Melinda gave up her phone for 9 days at Beond. Here, she sits in an ice bath. She stayed in for 15 minutes. Photo from Melinda
So many things had been a struggle for 46-year-old Melinda*. And the smart phone wasn’t helping.
Her divorce weighed her down. She self-medicated. Late last year, her job in healthcare felt stressful and heavy, and she quit. Lying sideways on the couch in the middle of the day, she’d scroll social media. Her feed was filled with colleagues getting promoted and running lucrative businesses. She compared herself unfavorably. “LinkedIn contributed to my feelings that I’m a failure,” she says.
On May 1 she took an overdose and tried to die. Her boyfriend found her. She woke up in the hospital ICU with a tube down her throat.
The phone wasn’t the prime reason she tried to kill herself. But the phone was one factor in a life that felt crushing and hopeless.
Our culture may be reaching a tipping point regarding phones and social media. Writers, public health officials and educators are beginning to agree that our fixation with our iPhones and Instagram feeds can fray our mental, physical, and emotional health.
The average person’s phone time is 4.5 hours, and more than half of Americans say they’re addicted to their phone.
Even people who love their phones hate their phones. A popular new book by Jonathan Haidt called “The Anxious Generation” makes a powerful argument that phones and social media aggravate our crippling and worsening mental health struggles—particularly for kids and teenagers. The surgeon general, the nation’s top health official, urged social media companies to add warning labels to their products. Cigarettes are linked to cancer, Coca-Cola to obesity, and Social Media to depression.
Melinda is an astute person, and can find solutions the same places she found problems. She saw on LinkedIn Beond advertising ibogaine treatment for depression and PTSD..
So Melinda booked nine days at the Beond facility in Cancun, Mexico. There, she would do one of the world’s most powerful and long-lasting psychedelics, ibogaine, derived from a plant from central Africa. Science suggests, and anecdotes concur, that ibogaine can salve depression and addiction.
Then—also on LinkedIn—Melinda found out Beond offered $500 cash if you gave up your phone.
She was happy to hand over her iPhone, and embark on a phone-free adventure toward health.
“I wanted my brain totally focused on ibogaine,” says Melinda. “I didn’t want to be tempted to text my ex, or fill my brain with unimportant stuff.”
Beond was co-founded by husband and wife team Tom Feegel and Talia Eisenberg. They have long known about the dangers of excessive phone use. They themselves stare at it too long, too often. Phones, they came to think, are socially acceptable opioids in your pocket.
Even their own kids were hooked. One would wake up and ask for the phone before breakfast. For them, YouTube was more desirable than cereal. (They’ve changed their relationship with the tech over the years. Their 14-year-old son Charlie has been given only a flip phone.)
Tom and Talia saw the same phone-bound behavior in the guests at their ibogaine retreat.
People would come for a 10-day expansion of their mind and consciousness, and instead of basking in the beauty of Cancun and the fellowship of the other guests, they were head down in their smartphones, checking email, arguing on Facebook, taking selfies, counting likes. (The Taiwanese call phone-addicted folks “The Head Down People.)
“The vision for Beond is to create an environment where individuals can have a profound and meaningful transformational experience with ibogaine,” says Tom. “The environment facilitates a connection that has been lost or eclipsed, a connection to their authentic self, a connection to their hopes and dreams, their life purpose and vision, to their most important relationships, to other people at Beond who are going through a similar process, and ultimately a connection to Nature.
“The phone was just a great weapon of mass distraction from all of that.”
Tom and Talia had already asked people to give up their phones for the 3 days surrounding their ibogaine trip. (Loved ones can still be in contact with staff.) But three days felt “insufficient,” says Tom. So last month Tom and Talia instituted the Digital Detox Challenge.
“People are so dependent on the dopamine,” says Tom, “they wouldn’t give up their phones unless we paid them.”
Such is the pull of the phone that only two people, including Melinda, signed up. “$500 is not enough,” says Tom.
Staff at Beond hide confiscated phones as if they are buried treasure: in plastic bags in a black bank vault in a locked office with security cameras. These phones are better guarded than the crown jewels. (People doing the digital detox can still get their devices for half an hour a day to check in with loved ones.)
Melinda loved not having her phone. She’d see others hide in their rooms in the afternoons, staring at their devices. She’d feel the urge to text her ex, and instead she’d distract herself by swimming laps or working out.
“One day it was pouring rain and I didn’t go inside to look at my phone, I just walked around the pool and felt the rain on my body and went swimming, and it felt very therapeutic,” Melinda says, “I felt a release, a sense of calmness coming over me — like I was right where I was supposed to be.”
“Other guests would say, ‘Are you serious, how can you do that?’,” Melinda says. “They were shocked, absolutely shocked.” Yet Melinda found a deeper connection with other clients, especially with people who didn’t use their phones much, either.
While phones dominate much of our lives, phones do not dominate psychedelic spaces. Any decent sitter, guide or shaman will suggest you turn off your phone while you’re tripping. And many trippers report that the phone is less enticing while under the influence (not to mention harder to see and hold).
“People who are on psychedelics, or who recently took ibogaine, they have this new perspective, they feel like they have the choice to use their phone or not,” says Tom.
Shelving the phone has serious benefits for anyone. One Stanford study found that kids who reduced their screen time gained less weight, were less aggressive toward peers, and less materialistic.
Tom bought five copies of the book “The Anxious Generation” and placed them around the retreat center for guests to pick up. To spark conversation. To provoke thought.
Melinda is back home in the Midwest. Her life is better – she is exercising daily, journaling, reconnecting with friends, and is no longer plagued with recurrent thoughts of suicide. She recently went to a music festival, did a little MDMA, cuddled with a loved one, and “felt the happiest I’d felt in I don’t know how long.” And she barely looked at her phone.
“I wake up every morning feeling happy and I have zero thoughts of suicide,” Melinda says. “I’m doing my part. So yes, ibogaine is fucking magic, but only if you do your fucking part.”
*Melinda is not her real name. We changed it to protect her privacy.
