, do we want to chase our dreams or do we want to be behind these things that are making billions of dollars For a couple guys in Silicon Valley?

[D]

You have said, and I'm quoting you to you, the systems were not in place for the younger generations to develop healthy relationships with technology from the start. So a system that was sort of broken here, what did you mean by that? And are things getting better now that we're in this age where we real it? There's a lot of books about this and a lot of discourse about social media and sort of the risks of it.

[B]

The fact that I started this with $250 in my dorm room and I'm now on this stage alone is a win. It's a win for the movement that Ted believes that digital wellness is critical for the future of humanity. Now, when we talk about systems and systems change, a lot of you might be in a state where there might be a phone free ban. And across the nation, because we haven't had a national legislation in 30 years past almost 40 states, this backed school said, hey, we want to ban phones. Now there is a problem with that. Creating a policy that you can't have phones in school does not fix all of the problems. And so what I did was say, hey, we actually started this with the governor in New York. Why don't we build the next generation of digital wellness activist athletes? Let's train them, let's give them grants, and let's have them help us implement and create a new story and a new brand for digital wellness from phone free into phone free fun. And so what I believe is that we have to put young people at the center, but we also have to educate all stakeholders. And we actually need to ensure in the future that there are financial incentives for big tech to actually edit these platforms in the same way that we've created tax incentives for the environmental movement. Because nothing has changed, but humans are changing.

[D]

Okay, two follow ups to that. One is, what are young people saying to you?

[B]

Well, young people want to be heard. They want to be in the rooms where decisions are being made about them because they're the ones that are now forced to take their tests on iPads. There is no longer that period of time where you're feeling stressed to take a test, then you're relieved and you don't get your grade back for a week. These kids are getting it from all sides, socially, academically, a Lot of pressure from their parents and they're the ones that give me hope, that say, hey, we want to be the leaders. We want to show our school how to not just take away phones, but how to make sure the kids that use phones at lunch because they didn't have a place to fit in can sit at our friendship table. Or we want to take phones away and we actually want to make screen free proms and make this feel fun. Because if it's all about abstinence and the lack thereof, you're never going to get kids on board.

[A]

I get it.

[D]

I grew up in Texas where abstinence was taught in schools and look how well that worked. We're talking a lot about systems and then both kind of big picture, but also a lot that can be done individually and how we can make changes in our own families or in our own homes. I guess my next question is why is the onus of on us? You know, there's so much, so many conversations about like what we need to be doing to help our kids become more literate, what we need to be doing to help solve for this anxious generation or so called anxious generation in our own homes. What do those incentives look like at a system wide level? Like how do we incentivize technology makers and companies to do something different that would be healthier for the rest of us?

[B]

Well, I've been trying to do that for 10 years. We still don't have a national legislation passed and AI is moving faster than any other social media platform in history. So at this point, as humans, the way I think about this is that technology is more like food than anything. We have our own media metabolisms. Every child is different, every family is different. We must learn how to consume technology in a way that is going to support us rather than hurt us. Because unfortunately, the systems are not built for us to thrive. But the hope is that we can retrain young minds and if we start early, well, the average, I can't believe I'm going to say this. The average toddler, 40% of them have devices before they're even in preschool. So if we're not starting, then the moment a child sees a blue light, then we're going to be losing ourselves to big tech. And guess what, it's no longer about billionaires. It's now about trillionaires and everyone else.

[D]

How do you want kids as young as, you know, age six to be educated?

[B]

Well, I've been doing it for the last decade and what I believe is that wicked problems need wicked games. And that if we want to drive behavior change, we have to do it in a playful way and that kids are going to engage with. We know that just having PowerPoint slides and telling kids what not to do doesn't work. So I wanted to rewrite that playbook and put young people at the center of designing, creating, and now I'm even building technology that young people are helping me design because I know what's out there. Surveillance and stalking our kids is not enough to support them emotionally. And our world is broken.

[D]

How should we be supporting them emotionally?

[B]

Well, I think one of the things that I always say is that if you're a parent or you're a grandparent or even just someone that lives with someone you love, is that you should never have more devices than people in a room. And what I mean by that is that if you want to watch something, watch it together. If you want to scroll, scroll together when you're going to bed with your partner and you're on your devices or you're sitting in a room with your kids, a term I call phubbing, when you're all on your phones, guilty. I mean, we've all been there, but it's one of the great golden rules that we can start implementing. And at the end of the day, the kids are looking at us and we are modeling that future, and we need to be able to show them, hey, even though the headlines say that you're a victim and that you're anxious and you're depressed, that's not a story that is going to empower someone to be up on the stage. I pulled myself out of that story. And so I want the next generation of young people to know that it is possible and that when social media is used as a tool, it can change the world.

[D]

Do you draw a distinction between social media or just digital tools for consumption versus creation?

[B]

I love that you asked this question, and I'm going to give my tip at the end on this. But ultimately, the way that technology was designed was for us to be passive consumers. We were never trained to interact with it any other way. And therefore, many of us, starting at a young age, are caught in this doom loop in this vicious cycle of I'm going to die, the world is going to end, I'm never going to have a job, what's the. The point of studying? The world is burning. Kids are dying. However, I believe and I know that when we retrain our minds and we teach our kids to engage with technology with an intention to lead with creativity and the Imagination muscle that we can actually activate joy and fight against the doom loop into the joy loop, which is really where we take back our creative power and say, you know what? I'm going to be the creator of my own digital story and my own digital world. And instead of you hacking me big tech, I'm going to hack my devices so I can take back control of my life.

[D]

Okay, which brings us to Ginkgo and

[A]

how you have decided to work with AI.

[D]

Why did you decide to use an AI and can you tell us a little bit more about it?

[B]

Absolutely. Well, in looking at all these tools in the ecosystem, I saw that parents were stalking kids, but there was basically broken product market fit. Because kids, I'm going to be really honest, they're smarter than all of us. They break through everything. They create their own wi fi routers. So the truth is, is that your kids are always going to win. What I saw in the market is that, I mean, we've seen a lot of OpenAI's decisions lately and it's a little bit scary. I know a lot of kids that have also lost their lives because of how AI impacted them and the way that social media impacted me. And what I knew is that parents didn't have a doctor back to compass for the digital world. What do you do if your kid is being groomed? But also they didn't have a safe place to go. So the reason why I wanted to create an AI based tool was one, because I had clinical research that I could build it with. Two, I can make it HIPAA compliant so people could trust us with their family secrets. But third, because I wanted to build a tool that could take the data from a child's device, take those insights and make early predictions for parents of things that could go wrong. Because technology shows us signals. And if Big Tech is making billions of dollars and selling our children face masks, we as parents should be able to take those data, get those insights and know, hey, if Lars is moving really quickly on her device and experiencing a lot of mood issues and looking at different content, my parents, back when I was struggling with, might have been able to get a notification that said, hey, you should take Ginkgo to the parent to the doctor's office and show them because we think she might be dealing with anxiety or depression or adhd. And that is the big gap right now is that there is such a disconnect between our children's inner world, the digital world, and our family's world. And I want to rewrite that story.

[D]

So basically, if you are a parent with a child who has a device or more than one device, you can use ginkgo. Is that how.

[B]

Just ask ginkgo.

[D]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah. Really, our vision, you know, after spending a decade building half the story with young people, I realized the next frontier of digital wellness is bringing it into the healthcare space. This is not something that's going away. And in fact, in five years, we're gonna be sitting wishing that you asked people to put their phones away because our tech is going to be embedded in our bodies. And so what we need to figure out is how do we preserve the part of us that makes us human?

[D]

What is your answer to that question?

[B]

Well, I think we really need to get out of the consumer seat and into the driver's seat when it comes to technology. And what I mean by that is that you can literally retrain your mind or your child's mind by engaging with technology 20 minutes a day and doing something joyful. So sparking the imagination loop, instead of having your child scrolling passively on YouTube, sit down, let them tell you a story and make it together on AI and let them watch it appear like magic. That is joy. That is how technology can be used. But more importantly, it will awaken our senses instead of suffocate them.

[D]

If I asked you to just paint a picture of a more affirmative vision of the future in which we have all of this digital technology and AI at our fingertips, but it isn't so suffocating or at least not so fraught,

[A]

what would that look like?

[B]

It would look like young people believing that they have a right to their mind.

[D]

Say more about that.

[B]

What I mean is that, like I said, kids have just been taught to be consumers of technology. I am watching kids every day say, I'm going to put my phone down and I'm going to take back control of my thoughts. I'm going to think before I search. I'm going to reflect before I say, technology has quite honestly told us more about our own stories than we've let ourselves reflect on our own. And I know that in this new future, we will have no minds left behind if we continue to give young people the tools to rewrite that for the next generation.

[D]

Before we let you go, what are some small, actionable steps that we can take to get to this more affirmative vision?

[B]

Swap screens with analog fun. Have a notebook and paper. Get your knitting, put your phone down, keep that at your desk. It's a great way to tap that into yourself. The second thing is, and this is hard for all of us. Challenge yourself one day a week to not use any, any AI.

[D]

And that's from an AI founder. You're saying this?

[B]

Absolutely. And the truth is we have to retrain our brains to actually answer our own questions. The third thing is actually try to do a screen free scavenger hunt where if you have a family, have your kids write down a list of things that they want to find in the world, leave your phones at home and just go out and do it. Go, be free. Escape the wild, wild web and get some screen peace, which is really just peace of mind.

[D]

All right, you heard it from Larissa May. Escape the wild wild web. Larissa May, thank you so much.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

That was Larissa May in conversation with me, Elise Hu, at TED Next 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmanivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by the world's leading ESIM brand, Airalo. When I travel, I don't want to just see a new place. I want to engage with it. It's often the small, unexpected moments that stay with us. The cafe you stumble into the conversation you didn't plan for. The turn that leads somewhere surprising. Airalo makes it easier to stay connected to those moments. You can activate your ESIM and get online the moment you land. No swapping SIM cards, no searching for WI fi and no hidden fees. With unlimited data and reliable coverage through top local carriers, you can explore freely and use your phone the way you do at home. It's a simple way to stay connected so you can experience more of wherever you're traveling. To get unlimited data this [e-mail] that's a I R, A L O.

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