Digital detox: Why locking your phone in a box makes for the ultimate mindful retreat

After nearly two years of lockdowns, working from home, and no let up from Zoom meetings, Laura Sanders finds the ideal environment for anybody to try a digital detox – no chanting or funky juice concoctions necessary

An Unplugged cabin offers simple charm (Moon Communications/Lois North)

The last time I was required to lock my phone away in a box, I was at school and it was a punishment – not something people paid for the privilege of doing and certainly not something I thought I’d look forward to. But in the right environment, such as a cosy cabin in the Sussex countryside, with a fire crackling away and a snuggly bed overlooking my own bit of land, it was more than doable – even for somebody who takes her phone in the shower with her.

With the average person’s screen time more than doubling during the pandemic and two-thirds of couples now reportedly spending upwards of five hours on their devices a day instead of communicating with each other, it comes as no surprise that digital detoxes are increasingly in demand (and increasingly needed). Even before Covid-19, many of us had lost touch with the “real world” and forgotten how to live meaningfully in it. What’s more, there’s still a huge stigma surrounding mental health and carving time out to practice self-care to maintain it.

In 2020, Hector Hughes and Ben Elliot, two former tech start-up workers from London, set out to prove that the key to reconnecting with our surroundings and truly taking time out isn’t in the number of miles we travel away from home, or extravagant retreat programmes which have you doing yoga at dawn and drinking green juice, but simply the distance we put between ourselves and our gadgets.