STOCKBRIDGE, Massachusetts — I went into rehab recently.
It wasn’t to treat substance abuse, though both drugs and alcohol are banned at the facility I checked myself into. Rather, I went to free myself from the noise that is disrupting our mental health in the 21st century.
I shut off my phone and laptop and locked them away for three days. But this was more than a digital detox: I joined 50 other people in taking a vow of silence. Instead of scrolling or chatting, we spent hours in guided meditation and the rest of the time alone with our thoughts. As silent retreats go, this one was brief. But I had never kept quiet for so long in my life, and I hadn’t been without my electronics for that long since I got my first iPhone 18 years ago.
I craved the unplugging, but I was admittedly skeptical about elements of the experiment. I didn’t think I had the patience for meditation, and my few previous attempts at yoga typically ended with the administration of Advil. I rolled my eyes at some of the instructions served up by session leaders (they’re allowed to talk): “Breathe into the back of the leg like it was a stream.” “Feel the fountain of light in your heart space.” “Let’s take our thumb to the inseam and clear the liver energy channel.”
For (silent) giggles, I signed up for one treatment that involved “using herbally infused oil to help balance your dosha,” and another in which “practitioners create a ‘heart link’ to connect to the angelic realm.” I skipped the “metaphysical” treatments such as tarot reading and astrology because they would compromise my vow of silence.
But underneath all that woo, I also found something true. The silent unplugging made me appreciate, in ways I hadn’t fully understood, how much my phone has hijacked my attention. In the notification-free quiet, I wondered: Have I forgotten how to just be?
Of course, the world’s religions have been practicing forms of monastic silence for thousands of years. The difference is those ancient orders, and even those who went on silent retreats in pre-smartphone decades, didn’t have Instagram accounts. Now, when we go into silence and turn off our devices, we are entirely isolated. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, this is disorienting.
I expected I would go through some digital withdrawal, and that happened. Dozens of times, I felt an involuntary urge to reach for my phone: to check the time, to take a picture, to see if the snow had canceled my flight, to look up “upma” before ladling some onto my plate, to order Valentine’s Day flowers, to find out what I was missing and who was trying to reach me. It felt unnatural not to be scrolling while waiting for a session to begin.
But something else happened during those three days that I didn’t expect — and it was frightening.
I was blindsided by the kaleidoscope of emotions that poured out in the silence. In the absence of distractions from the phone, my thoughts bombarded me in random ways. I felt variously bored and anxious, clear-eyed and confused. One moment, I felt myself floating blissfully above the snow-covered hills — until I was awakened by my own snore. At another point in meditation, while I concentrated on my deep breathing, sadness suddenly overcame me as my brain transported me back 18 years to my mother’s deathbed and her breathing, weak and sporadic.
A day into the silence, I felt like taking a nap, and the urge intensified into thorough exhaustion. I took a walk outside and gobbled a few cookies in hopes of a sugar boost, to no avail. I fell asleep before dinner and, after rallying for the evening meditation session, was out for the night by 8:30 p.m.
The instructor said she often sees this reaction. Some people experience an adrenaline crash as their stressed minds and bodies adjust to the calm. But it also turns out that suddenly shutting off external stimuli and turning attention inward can demand a startling amount of energy.
“We are often so externally focused that we don’t recognize what is going on in our minds, and when we begin to pay attention to that, it’s genuinely exhausting for most people,” Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin psychologist who studies meditation. It also can make us more anxious, at least at first.
Yet this shift is what ultimately improves our sense of well-being. Studies routinely show that moving from involuntary attention capture (what happens when your phone sends you notifications) to voluntary attention (when we choose to examine our own thoughts, or admire forms in nature or art) reduces our levels of stress, depression and loneliness, and improves our cognitive function.
Unfortunately, few of us escape the involuntary distraction of our devices, even for a few days. A landmark study in 2010, at the dawn of the smartphone age, found that people didn’t pay attention to what they were doing 47 percent of the time — and Davidson said that has probably increased.
“Compared to the way people performed 50 years ago, before cellphones and the internet, we are objectively more distractible,” he said. “We have an attention deficit, if we’re honest with ourselves.” This is why our phones have made us less attentive to our children, our spouses, our work and our studies.
But the exhaustion I felt that night points to an even deeper problem: Our phones are making it harder to know ourselves.
I did my silent retreat here at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in part because it’s relatively cheap (rates including meals and program start at $583 for dormitory-style lodging, and there are need-based discounts) and the three-day, two-night program felt less intimidating than longer ones. The 1950s facility, a former monastery that the state once considered converting into a prison, is not luxurious; there were water stains on the ceiling tiles in my room, and part of my nightstand was held together with Scotch tape.
But people don’t come here for the amenities; they come to “disconnect from the craziness,” as my retreat leader, Jess Frey, put it.
That was certainly my goal. I arrived in a frazzle after a tough week at work and in the world. Waze had sent me down the wrong road. ADT had just called to say my burglar alarm was going off. (My security cameras revealed the culprits to be wild turkeys pecking at the door.) I made a last check of emails, texts, Slack, Signal and WhatsApp, and sent a final text to my wife. My family and my editor had the number for Kripalu’s front desk in case of emergency.
I locked my phone and laptop in the car — only to return a few hours later because I feared subzero temperatures would ruin the batteries. I was wearing an “In loving silence” placard around my neck, but a talkative fellow in the parking lot hadn’t gotten the memo.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where check-in is?”
I pointed in the same direction as all the signs.
“Thank you!” he called out.
I waved.
He spied my University of Virginia ski cap. “Go Cavs, by the way!” he persisted.
I ignored him, then went to lock my devices in my room’s safe to reduce temptation.
Kripalu, originally rooted in Hindu traditions, is now nonreligious and eclectic — extremely so. After check-in, I stopped in at the Healing Arts center, where a practitioner said she would be “releasing energy blockages” in me. She would achieve this through use of a “high-vibrational frequency” that emanated from her hands as she waved them over me while moving her eyes beneath her closed lids. She paused to take notes as she administered the treatment. “I was on your heart chakra,” she told me after the session. While listening to my heart chakra, she heard the words of Bob Marley and wrote them down for me: “Every little thing gonna be right.”
Next, I participated in a “gentle yoga” session, where we made mudras — hand gestures — that looked like corgis. The instructor disclosed the presence of an “inner waterfall” and taught us a mantra: “As I learn to let go, my life becomes an effortless flow.”
This yoga seemed a bit too gentle, so I took it up a notch to “moderate yoga” for my next two classes. At each of those, impossibly flexible women in Lululemon attire turned themselves into swimmers, skiers, runners, dogs, snakes, boats, bows, trees and warriors (exalted, peaceful and humble). My wobbly attempts resembled theirs not in the slightest, and I left both sessions in the injured-warrior pose, with crick in neck and sciatic pain. Even the closing “Om” proved problematic: Wouldn’t it break my vow of silence?
The silent meditation was more to my taste. Frey, who launched the silent retreats five years ago, explained what we were here to learn: “Who am I when I’m not addicted to my phone and don’t have that thing buzzing on me all day long? … Who am I when I’m not scrolling on social media all day long?” Silence, she explained, “naturally slows us down and gives us a moment to land back inside of ourselves, to reinhabit this body that we live in.”
But if silence slowed us down, Frey kept a rigorous pace, teaching us no fewer than 10 meditation techniques done while seated, standing, walking and reclining. In between, she dispensed aphorisms, urging us to embrace “a radical acceptance of who you are, where you are, as you are,” and offered prompts for us to answer in our journals: “Where is the great river of life carrying you?”
Others seemed to have feared the unplugging even more than I did. One woman, before going into silence, confessed that she planned to sneak looks at her phone in her room at night. One man brought a small safe to the retreat. He put his phone and watch in it Friday and set the timer so it wouldn’t open until Sunday afternoon — unless he broke open the safe with a hammer.
At the end of the weekend, Jennifer Shaer, one of the participants, said “it was very uncomfortable” to realize how powerfully she felt the pull of her phone.
Another, Amy Schwenkmeyer, told me she was constantly feeling “that habit kick in, just that reflex” of reaching for her phone. “It scared me,” she said.
One man told me after the retreat that he’s thinking about switching to a flip-phone so only phone calls can intrude on his day. But not many of us have the freedom to go on do-not-disturb for long stretches of time. “There is always that feeling that you are somehow doing something wrong by doing that,” Anna Fuentes, a younger participant, told me. “This feels like the only place that I can actually do that and have it be okay.”
My own experience at Kripalu was incomplete. Because I was there to describe the experience, I was by definition not being in the moment, which is the whole point of a silent retreat. And yet my intense exhaustion suggested that something powerful had happened in my brain. After a long sleep, I left in better spirits and with a clearer head — and I have no doubt that came primarily from being off that infernal phone.
When I finally turned it back on, I had 78 text messages waiting for me and a couple hundred emails. None was urgent.
At present, I am a sojourner in civilized life again, to borrow from Thoreau. But not a contented one. I plan to try turning off my devices on Saturdays and spending part of the day in contemplation. Maybe I’ll switch my SIM card to an old flip-phone during that time, in case of emergencies. I’ll let you know how it goes.
And if you’ve found a way to shut off the “involuntary attention capture,” please let me know. As my heart chakra likes to say, let’s get together and feel all right.
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