Overworked, stressed-out Britons are driving a surge in demand for digital-free new year getaways, where guests are forced to ditch their smart devices as they check in.
The trend for “digital detox” has been around in the America for some time, but the urge to go “off grid” is taking hold here too, along with a mini-boom in specialist companies looking to cash in.
This month, pop star Ed Sheeran announced he was stepping off the social media bandwagon – no mobile phones, emails or Twitter for a whole year. “I find myself seeing the world through a screen and not my eyes,” he wrote (on his Instagram account, of course).
Tanya Goodin, the founder of Time To Log Off, knows how he feels. Her eureka moment came when she realised she hadn’t read a book in four years. “I thought, wow, how did that happen? I realised it was about my attention span. My focus was gone,” she says.
After 20 years running a digital marketing agency, she decided to break away and launch her detox company, which offers retreats in places such as Hawaii, Italy and Cornwall.
Like many of us, Goodin says she spent most of her time flipping from device to device, from app to app. “I used to pride myself on being a supreme multi-tasker. I used to think that was great. But my focus was going down while my multi-tasking was going up,” she says.
Goodin says most adults are now spending more time online than they are asleep, and work is intruding on every waking hour.
She worried, though, that there might not be an appetite for American-style retreats among more cynical Brits. But that wasn’t the case. “I only had four retreats planned for next year, but I’m going to have to do more,” she says.
Lucy Pearson, the co-founder of Unplugged Weekend, another specialist operator, says she has also seen a surge in demand. “This year, especially, there’s been a lot of interest in digital detox. Everyone wants to talk about it, and people are becoming more aware of it.” Both she and Goodin say the biggest demand is coming from burned-out corporate high-fliers, which is hardly surprising given the price: the Cornwall retreat costs from £745 for a week.
It’s pretty serious money when you could, well, just switch your phone off. But Emily, a director of a London-based consulting firm, says that being forced to do it – and for money – was key. After being signed off from work for “burnout” earlier this year, she took the plunge and signed up for a digital detox retreat to Italy in October.
“I was nervous about getting stuck with a bunch of alpha females all sitting around bitching about things. But it turned out to be a really nice group of people,” says Emily, who didn’t want to reveal her surname. Guests were encouraged to do yoga and drawing, or go on silent walks. But the thing Emily found most transformative was simply looking her fellow detoxers in the eye and having a good old-fashioned conversation. “We were looking and engaging with each other rather than communicating through our phones,” she says.
The other thing that struck her was just how much pointless “digital noise” there was in her life. “When I got back home, I realised I didn’t have any messages that were actually important, that needed me to do anything. No one had died.”
Digital detox isn’t just for the Emilys of this world, though: parents with teenagers and young children are coming round to it too. According to Childwise, a market research firm, children aged between five and 16 now spend, on average, six-and-a-half hours a day gawping at screens.
It’s a phenomenon Center Parcs, the holiday operator, says it’s aware of. “We found that the most likely time to be distracted by mobile devices is when you’re with the people closest to you,” says Colin Whaley, its sales and marketing boss. So now, families checking into their holiday chalets this festive season are being given a miniature sleeping bag to stash away all their digital devices. “It’s a little nudge to give the mobile phone a rest for a few days,” says Whaley.
That might sound gimmicky, but Richard Graham, a consultant psychiatrist at the Nightingale hospital in London, agrees families need to be encouraged to re-evaluate their relationship with technology. The number of teenagers he’s been treating for technology addiction has climbed in the past six months, and he believes young people in particular need more “digital-free space”.
The point about digital detox holidays, Graham says, is that they give people “permission” to switch off. “There’s often a demanding figure in the background – it might be a boss, a family member or a friend – who you feel may be hostile to you switching off,” he says. The ritual of handing over your smartphone takes away some of that guilt, he argues.
So rather than making the usual half-baked new year commitment to getting fitter, perhaps for 2016 we should all have a go at stashing away our digital addictions for a day or two (even an hour or two?), and indulge in some good old analogue fun.
Charades, anyone?
