Larissa May was spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind a screen during college, scrolling more than she was walking, sleeping, or socializing. The stakes of that quiet spiral turned out to be universal: how does any generation build a healthy relationship with technology when no one designed the systems to help them do it? It took a resident adviser, daily visits to a psychiatrist, and a sharp observation about a drug her doctors never asked about to set May on a decade-long path toward what she now calls digital wellness.
The drug nobody asked about
Sitting across from her psychiatrist as a college student, May noticed something missing from the intake questions. Clinicians asked about drugs, alcohol, and sex. Nobody asked about the device in her pocket. That gap became the founding idea for her work: that screens are not the root problem but a symptom, a more comfortable escape from emotions that young people were never given tools to process. ‘We were given a device and told to 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,’ she told TED interviewer Elise Hu.
May launched her digital wellness organization with 250 dollars from her dorm room. Ten years later, she was on the TED stage describing a movement that has grown alongside a national reckoning: nearly 40 states moved to ban phones in schools ahead of a recent school year, even without federal legislation to back them up. May sees the bans as a starting point, not a solution. Working with the governor of New York, she helped build what she describes as the next generation of digital wellness activist athletes, young people trained and given grants to implement change themselves and to rebrand the conversation from ‘phone-free’ into ‘phone-free fun.’
Her reasoning is direct: abstinence-only messaging does not change behavior. She wants students who once sat alone at lunch scrolling because they had nowhere to belong to be invited to a friendship table instead.
Getting out of the consumer seat
May draws a hard line between passive consumption and active creation. Technology was designed, she argues, to lock users into a doom loop of anxiety-driven scrolling. The exit is not willpower but retraining. Her framework involves engaging with technology for 20 minutes a day with a creative intention, letting a child narrate a story and watching it come to life through an AI tool, for example, rather than scrolling passively. She calls the destination the ‘joy loop,’ the moment a person stops being hacked by a platform and starts directing their own digital experience.
Her newest tool is Ginko, an AI built on clinical research and designed to be HIPAA-compliant so families can trust it with sensitive information. The core idea is that a child’s device behavior carries early signals: movement patterns, content choices, mood indicators. Ginko is designed to surface those signals to parents before a crisis, the kind of early alert May’s own parents never had access to when she was struggling.
She left the stage with three concrete actions: swap screens for analog activities and keep a notebook nearby as a physical anchor; challenge yourself one day a week to avoid AI entirely and answer your own questions; and take the family on a screen-free scavenger hunt, kids write a list of things to find, phones stay home, and everyone goes.
The notebook on the desk
A notebook and a pen, sitting at arm’s reach from a screen, mentioned plainly as May’s first recommended swap.
May started this with 250 dollars and one clear question about why the psychiatrist never asked about the phone. A decade later, the question is still the same, only the scale has shifted, and the kids, she insists, are the ones most ready to answer it.
