For Ambrosi, the habit turned into an addiction during his freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley. In the fall, Ambrosi began his studies full of confidence and ambition. But lacking the structure of high school and with increasingly difficult school materials, he did not fare as well as he had expected.

Whenever faced with a daunting task or an amount of work that seemed overwhelming, Ambrosi would pull out his phone and start scrolling. “My cell phone has become like a digital pacifier,” he said.

Ambrosi found himself slowly sliding down a hole. He fell behind in school, which became a source of stress that led him to spend even more time passively using devices as a form of mindless comforting.

Ambrosi managed to get out of his digital addiction. He is grateful that growing up on the coast instilled in him an appreciation for the outdoors that he could draw on for alternative respite. Ultimately, however, it was an opportunity to take a break from college and work at a software startup in New York that changed his attitude.

At the Big Apple tech company, Ambrosi observed that successful professionals around him understood how to manage their digital devices to increase efficiency, not distract them. He began to learn about our relationship to technology by studying it from the perspective of neuroscience, economics, and psychology.

After a three-semester hiatus from his studies, Ambrosi returned to Berkeley with new intent and focus, improving not only his time management, grades, and health, but also his sense of identity and comfort with him. -even when he was alone so he wouldn’t. t reach the nearest electronic device.

He became an evangelist for developing positive, intentional relationships with technology and created a student-led course through the School of Information at Berkeley. Now in its second iteration, “Becoming Tech Intentional” has garnered tremendous interest and positive reviews from students.

In the course, Ambrosi walks students through an audit of their devices, helping them reorganize their content, recommending apps that support efficiency, and encouraging them to purge unnecessary software or “flush out” like he says so.

Ambrosi believes that an understanding of how social media companies take advantage of us and the neurological processes involved helps the process of reshaping our relationship to technology.

“Social media has an incentive to divert your attention as often as possible,” he explained. “Apps give us access to information and status, which we are naturally conditioned to seek, but put it into overdrive and artificially stimulate us.”

He encourages students to recognize that the social media giants see us as a product they can sell. They give us their apps for free in order to sell our attention and manipulate how we spend money, time or even how we vote. Ambrosi offers advice to free ourselves from this toxic relationship. Sometimes the redirection process can be as simple as accessing social media through a laptop browser rather than a phone to reduce how easily we start to scroll.

In class, Ambrosi discusses emerging research on how our screen time can have chronic effects on our

brains. It organizes students into cohorts and encourages them to offer each other feedback and support as they learn new ways to interact with technology. Unsurprisingly, Ambrosi’s method resembles programs for drug addicts.

“When you recognize that you want to change your behavior but aren’t able to do it for more than a day or two, that’s addiction,” he says.

Dino Ambrosi plans to bring his successful Berkeley course to a wider audience through a series of training camps, with one of the first scheduled for Half Moon Bay later this year. He’s especially interested in sharing his experiences and lessons with high school students heading to college so they can avoid the pitfall he’s been through. Ambrosi’s new website, projectreboot.school, will announce details soon.