Bound for the beach? Don’t leave your mind behind in the office. Samuel Fishwick has a guide to switching off

DO YOU like to be beside the seaside, or is it the likes on the ’gram you’re after? While your holiday is #NoFilter, your brain is struggling to relax if you can’t tear yourself away from screen time.

“So many of my clients complain that their holidays feel too short,” says Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist, couples counsellor and author of

The Phone Addiction Workbook.

“If we’re still connected to our phones, keeping an eye on what’s happening at home or at the office, it’s likely that our holiday time will feel like it’s flying as we’re not taking in the new experience, our new environment fully.”

So, what to do? Neuropsychologist David Eagleman, who studies time perception, calls time “a rubbery thing” that changes based upon where we are and our mental engagement with our experience. Eagleman asserts that the more engaged we are with what we’re doing, the more immersed we are in it — so switch off from your phone, and switch on to what you’re doing if you want the holiday to feel like it’s lasting a lifetime.

For one, don’t pack your Kindle. “Reading a paper or hardback book has two key benefits over a screen”, Burke argues. “Having good spatial mental representation of the physical layout of the text has been shown to lead to better memorisation and comprehension. When scrolling down a screen, we don’t get any sense of where the text lies ‘ on the page.’” Also, “the opportunities for multitasking are increased if we’re reading our book via the same device we use for messaging, shopping, and browsing. If we are reading a physical book and wish to do those things then it takes a much more conscious effort to put that book down, root out our phone, and switch it on.

Gelong Thubten, author of A Monk’s Guide to Happiness: Meditation in