Eight days. No notifications. No exceptions.
Phone-Free Retreat
Your phone goes in a lockbox on arrival. It comes out eight days later. In between: the Sahara, the Atlas, the Atlantic coast, and attention that belongs entirely to you.
The experience
Phone-Free Retreat
The average person checks their phone 96 times per day. Each check triggers a micro-dose of cortisol, the same stress hormone that disrupts sleep, accelerates inflammation, and fragments the kind of sustained attention required to think clearly. The research on smartphone abstinence is unambiguous: studies by Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology consistently show that the mere presence of a smartphone, even face-down, even silent, reduces available cognitive capacity. The phone-free retreat at Umnya removes the variable entirely. Devices are collected on arrival and returned on departure. No exceptions, no grey areas, no 'just checking one thing.' What participants consistently report after 48 hours is not anxiety but relief: the ambient cognitive load of perpetual connectivity has a weight that most people only feel when it is lifted. The landscape does the rest. Eight days in environments, the Sahara at 4am, the Atlas at 3,200m, the Atlantic at dawn, that predate screens by millions of years.
Duration
8 days, 7 nights
Group size
8–14 guests
Format
Co-branded with partner studio
What to expect
Phone-Free Retreat · 8 days
Lockbox for all devices on arrival day. Daily movement programme: hiking, yoga, breathwork, or surf depending on destination. Meals prepared from local seasonal ingredients. No news, no social media, no work. Nightly debriefs with the group, optional. One analogue journal per participant. Devices returned with a letter: what we noticed about you in eight days.
From the journal
9 min
8 Days Without Your Phone in Morocco: What the Research Says Will Happen
The average person touches their phone 2,617 times a day. After two days without it, measurable neurological changes begin. After eight, something more permanent shifts. Here is what the research shows, and what participants describe.
10 min
The Science of Disconnection: Why 8 Days Changes Your Biology
Cortisol drops by day three. Melatonin production increases by day five. By day seven, your nervous system has fundamentally recalibrated.
8 min
The Neuroscience of Digital Detox: Why 8 Days Changes What 8 Hours Cannot
A weekend without your phone is a break. Eight continuous days without it is a recalibration. The difference is not quantitative, it is categorical. The neuroscience explains why duration matters, and why Morocco is not incidental.
Phone-Free Retreat
Eight days. No notifications. No exceptions.