Jono, Ben & Megan - The Podcast - Inside New Zealand's New Screen Addiction Service

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

How much screen time is too much? We chat with Francis from Touch Grass, a new New Zealand service helping young people and families navigate screen, gaming and gambling addiction.  We dive into why apps are designed to keep us scrolling, the warning signs of addiction, how social media is impacting young people's sleep and mental health, and whether an outright ban is really the answer. Plus, the team compares their own screen time stats... and one of us may have a problem.  If you've ever lost an hour to TikTok, doom scrolled before bed, or wondered how to help your kids build a healthier relationship with technology, this conversation is packed with practical advice and eye-opening insights.    Join the Itty Bitty Hitty Committee HERE!Instagram:  @THEHITSBREAKFASTFacebook: The Hits Breakfast with Jono, Ben & MeganSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Anna, good morning to you, Francis. Good morning, and thanks for having me. On your cell phone? I am on my cell phone. So, business. Business purposes, yes. I know, lovely to have you on, Francis. It's probably, it sounds quirky, but actually there's probably a lot of need for it.

New Zealand's first cell phone addiction recovery centre. Oh, my gosh, that's such a long title. How fancy. Did I just make up the title of your business? actually made up the title and made us sound way fancier than we are. Would it be helpful for me to tell you what we are? Yes, that would be good, yes. It's not like John had a make-up anything.

This is actually might even sound even fancier, you guys. So we're called Touchgrass. We are a youth service for what's called behavioral addictions. So we treat screen addiction, gaming addiction, and gambling addiction. Well, and there's a lot of it, too. I mean, I know some of my son's friends, they gamble. What? pretty normalized and widespread, actually.

Yeah, sport gambling. You'd be surprised how many young men are now getting into sports betting. Yeah, that's huge. And you can just do it on, obviously just do it on your phone now, but they can bet on it. You name something you can bet on it. For, like, legitimate money? Wow. Yeah.

It's pretty full on. Because obviously those are offshore organizations, are they, Francis? I mean, we've got the TAB, and we've got the Betcher app. So there's a lot of young people that are connecting with sports betting through the Betcher app. and they are getting exposed to it really early. So, you know, with places, social media like Instagram, they're seeing it in their feeds, they're seeing it in actual content, not just ads.

And so I think that a lot of young men are actually getting exposed to it super early. And it's just very normalized in their culture now. Well, you know, cell phones, obviously, we use them a lot, and they are a wonderful tool for a lot of things. But then there is that time that I think we're all guilty of where, you know, You can be doing nothing. And then all of a sudden you pick up your phone just out of habit and you find yourself lost in those sort of, you know, the 10 minutes goes.

I mean, it's probably happening more and more these days with everyone, right? Yeah, I would say so. And I think, you know, what we're aware of is that a lot of these apps and phones are designed to be addictive. And so it's very hard for young people whose brains are developing to pull themselves out of some of those addictive loops that these cell phones are created to do, like particularly with, you know,

apps like, oh, yeah, like Instagram, TikTok, they have this thing, the concept, Infinite Scroll, where it never ends. You know, when you're reading a book, you know, you get to the end of a chapter and then you look up and you think, oh, I might just put the book down and go do something else.

Whereas with a cell phone, when you're looking on some of those feeds, it just doesn't end. And so it's very hard to pull your attention away from it once you start. No one's ever got to the end of Instagram, have they? It's a very good point.

No, do you know, back in the day, there was the end of your feed. When it first started, it ended, and it was like that's all the updates for today. You've seen enough internet for today. Then they thought there's a lot more money to be made here. So Francis, there must be some, are you finding huge demand for your services? Yeah, look, we've had some really positive feedback

from many of the community organisations that we've talked to about this. I think that a lot of the addiction services, you know, like, for example, like CADs, are being approached by families to get support with this, but they're not funded to do it. So we are definitely seeing the need out there for sure. How do you know when you're having a casual doom scroll at night? How do you know when you're addicted? Like, when does it go too far? That's such a good question.

So look, I think that my take on that would be when it's impacting the occupations of daily living that you need to do to thrive in life. So when it's impacting things like your sleep, as a young person I'd be thinking when it's impacting things like your academics, ability to engage at work. I think those are the things that we're looking for when we're really worried about it. And it might also be things like a young person who's given up on all of the other hobbies and interests that they used to have or giving up on socialising or absolutely unable to pull

themselves away from it, even when it's having a negative impact on the relationships in their life. Because I was thinking about it too, you know, like as a teenager, I was, you know, you'd go home after school and you watch TV, you're watching a screen of a different time, and you'd sit through MASH and other shows that I wouldn't understand, you know? So what's, in some ways, the cell phone has replaced that for a lot of people? I think it has replaced it, but I think there's quite a big difference between sitting and watching a TV show and sitting and looking at a phone. The thing with TV, like especially really good television,

is that you sit and you pay attention to it and you're engaged with it. And if you don't have your phone sitting there with you, there is still a stopping point, and you are just singularly focusing on it. I think what's really hard about phones is that you're distracted by so many different things and you get pulled into those dopamine loops when you're seeing you know you were looking through your feed

and you might see one thing that interests you and then so you keep going because you think oh something else exciting might come up and a few more scrolls quite a different dynamic for the brain and so how do you approach it as sort of an addiction program because I imagine a lot of addictions

you're wanting to cut them off Ben's you know your stuff you were looking at all the internet we managed to nip that in the bud didn't we? looking at. We nip that in the butt. Like alcohol as well. Alcohol as you know. We sold your alcohol problem. My own. Mine is a rugby league highlights.

Costumes. So you, I mean, you're not, it's, you know, you can't really quit a cell phone. There still needs to be some, you know, some level of cell phone usage in people's lives. So what do you do there? Look, I think that it's more about how do we help young people and their families to have a healthy relationship with technology. I don't think it's about cutting. phones completely out of people's lives. So we might be looking at lower level interventions,

which might be a certain app that you might install on your phone to help you block out your involvement at certain times of the day. It also might be about empowering parents and giving them tools to support their young person with making good decisions around tech use. But I think it's really just very variable depending on the level of addiction that's going on for the young person and how it's impacting their family.

So just to mention, because I think this might be helpful to listeners. We have a website called touchgrass.org.m.z, and that will have resources and heaps of information for parents and young people if they're interested in different ways to manage cell phone use. But if things are getting a lot harder and things aren't improving with maybe some of the lower-level interventions, that's when we'd be recommending that they come in and do some one-to-one work with us or family therapy. And so we offer like a clinical service, which has family therapy and one-to-one.

therapy and we also have a youth worker who has their own lived experience of gaming addiction and that's really about getting alongside the young person and helping them reintegrate back into the community so where do you stand on the cell phone ban like in Australia 16 or over and if you don't agree with it like what age do you think people should be getting smartphones and so are you talking about the social media or the social media social media social media Look, I think that there's good arguments on both sides for that. I think that there's an argument that delaying things is probably better for young people's development and they're developing brains. However, I can see that social media can be really beneficial for young people who are in marginalized communities.

So young people that might be in the rainbow community, in the disability community or in rural communities where it's actually quite hard to see others, that social media can be a really important point of connection. for them. So I think we just have to be really measured in our approach. To be honest, I don't think that there's any one solution for this. I think that we have to take an integrated approach around it, which is really about looking at what technology

we can use to support healthy use, but also how to we empower the young person and their family. And you know, like there's been some really great research recently done in New Zealand with young people about this topic. And young people are telling us, I'm worried about my social media use, I'm worried about its

impacts on my attention, concentration, mental health, but they don't want to be excluded from the internet. They want tools on how to manage themselves well. Go, I hope someone's talking to you, Francis, because you sound very, very cloned up. I look at my kids sometimes, and obviously, like all parents, you know, you look at the good and the bad and stuff, but when they're using it and they're editing and they're creating videos and they're using it creatively, I'm like, man, this is such a great tool. They're learning about things in the world and they know about stuff.

And I'm like, how'd you know about that? They're like, oh, I've just learned about that on social media. I'm like, there is some stuff. But also, Ben mentioned that point. that you made about being you grew up in a small community and it is often your lifeline to the outside world especially if you're in the rainbow community. 100%.

And you know, like I think even for kids that are growing up in maybe communities where there's not a lot of money going around, it's harder for them to afford things like text messaging. And so if we exclude these kids from things like social media, it's actually almost impossible for them to contact their friends because they can't just text them, you know. So we do need to think about that and take a bit more of an integrated approach.

And I think as well, a lot of people that are parenting these days weren't raised on these kind of phones with these kind of apps. And so parents actually do need empowerment and support around how to have an approach that works for their kids. And I will say that the big thing that I wish all parents knew is just how important it is to protect their kids sleep because I think that what has been really affected by a lot of the social media use is sleep for young people.

And the effects of that are really pervasive across, you know, mood, attention, concentration and well-being. Now, so if we were to all open up our screen time right now and tell you our daily average, you can decide which one of us needs to come and see you, Francis. Okay, I'm nine hours, 35 minutes, daily average. Oh, Lee, shit. Oh, my God.

Yeah, I'm doing like editing on my phone. time I would have thought, well, you're nine hours daily. Nine hours. You're going to wait for nine hours a day, are you? Is that too much? Are you actually nine? This isn't nine hours and 35 minutes? Wow.

Maybe I'm leaving apps open. Yeah, maybe you are. I'm like, yeah. I'm like five hours, 41 minutes, but I would spend a long time. And I'm down 18% from last one. Like editing, I edit a lot of my phone. All my editing. Yeah, I'd spend a good couple hours a day on that.

What are you sitting at? I'm five hours 41, so a long way off you. I'm four hours two. Yeah. Four hours, two minutes. How am I on nine hours? Geez, I do need to come see you, Francis. I'm really sorry that you don't fit in my age range at the moment, but maybe we'll extend it eventually.

Is that screen time a lot for a daily average? I mean, I guess it depends on what you're using it for. I have a lot of questions there around, like, are you, is it because you use it to listen to podcasts? Like, what is it that you use in your phone? The audible box and things like that. Yeah, I do listen to a lot of podcasts. driving and I do hot spot at two to my computer a lot of the time, so would that count? Yeah, surely that's going to be building out your screen time as well.

Yeah, thank you for making me feel better about life. Thank you. Wednesday, I spent 14 hours on the thing. On a day? No, that's your whole waking. Last week's average was 11 hours, 24 minutes. Okay, no, I think someone needs to look at what's running in the background. Yeah, Francis, this is not a conversation for you right now.

I think this is more of a boomer issue. Apparently I don't fit in Francis's age practical to turn up to therapy. A lovely chatting, well done on, you know, creating such a great service and being so pragmatic about your approach to... No, we're really excited. And I just wanted you guys to know, sorry to kick you off, I just wanted to let you guys know that we are actually launching the website at the end of this week. So if people are looking for resources and support,

we've got some great resources on there for parents to help them understand a little bit more about gaming, gambling, screen addiction. So it's touchgrass.org.m.m. Tell you what, we'll keep in touch with you, Francis. Please do. Anytime. Lovely talking to you. Thanks so much. Pleasure. See you guys.