The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Offline, it felt like we were winning at life – but were we?’
On a digital detox in Essex, Greg Dickinson feels the benefit but isn’t convinced that it makes him happier
The location was shared via Google Maps. No postcode, no old-fashioned directions, no “turn left at the postbox, if you see a horse you’ve gone too far”. Instead my target was a red digital pinpoint in a field, just north of the village of Finchingfield in Essex – myy final hit of delicious, convenient internet before embarking upon a “digital detox”.
I don’t think I’m addicted to the internet, but since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine I have certainly spent more time on my phone. Shortly after waking up, then on my lunch break, and during quiet moments throughout the day, I check for updates. It was a similar situation when the pandemic first took hold two years ago. But the result of this endles scrolling is not a pleasurable dopamine hit, but tragedy, sadness and worry. And then there is the full-time administrative task of keeping up to date with emails and WhatsApp. What happens if you just lock it all away for 24 hours?
SMARTPHONES AWAY
It was early afternoon when my fiancée Olivia and I reached our cabin: a futuristic black cuboid named “Pablo” on the edge of a farmer’s field. The quarters were unfussy and cleverly compact, like a narrowboat, kitted out with a black kettle on the hob, a compost loo and a wood-burning stove.
Crucially, there was also a lockbox containing a compass, a torch, an ancient Nokia phone and a map of the local area. Oh, and a padlock and key. We messaged our parents with the Nokia phone number in case of an emergency (spoiler: there wasn’t one) and locked away our smartphones. Just like that, we were offline.
The idea of “logging off ” has been around since we started “logging on”, back when the internet beeped and screeched its way into our front rooms. We developed a taste for Ask Jeeves, we enjoyed receiving sage advice from Clippy the Microsoft paperclip, and it was hard to stop.
But like all new pieces of technology, the World Wide Web was soon under the spotlight. As early as 1995, Dr Kimberly Young founded the Center for Internet Addiction at the University of Pittsburgh, in the United States, making her one of the first to say out loud that this bottomless pit of entertainment and information might just have a negative impact on our mental well-being.
The discussion around digital addiction has ramped up over the years, and for good reason – our screen time is only going in one direction. A recent survey by uSwitch shows we spend an average of 6.4 hours per day online, on any device. And Google Trends shows rising interest in searches for terms such as “phone addiction” and “digital detox”, suggesting a growing self-awareness of the problem among individuals.
What is interesting is that other countries take very different approaches to the scourge of screen time. In China, internet addiction is diagnosed as a clinical disorder and there are military-style digital detox “boot camps” where worried parents can send their loved ones to be “cured” of their affliction in harsh conditions, sometimes for months at a time. In the United States, the solution is fluffier. There you will find screen-free summer camps for self-diagnosed addicts, who pay large sums to go offline for a long weekend of yoga and kale smoothies.
Thankfully, there were no padlocked cells or whip-cracking guards on our digital detox, and better still there were no icebreaker sessions with high-networth individuals. The British approach to the digital detox, as championed by holiday companies such as Unplugged, with whom we stayed, is much quieter. It is not medical, nor is it therapising, but more centred on the simple removal of digital noise in a natural setting.
The question is, does a digital detox do us any good, or is it just another way of making money out of inward-facing, overthinking millennials like myself?
A central part of the Unplugged experience is nostalgia. Our cabin was equipped with board games and lifestyle books about connecting with nature, and there was an instant camera with film for 10 photos – a nice touch. The unspoken suggestion seems to be that these forms of “olden days” entertainment could make for more authentic interactions – and it could be true.
A wireless radio soundtracked our afternoon game of Jenga, which we played multiple times as our camping mugs full of tea refused to cool down. I lost, multiple times. But the theme of the BBC Radio 2 show was dogs, pegged to the beginning of Crufts, and before we knew it we were listening to Who Let the Dogs Out by the Baha Men in our peaceful little cabin. Would Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, downloaded on Spotify on my locked-away phone, not have made for a sweeter soundtrack, I wondered?
After a couple of hours, we felt compelled to explore the area, so we drove to Finchingfield for a Guinness at the Fox Inn, which we had spotted on our drive in. During our pint I noticed the couple on the table beside us, glued to their devices without pause. I raised my right eyebrow twice to bring Olivia’s attention to them. We smiled, for we had a dark secret: we were offline, and it felt like we were winning at life in some way. But were we?
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY
Some argue that going on a short-term “digital detox” serves no purpose whatsoever. In 2019, a team of psychologists including Dr Andrew K Przybylski, director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, conducted experiments to assess the benefits of signing off from social media for a day. Their hypothesis was that there would be a positive effect on well-being, but they found the opposite.
“Contrary to our expectations based on literature linking lower social-media use with higher well-being, we did not find any evidence that abstaining from social media for one day had significant positive impacts on psychological wellbeing,” their report says. In fact, the results showed that “some models showed significant deficits on social relatedness and satisfaction.” Perhaps that couple, glued to their phones, were happier than us after all?
There were times during our micro digital detox when it did feel like a phone would have enhanced, rather than detracted from, the quality of our experience. While at the pub, we discussed what to do the following day – but without knowledge of the next day’s weather, or the proximity of the cabin to the sea, or suggestions of things to do
nearby (based on a Google search), we were missing key pieces of information.
In another study, Theodora Sutton, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford, explored this very idea. She analysed the well-being of attendees at the Camp Grounded digital detox in San Francisco, California, over a three-year period, and her findings suggested that self-moderation, rather than going teetotal, was the most effective way of managing screen time.
She concluded: “Quantifying an arbitrary number of hours of recommended screen time is unhelpful; it is far more useful for each of us to recognise digital use within the context of our own lives, where we may be under social pressures, which technology enables, or hold aspirations, which digital use compromises.”
SO DID A DETOX MAKE A
DIFFERENCE?
Back at the cabin, under a darkening early spring sky, our entertainment was the fire pit. I constructed a decent enough pyramid of wood and we sat back, quietly enjoying the peace as a couple of lanky hares gambolled across the field. We watched the sun set, something we haven’t done for far too long, and found ourselves hypnotised by the endless queue of planes coming in to land at Stansted Airport, a form of television that felt cheatingly digital, somehow.
The next morning we awoke early to abundant daylight, gushing through the giant, set-piece window beside the bed. Over our morning coffees we chatted away, unhurried, our hair stinking of wood smoke, while we watched pheasants strut their way into the day, and I asked Olivia if she thought our minibreak had been made better by the absence of our phones. Not really, she said, although I suspect she welcomed having my full attention which, admittedly, can be diverted to Wordle (and Quordle, Nerdle and Birdle) in the first hour of the day.
I had to agree. We have enjoyed similarly peaceful getaways with our phones turned on, in the corner of the room. But I am thankful that Unplugged brought us to this sweet, straightforward cabin in an under-celebrated corner of the country. The villages around Finchingfield, with their thatched roofs, duck ponds and pastel-washed houses, are truly lovely. I would never have picked it.
Firepits, board games, the great outdoors, conversation, the quiet of night… These are things we all need more of in our lives. A phone, used sensibly, doesn’t prohibit any of the above. But if the theatre of a digital detox helps us to enjoy these simple pleasures, it remains a concept worth plugging into.
Unplugged (unplugged.rest) has nine cabins in Essex, Hertfordshire, West Sussex, East Sussex and Hampshire, with prices from £390 for a three-night stay