about touchgrass
”Touch grass” is what your mates say when you need to log off and get back to real life.
Screens, games and gambling apps are built to keep you hooked. Touchgrass helps you fight back with self-knowledge, tools and real stories from people who've been there.
No lectures. No judgement. Just private, pressure-free support when you need it.
The back story
The Problem Gambling Foundation Ltd has supported Tāngata Whai Ora nationwide with clinical support for gambling harm for more than 30 years. A new idea took shape in 2025; research was mounting on screen use harming young people and we realised we had the expertise in behavioural addiction to help. This started our journey beyond gambling, into an additional service offering for gamblification, gaming, and related screen harms, specifically for rangatahi.
Touchgrass was created to give rangatahi and their whānau ways to deal with these issues; designed with and for young people. It can be accessed in multiple ways to meet people where they’re at. There are digital tools, expert counselling and youth mentoring services, all available in-person and online.
The problem
Online gambling is growing, by early 2027 there will be up to 15 licensed online casino operators in the NZ market. This means more advertising (which will soon be legal!) and more messaging aimed at our vulnerable rangatahi.
Sports betting is already totally embedded in the sports we play and watch, marketing to young fans is relentless. Online gaming increasingly has gambling baked into its design with lootboxes, skins and other gamblified mechanisms easily available to our youth.
The pandemic normalised 10-to-16-hour screen days and lowered the age problematic use begins. Kiwi teens now average 7–9 hours daily. "Screen time has become the defining public health challenge of the 21st century." (Global Health Researchers, 2024)
40%+
of young people call screen addiction and social media personal issues.
66%+
of 12–17 year olds rank it their biggest challenge, above relationships, drugs, violence.
Impacts of this harm
It shows up everywhere: classrooms, EDs, homes and courts. It’s serious, sometimes irreversible, costly to our families, economy and health system.
It can affect cognitive functioning. It impacts mental and physical health with anxiety, depression, ADHD/ASD-like symptoms, disregulation, suicidal ideation and sleep disruption common. It can have a profound effect on feelings of isolation and family functioning.
Excessive screen use can effect brain and social development, preventing young people from launching independent lives. This is leading to many rangatahi still living at home in their mid-to-late twenties.
The wider cost of all these issue combined includes discontinued education, unemployment, and a system buckling under demand. This isn't a future problem. It's here.
What rangatahi are asking for
In June 2026, Mana Mokopuna, the Children's Commissioner, published Children and Young People's Perspectives on a Safer Digital World. Young people aren't asking to be excluded from the internet, they're asking to be equipped for it, through education, safer platforms, and real-world support that meets them where they are.
Touchgrass was built from co-design with young people, matched with international best practice. For six months we employed a group of rangatahi to research the issues and help develop the service itself. They developed key insights about rangatahi:
"We want help but we don't want anyone to know."
"We don't want to be labelled as a problem."
"Feeling stupid or embarrassed hurts more than any loss."
"Be more like a friend than a brochure."
A co-designed solution
Touchgrass is a wellbeing ecosystem for youth, co-designed by rangatahi and the Problem Gambling Foundation youth team. It has been built to reduce the harms of a gamblified world. Our youth clinicians use best-practice evidence-based frameworks to provide high quality treatment services. This then informs the online self-help advice that our AI chatbot is trained with.
Young people find Touchgrass in their own spaces: Reddit, Discord, TikTok, Instagram, leading into anonymous, private, online tools they can leave anytime. Whānau can find comprehensive support and professionals can refer rangatahi in.
We run school and community programmes building digital literacy without stigma. When ready, rangatahi can meet youth mentors with lived experience, or move into counselling, whānau therapy, or intensive treatment.
Aotearoa-wide prevention
This isn't a willpower problem. It's a design problem. Young people aren't failing to resist screens, they're being human in an environment built to exploit that. These products are built by engineers and behavioural psychologists with one job: maximise time on platform. The engine, variable ratio reinforcement (the same mechanism behind slot machines) means you never know when the next reward's coming, so you keep checking. It shows up in infinite scroll, unpredictable likes, algorithms built to hook you, and 60–80 push notifications a day.
Touchgrass fights back with awareness, tools, advocacy, and inspiration to live less gamblified, and more screen-free lives. We drive nationwide prevention, tackling big business profiting off our rangatahi through engineered addiction. Our advocates, public health team and social marketers are pushing for change at the highest level.
Meet the team
