These Georgia Students Are Asking Teens to Pause for Five Seconds Before Scrolling
Exams are coming up, reports are due, and applications for jobs and college are on the horizon. But high school students Pranshu Raithatha and Harsh Mehta encountered a problem outside of the demands of the coursework itself. When they needed to focus, they realized they were scrolling on social media apps on their phone.
They downloaded application after application, muted the sound on their phones so auto-playing videos wouldn’t draw them in, and set the screen to monochrome to reduce the visual appeal of vibrant images.
“I was still mindlessly scrolling, and it wasn’t something I chose to do,” said Raithatha.
Co-founders Raithatha and Mehta asked themselves and their teenage peers a behavioral design question: “Can a brief pause at the exact moment someone opens social media help turn an impulse into an intentional choice?”
Grounded in this question and exploring the root of the challenge of focused attention, Raithatha and Mehta built Mivo Scrolling. “We wanted to build something that helps people first by finding the gap between what people wanted to do and what they actually did,” they said. “And importantly, we don’t want to make people feel guilty, but rather to help them notice their screen time habits and then make an intentional choice.”
Behavior, Not Blocking
When Raithatha and Mehta explored existing screen time apps, many of which they had tried themselves, they noticed a common core feature. A focus on blocking, which aims to reduce time spent scrolling by using time limits or providing reduced access to apps.
“A lot of tools made screen time a discipline issue. Instead, Mivo avoids strict blocking and productivity gamification. It asks users why they opened the app, making automatic behavior visible before the feed takes over,” said Raithatha and Mehta.
To learn more about how their peers were using their phones and social media, and about ways people wanted to control their screen time instead of just blocking access to the app, Raithatha and Mehta surveyed over 500 high school and college-aged students in the greater Atlanta area and across the United States.
One of their main findings: Over 90% of their respondents reported that they were scrolling naturally without wanting to, and many would uninstall screen time apps within just three days of trying them out.
“The main comment from users is that they didn’t realize how bad their screen time had gotten. When we asked how long they scrolled, people thought it was 1-2 hours and the actual average was around 4-5 hours. We also learned that scrolling typically happens in one big session rather than multiple small sessions throughout the day. So this awareness really helped them out,” said Mehta.
Raithatha and Mehta’s results are reflected in national numbers. A 2023 Gallup survey of over 1,500 teens found that in addition to the nearly five hours daily that 51% of U.S. teens spent on social media, there are mental health outcomes. For teens who used social media daily for over five hours, 41% reported their overall mental health as poor or very poor. For teens using social media for less than two hours daily, 23% reported their overall mental health as poor or very poor.
“In our survey, teenage respondents said that if they knew what they wanted to do instead of scrolling, it helped them to be productive. And it’s better than making them feel guilty,” said Mehta. Our goal is to help make behavioral changes for teens easier by allowing them to calmly notice their habits, without feelings of shame.
Choosing Intention, Maintaining Attention
Whether it’s reaching for your phone first thing in the morning to see what your friends are up to, scrolling late at night, or perhaps when you’re stressed or bored, Mivo seeks to understand and work with each person’s individual schedule.
In the first three days, Mivo uncovers patterns of behavior as part of its baseline determination process for when and how you use social media apps on your phone.
Based on this baseline and what is realistic for each person, Mivo can help you be aware of the actions you are taking so you can plan to scroll when it works with your overall schedule. “When we talked with people and looked at the user activity, we see that to control screen time, it is helpful to think about two phone sessions, one in the morning and one at night,” said Raithatha.
Raithatha and Mehta highlighted that Mivo is not about eliminating the use of technology or scrolling altogether, acknowledging the importance of technology in our lives. The point is to be intentional and make conscious decisions throughout the day that you can be comfortable and proud of.
The Purpose of the Five Second Pause
With the baseline understanding of your schedule and habits, Mivo uses a friction model using a five-second pause and a reflection prompt before the social media app opens after it’s tapped on the screen. “This pause creates time and space for someone to reflect on what they are going into the app,” said Mehta.
The Mivo team highlighted that, just like every other habit that you have or would like to build, people respond better to reducing or making changes slowly and sustainably instead of a drastic change in phone or social media use.
“As we were designing and developing, we asked, ‘Does this help someone make more conscious choice or annoy them?’,” said Raithatha and Mehta as they balanced the use of interactive features, the overall experience, and design.
“I have experience with film, including at my school’s film program, and I’m a suspense and horror fan, so I know what keeps people interested in engaging with content,” said Raithatha, adding, “We also don’t want people spending lots of time on Mivo, and we’ve used a light cream color palette to ground people more in the moment.”
To further help people be even more intentional about their time while maintaining access to social media platforms, the application's newest feature, Mivo Clear, entirely removes the scrolling option from Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. While people can still text on Instagram and TikTok and watch longer videos on YouTube, this feature aims to increase mindfulness by slowing down the momentum gained on social media when quickly scrolling through content.
In addition to the pause and intention setting after tapping to open an app, a few of Mivo’s additional features include active session timers that show how long you’ve been scrolling, the ability to set personalized schedules that align with your activities and goals, and late-night or rescue modes to provide gentle reminders related to your goals.
Reflection and intention are key for Raithatha and Mehta in their design of Mivo. From starting each day with an estimate of your screen time compared with reality, application users have the chance to realign their habits with their goals and expectations. Additional reflection comes after a scrolling session in the form of “Worth It?” session checks, which ask, “Was this worth your time?”
Raithatha said, “It has been encouraging to see how people our age are using Mivo to help them think about and take control of how they are spending their time. So they can sleep, study, or be creative.”
Opportunity Cost and Attention
The design of social media platforms itself is anything but mindless. The features of these apps, such as the way they are typically used when we are alone, allow for viewing endless amounts of content, have the ability for fast scrolling and autoplay of videos, and teasing content of interest, have been described by Michaeleen Doucleff, a PhD scientist, NPR journalist, and author of Dopamine Kids, as superglue.
When discussing the challenges in being intentional with your attention, Raithatha said, “The algorithms of social media platforms are maximized. And for Mivo, we’ve spent time learning the user interface features of these social media apps that makes them difficult to close, like dark mode for users to stay on the app at night and the use of short-form videos.”
“The biggest thing I want people to take away about this is that this is not a conversation about phones. It’s a conversation about attention,” said Raithatha.
Mivo Scrolling is currently available on the Apple App Store for iPhone, and the Android version is in the final stages of development. To help students be prepared for the upcoming school year, Mivo has launched a referral program (with prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd most referrals) running from July 24th to August 14th, 2026. The full details are available in the application.