Adventures in Unplugging

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. I’m not sure when my smartphone began to feel like an albatross, when my unease about relying on it devolved into full-blown anxiety that I was ­frittering away my life on this tiny screen. As if reading my mind, ­purported solutions to this digital malaise began ­appearing on the very device that caused my angst, to paraphrase ­Hemingway, gradually and then suddenly all at once. TikTok influencers, riffing on the trend of “touching grass” instead of scrolling, touted self-guided digital ­detoxes. I kept seeing advertisements for Brick—a physical plastic block that, for $59, can turn smartphones into devices that merely call and text. The Opal app directs users to wholesome dopamine hits, like solving math problems, instead of trawling “culprit” destinations like Instagram. Some people are ditching devices altogether in favor of flip phones and meeting up in “Luddite” clubs dedicated to offline pursuits like painting and reading. Goop wellness empire queen Gwyneth Paltrow says she underwent a digital detox to be more “present.” The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year. The smartphone backlash has even reached the corporate world: ­Companies like Spotify and Dolby have invited keynote speaker Nina Hersher, the founder of Digital Resilience Lab, to talk about device-specific wellness. The digital detox tech market raked in an estimated $3.4 billion globally in the fall of 2025 and is now projected to balloon 15 percent every year. My own algorithm started serving me marketing materials from wellness retreats featuring digital detoxing—or, in the case of Arizona’s Miraval Resort, “digital mindfulness.” At The Ranch in Malibu, California, guests can ­expect, in addition to daily massages, to “detox from digital devices.” Such retreats are one of the wellness industry’s fastest-­growing sectors, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. report. In just a few days, they seem to promise, they will cleanse you of the virtual residue mucking up your mind. I went to get a glimpse of a well-­reviewed digital detox retreat offered by Golden Door, a posh resort set amid the Merriam Mountain range on the outskirts of San Diego County. I drove there in mid-May and parked near a wooden bridge that arched over a small burbling creek. The heavy scent of jasmine suffused the air. As the highway noise dissipated, I felt my jaw unclench for the first time that day. The retreat center’s founder, Deborah Szekely, attributed nutritious, fresh food as central to her family surviving the Great Depression. Drawing from this ethos, Golden Door’s program has, since 1958, centered on organic meals shared in a dining room and daily exercise like hiking. These days, it also offers LED treatments, dermaplaning, and an experimental “multisensory” video experience, The Circle, that is modeled after Las Vegas’ Sphere, with live musicians soundtracking a nature film shown on a circular screen under a forest ­canopy. The lawns are trimmed by a silent robot so as not to disturb the 40 or so weekly guests while they’re unwinding, Golden Door General Manager and COO Kathy Van Ness points out when she meets me for a tour. Guests typically stay for seven days (a “classic women’s week” costs $12,950) and, according to Van Ness, 60 percent of visitors return every year. “Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world.” In the 13 years that Van Ness has led Golden Door, she’s noticed that the younger clientele, rather than obsessing over fitness fads, arrive anxious and desperate to take charge of their relationships with smartphones. This is easier said than done, even at one of the most intentionally relaxing places on Earth. When Van Ness first arrived at the retreat center in 2013, she’d inherited a place with no wifi. “The stress of not having [wifi] was more fearful than actually telling them to put [their phones] away,” Van Ness says, “because they felt that they couldn’t do it.” (Fans of The White Lotus might find this story­line familiar.) So she installed wifi, and in 2017, she started experimenting with something less rigid. Minimal phone use is permitted in common areas, but attendees may use them inside their rooms, which are outfitted with a small black “sleep” bag for guests to tuck their digital devices away. Each is emblazoned with words of encouragement, such as “choose to look more at your inner wisdom than the screen.” “When you tell people who are successful that they can’t do something, you’re taking something away from them,” Van Ness explains. “If you give them the choice to understand why they should not do that, they are gleeful to put it away.” Her sleep bag strategy aligns with 2017 research suggesting that a smartphone within one’s sight can diminish cognitive capacity. But I suspect that Golden Door’s digital detox has become popular with the well-heeled for a different reason. They get to indulge in the ultimate quiet luxury: being unreachable. Lily Lambie-Kiernan Although it’s now positioned as a form of wellness, digital detoxing ­entered the cultural lexicon at a time of panic. In 2018, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how the company had harvested millions of Facebook users’ data and used it to influence the previous US presidential election. “All of a sudden, everyone started saying, ‘Oh, by the way, social media can manipulate you, and social media can be evil,’” says Anastasia Dedyukhina, the founder of the Consciously Digital Institute, an organization that is attempting to set standards for digital wellness practices. In 2024, Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation, which hinged on an argument that digital devices were “rewiring” children’s brains, changed the tenor of cultural conversations around screen time. “You cannot argue about the social importance of this book,” Dedyukhina says. “It mobilized lots of people to push back big time on social media, specifically on phones, and it became an institutional thing, a ­concern for governments.” Solid research has shown that prolonged use of smartphones is linked to poor posture and eyesight issues as well as psychological maladies like anxiety, burnout, shredded attention spans, and the degradation of human connections. In the past few years, a spate of high-profile lawsuits have alleged that tech giants intentionally encouraged social media addiction, particularly among children; Meta is currently facing such claims in a federal trial that began earlier this week. At least 20 states and several countries have instituted cellphone bans in school classrooms. ­Earlier this year, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for promoting design features that worsened a young woman’s depression and anxiety—a ruling that opens up the potential for other lawsuits and tighter regulation. (Meta and YouTube plan to appeal the decision.) The view of screen time as an “addiction” has led to a growing digital wellness industry that promises to help you “detoxify” from its poisons. Several years ago, Marck Lund-Nielsen, a brand consultant based in Denmark, says he began noticing a “dopamine detox” trend picking up steam in manosphere circles online. To “dopamine detox” was to abstain from compulsively pleasurable things, like seeking likes and follows on social media, supposedly in order to lower one’s cortisol levels. The podcaster Joe Rogan has touted “dopamine fasts” with guests on his show, and Andrew Huberman, the “wellness bro” Stanford neuroscientist, offers lessons in “controlling dopamine for motivation, focus, and satisfaction.” Just to be clear, the concept of a total dopamine detox misrepresents the science of the brain. According to Cleveland Clinic psychologist Susan Albers-­Bowling, dopamine is “a critical component that we can’t and don’t want to get rid of.” Recent online chatter about being “aspirationally offline”—indulging ­instead in nostalgic analog tech like CD players and wired headphones—stems from a backlash to techno-­utopianism (and its billionaire boosters), says Samantha Chen, a writer and content creator who analyzes digital trends. The rise of AI has only amplified this sentiment, Chen says, as people want “to exert some kind of control over what ultimately may not be controllable.” The digital detoxing craze has taken on a performative air. Gen Zers tote around “analog bags” bursting with coloring books and Game Boys in Instagram Reels. Even Brick has become a trendy accessory with which to broadcast one’s mindfulness around screen time. ­“Increasingly, social status is this thing of being able to disconnect from the digital world,” Lund-­Nielsen says. People with this privilege may not need to, say, monitor a bank account to keep it from overdrawing, or check work email while on vacation, he explains: “You can disconnect from it actively.” Of course, the digital detox trend stems from a real dissatisfaction with life online and an understandable suspicion of the way tech companies design their products’ algorithms in a way that keeps people scrolling to maximize profit. But some of the quick-fix solutions offered to supposedly cleanse us of these ills are most likely fads, both Lund-Nielsen and Chen told me. A more permanent societal shift would depend on people doing the tough internal work of untangling the loneliness that may be compelling all of us to reach for our phones. But that makes for a less-compelling Instagram story than posting a vintage VHS haul from an estate sale. Still, while a digital cleanse might be no panacea, could it curb my anxiety that I’m wasting my whole life online? Without $9,950 to spare for Golden Door’s shortest-possible unplug ­regimen, I decided to try a mini-detox at home. Heeding the advice of Colin Corby, a former tech industry worker turned digital detox coach, I did some self-examination to understand why this cleanse might help me: I’ve always identified as an extrovert, yet I also realized that scrolling was giving me an excuse to decline plans with friends, even when I wasn’t that tired. I gave myself a weeklong window to explore better digital habits. First, I tried to reduce my screen time by one hour per day to see if it would have a positive effect on my attention span, as research has suggested it might. I also deployed the power of inconvenience; I used Opal to block Instagram and Reddit, the apps where I linger the most. Using the phone an hour before bedtime? Verboten. And I said yes to all social plans so long as they didn’t require doing something terrible, like waiting in an hourlong line at a ­matcha place. Corby suggested that a change in environment could help build better habits, so I set out to wake up slightly earlier and go for a walk instead of mainlining my phone the moment I opened my eyes. The experiment started off badly. My attempt to wake up 20 minutes earlier resulted in snoozing my alarm two days in a row. Realizing I was not cut out to be an early riser, I opted to pet my dog for a few minutes before checking email. The next day upon waking, I read a chapter of a book instead of staring at my phone. I went out with friends four nights in a row, something I hadn’t done in at least a year. By the end of the week, I was surprised when Opal told me that my screen time had gone down from a daily average of four hours and 21 minutes to three hours. So was I able to concentrate longer, sleep better, feel less anxious? Not in the life-changing way I was expecting. I thought the break would help mitigate some ongoing sleep issues, but something else was keeping me up. Most personally beneficial were the mornings spent reading and dog snuggling, which made me feel a little less spiky throughout the day, and the nourishment from catching up with friends. Given that it takes several weeks, if not months, to develop new habits, I’d need to keep this up for a while to see demonstrable changes. But on day eight, my screen time spiked once again. I’d found a video of a CGI fish with Jim Carrey’s face transposed over it. Apparently, test audiences had found the creature so disturbingly lifelike that Warner Bros. scrapped the film it was designed for altogether. Delighted, I sent the discomfiting Carrey fish to a few friends over Instagram. Laughing about it over text with them fed the lingering desire to reconnect with friends—and felt just as good as not having my phone in hand. Ultimately, the slow and methodical building of better habits around tech, like being more present and scrolling less, is a slog. Which is probably what makes digital detox retreats so popular. They play into the quintessentially American approach to problem-­solving: We’re convinced that any dilemma can be quickly remedied—for a price.