America faces a mental health emergency hiding in plain sight—in our pockets, purses, and hands throughout nearly every waking hour.

Last week, I caught myself mindlessly checking email when I should have been fully focused on the person I was with. As I caught myself, I embarrassingly put my phone away and kept it there for the remainder of the lunch. Not long after, I found myself responding to a text in the middle of a phone call with a dear friend. Neither the email nor the text was critical—and I realized, this is not who I want to be.

If you're like most Americans, you've probably done something similar today. Research shows we now check our phones more than 100 times per day. We've become so seamlessly integrated with our devices that we barely notice how our screens have colonized every spare moment of our time, including the most precious ones we'll never get back.

Before the Internet existed, many of us working to build the Internet dreamed of “democratizing access” to information, ideas, and to one another. In those early days when I was an executive at AOL, only a tiny fraction of the population was online, averaging less than an hour per week. We believed the internet, once mainstreamed, would enhance how people lived, worked, and played. And in many ways, it has.

But today’s reality would shock my younger self and those early colleagues: Nielsen reports that Americans now spend over eight hours per day on screens—the........

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