Technology that respects
human agency

Sylvia Olveda

Co-Founder

Sylvia holds two psychology degrees from Stanford, where she served as a Teaching Assistant for Philip Zimbardo, the researcher whose work on situational control, compliance, and how environments shape behavior became foundational to everything we now understand about influence at scale.

She wasn't just reading Zimbardo. She was inside the room, translating his research for students and working directly with his methods. That experience gave her a practitioner's understanding of how environments, not individual willpower, determine behavior.

From there, Sylvia moved into user experience research, the discipline where behavioral psychology meets product design. UX research asks why people behave the way they do inside digital systems, and how those systems should be built to actually serve human needs. It's work that sits at the uncomfortable intersection of cognitive science and commercial software, and Sylvia spent years in that space.

What she saw there wasn't encouraging. The same psychological principles she'd studied at Stanford — reward variability, social proof, loss aversion, identity-based compliance — were being baked into interfaces not to help users, but to keep them. Not as a side effect. As the product.

Digital Balance is built on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a framework that treats compulsive behavior not as weakness but as a predictable response to a poorly designed environment. That framing is Sylvia's. When a platform is engineered to exploit your cognition, understanding your own mind matters more than trying to out-willpower it.

Ryan Shanahan

Co-Founder

Ryan is a CISSP- and CISM-certified information security executive with more than 25 years of experience protecting organizations from the ways technology can be turned against the people who use it. He has served as a CISO, built security operations programs from the ground up, and consulted for both Fortune 500 enterprises and early-stage companies across healthcare, commercial real estate, and technology services.

His path to Digital Balance started in adversarial security work: phishing simulations, social engineering assessments, incident response. Years of studying how attackers exploit cognitive shortcuts led to an uncomfortable recognition. The same psychological levers used in targeted attacks (urgency, social proof, variable reward, loss aversion) were being deployed at population scale by the platforms billions of people use every day. The difference was legality, not impact.

Ryan brings that security practitioner's lens to digital wellness. He treats persuasive design as a threat model, not a lifestyle problem, and built Digital Balance around the premise that users deserve to understand exactly what platforms are doing to hold their attention and why it works.