Garner Hall, a 17-year-old Bainbridge High School senior who wanted to break his own social media reliance, created an Instagram account with the goal of helping others through his Brain Nourishment movement.

Since creating the account in April 2024, Brain Nourishment has grown to over 1.9 million Instagram followers. Hall attributes the success to the simple messaging and universal concerns around the social term ‘brain rot.’

“I consistently fell into this thing. It didn’t make me feel good. After probably too much time, I just came to the realization that I need to do something about this. There are tools. There are other apps that could help block social media apps, but I wasn’t sure if they directly address the root issue, ”Hall said. “And to address that root issue, I kind of thought you need to go to the source.”

Hall doesn’t shy away from the contradiction he’s posting on social media to encourage others to reduce their time on social media. Since April of 2024, Hall has been building Brain Nourishment and reached a million followers within four months. He said the account started with simple messaging and has grown to be more general motivational and self improvement, which he describes as uplifting content.

“Through this kind of movement, and just seeing whether it’s people my age, people older, I think it affects all generations,” he said.

Hall said he’s not trying to eliminate the use of social media; instead, he’s trying to promote a more balanced approach of using social media in moderation. Despite having such an online following, Hall says it hasn’t really impacted his daily relationships with his friends and family.

In the future, Hall hopes to create an app as part of broadening the Brain Nourishment brand.

No launch date has been announced; however, Hall hopes to continue work on the app this summer when he can dedicate more time to it.

“The main mission or goal of brain nourishment is just to serve as this contradiction to a lot of the underlying foundation of social media, going back to that same idea of keeping you in the loop. These algorithms want you to feel worse,” he said. “They want you to kind of feel stuck, because it fuels engagement, it fuels user retention. So we try to serve as that contradiction. We try to uplift people.”