Story by Isabella Reilly
Cover by Jane Durden
Keegan Lee couldn’t put her phone down.
Not at the dinner table, surrounded by her mom, dad and younger sister, Kohen. Not at her desk—it always had to be on and face up, beside her animal figurines and on top of Lee’s stack of handwritten letters. Not even while she ran, feeling for it in her pocket.
She couldn’t miss a notification. Who was trying to reach her? What were her friends doing? Did someone unfollow her Instagram account? Who commented on her previous post, anyway? She might as well check, and look at Snapchat, and maybe TikTok, too, while she’s at it.
“It was all-consuming,” Lee said of what she now realizes was the beginning of what would become a nearly year-long social media addiction.
Lee, now a first-year Copeland Scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill, said once she started to recognize how often she gravitated to her phone, she knew it had to stop. So, the then-9th grade student did the unthinkable.
She deleted her social media apps.
‘Taking over my life’
Eight months earlier, the 15-year-old track student was finishing a lap at Southern Alamance High School in Graham, North Carolina. But as she slowed, and began to breathe, she couldn’t help but notice the worried faces of her teammates around her, eyes glued to their phone screens.
When Lee checked her email, she saw it—track season had been canceled. The cause: COVID-19.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this COVID thing is that serious?’” Lee said. “Before this, I thought it was something that would blow over.”
Lee’s high school, the Burlington School in Burlington, North Carolina, transitioned to remote learning, and the friendly faces Lee had waved to by her locker days earlier she now saw only in small boxes via Google Meet.
Without school—without her friends, track practice, Fellowship of Christian Athletes meetings—Lee had little to turn to. Except her phone. But once she picked it up, she couldn’t seem to put it back down.
“I developed these very obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and it was interfering with my relationships, with my perception of myself, and with my goals and aspirations,” Lee said. “If there’s one good thing that came out of the pandemic, it’s that it gave me the self-awareness that I needed to understand my phone and social media was taking over my life.”
She deleted her social media apps for one week, hoping it would help her spend less time on her phone. The first few days, her thumb hovered over the spots on her home screen where Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok used to live. But it did get easier.
During her 7-day hiatus, the results were impressive. She ran longer than she used to. She picked up her pen more, handwriting “thank you” and “I appreciate you” letters to friends and teachers in loopy cursive.
“I had also developed this higher tolerance for boredom,” Lee said. “I could just live and not be tempted to fill the time and space (with my phone).”
The results were so impressive, Lee wanted to take it a step further. This time, she would delete social media for two months.
“I chose that time frame because I knew it would be good to document what I was feeling,” she said. “I wanted to visibly see a change in behavior through a relatively short time.”
But before she started her 60-day cleanse, Lee wanted to talk to an expert.
“I wanted to gain a sense of expertise about how social media and technology affects human behavior,” she said. “I thought it would help validate what I was going through.”
The problem was, the teenager didn’t know any experts.
She began on Elon University’s psychology faculty page. She emailed faculty members, introducing herself, asking if they would be willing to chat.
“I heard back from several of them,” Lee said. “‘A lot of them were like, ‘No, sorry, we can’t.’ But Dr. Ghandour said, ‘Let’s set up a Zoom.’”
Bilal Ghandour, an associate professor of psychology at Elon, said that Lee’s initiative surprised him. He wasn’t sure he could help, he told Lee, but was willing to talk.
Ghandour, who specializes in addiction and addictive behaviors, explained potential withdrawal symptoms Lee might experience during her two-month experiment. He said talking to Lee made him more aware of the addictive nature of social media.
“My eyes became wide open,” Ghandour said. “Year after year, I see (my students) more hooked on their phones and less focused. I can see that this is progressing into something really worrisome.”
Kaitlyn Burnell, research assistant professor of psychology at UNC, said phone immersion is increasingly common among adolescents, with average screen times ranging between 8 and 9 hours a day.
“We know that young people are engaging in very high amounts of digital technology use,” said Burnell, who hired Lee as a research assistant in her lab last August. “In our own data, we see some young people using their phones up to 17 and 18 hours a day.”
Burnell’s research focuses on uncovering the positive and negative effects of digital use and what role those effects play in childhood development.
“We want to make sure that (technology) is being used in a good way,” she said. “There are a lot of concerns that this high level of use is displacing more meaningful activities, like face-to-face interaction, physical activity and sleep.”
60 Days of Disconnect
In January 2021, Lee logged off, about the same time she began attending high school in-person again three days a week.
She acknowledged she often second-guessed her 60-day hiatus. Would she lose her friends? Would she lose followers? How would she stay connected with her peers?
“I was a teenager, and during those years, we’re highly sensitive to peer feedback and influence,” she said. “At school, (my friends) would always talk about social media. I couldn’t contribute to those conversations.”
Lee said the cleanse allowed her to be more present. Because she wrote in a journal about her experience, she noticed how much less attached she had become to her phone, adding, “I didn’t need to be gratified by a like or a comment or a number.”
“We get so caught up in the superficial realities of social media, that we forget the true meaning of relationships that are tangible to us,” Lee said. “The people in my life that were meaningful did reach out and make the effort (to stay in touch).”
After her cleanse, Lee looked over the stack of journals lined up against her wall, and she had an idea.
“It was entirely her,” Ghandour said, referring to “60 Days of Disconnect,” the book he and the then 16-year-old would collaborate on. “She wanted to document her disconnection but had no idea how to write a book.”
The process took two and a half years. Ghandour said when Lee first proposed the book to him, he wanted to contribute, but wasn’t sure how. Then it was his turn for an idea.
They would write separately. Lee would type up and revise her original journal entries, and Ghandour would individually respond to those entries, providing the teenager with psychological feedback and suggestions as she navigated the process.
Though Lee was still in high school while she worked on the book, she said she viewed the project as a creative outlet. But she kept the book a secret. She was afraid of being seen as arrogant and a go-getter. Some of her peers already called her a nerd at school.
“I didn’t want to hear a bunch of excess feedback,” she said. “I wanted to just write it for me.”
The duo finished the project by summer 2022 and the book was available for purchase that November.
But Lee wasn’t quite done.
Bridging the divide
Madeyln Rowley said it doesn’t matter where she and Rowley are. Walking down Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, entering the dining hall, speed walking to class across campus. Lee will always stop, say hello to some passerby Rowley doesn’t know, and greet them by name. She’ll ask them about their mom, their job and how their family is doing.
Rowley, a first-year UNC student and close friend of Lee’s, said it’s simple—Lee seems to know almost everyone.
“I have never met someone who pays such close attention to detail and knows the names of everyone who works on this campus,” Rowley said. “She is more intimately involved in the lives of the people she cares about than anyone I have met before.”
It’s fair to say, Rowley said, that Lee pays attention.
When Lee decided she wanted to take her digital mental health activism a step further, she vowed to do just that—pay attention. She had co-written “60 Days,” but what else could she do to help?
In 2021, she served as the director of well-being for the LOG OFF Movement, which helps “kids, teens and young people build healthy relationships with social media and online platforms.”
In August 2023, Lee joined Mental Health America’s youth leadership board, a nonprofit “dedicated to the promotion of mental health, well-being and illness prevention,” according to the organization’s website.
With MHA, Lee started speaking at conferences across the South, sometimes with Ghandour by her side. She spoke mainly to middle school students as that is usually the age when social media and technology use emerges as a problem, she said.
But the more schools she visited, Lee said, the more she interacted with parents and educators, too—and something clicked.
“I really think that parents and educators are the primary determinant in how children use technology,” Lee said. “That’s why I created a curriculum specifically for them.”
At 5 a.m. each morning, throughout Lee’s first semester of college, she chipped away at creating a nine-module, three-month long course, equipping parents with all the necessary tools to raise a child in the digital age.
“It’s a unique course, because there is not another out there from a member of Gen Z targeted toward parents and educators,” Lee said. “My goal was to limit this generational divide that comes from the presence of technology.”
Burnell, who said she has been impressed with Lee’s work as a first-year research assistant, added that she sees tremendous value in Lee’s advocacy in the digital mental health space as a member of Generation Z.
“It’s easy, regardless of what the topic is, for teens to dismiss adults telling them what they can and cannot do,” Burnell said. “Having a peer be the source of that information can be really valuable.”
‘Changed the trajectory of my career’
Next to Lee’s desk hangs a white lab coat, her name stitched on the upper right side in navy blue lettering.
Before “60 Days,” Lee said, she dreamed of becoming a doctor and attending medical school.
“Dr. Ghandour completely changed the trajectory of what I wanted to do with my career,” Lee said. “I remember having an epiphany in my room one night, and I said, ‘I don’t think medical school is for me.’”
As she nears the end of her first year at UNC-CH, Lee is a far cry from the 15-year-old girl who couldn’t put her phone down at the dinner table. She continues to travel across the country for MHA, funded by a $5,000 grant she received through Look Up Live, a nonprofit that supports digital health youth leaders. Lee also receives mentorship from Courtney Froehlig, product policy lead at TikTok.
Beyond Chapel Hill, Lee looks forward to spending her summer teaching a social innovation course at the Leysin American School in Switzerland. The course will enroll middle and high school students.
Bryan Yackulic, a professional development and career coach for Honors Carolina, said Lee’s dedication to her work is evident.
“This is a genuine passion for her,” Yackulic said. “She’s not trying to check boxes or collect stuff for a resume. These are things she actually cares about.”
Though Lee said she’s not antisocial media, she’s grateful her experiments and research have helped her to form healthier, nonaddictive relationships with social platforms.
“When I deleted social media, I began to feel a greater appreciation and gratitude for the things I had rather than what I lacked,” Lee writes in “60 Days.” “I had transitioned to living my own journey … which gave me a feeling of pure bliss incomparable to anything I had ever encountered on social media.”
