Five to eight days. No notifications. No exceptions.
Phone-Free Retreat
Your phone goes in a lockbox on arrival. It comes out five to 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. Five to 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 five to eight days.
How the week without a phone works
The device goes into a lockbox on arrival day. Everything else is designed around the gap it leaves.
01
Collection, on the first afternoon
All devices, labelled, locked, in the safe. There is no partial version of this: a phone kept 'for photos' is a phone that gets checked, and the research is specific that its mere presence costs attention.
02
Something physical every morning
Hiking, yoga, breathwork or surf depending on the terrain. The first two days are easier when the body is tired enough to stop reaching for a pocket.
03
A journal, and an evening that is optional
One analogue journal per person, and a group debrief each night that nobody has to attend. Day two is when people talk about relief rather than anxiety.
04
The handback, with a letter
Devices are returned on departure day with a note on what the team noticed over the week. It is the detail guests quote back to us most often.
Places that predate screens
The programme runs anywhere we operate, but three terrains do most of the work.
Erg Chigaga
Sixty kilometres of piste past the last tarmac, no signal for most of it, and a camp that is ours. The disconnection is geographic as well as voluntary, which makes the first forty-eight hours considerably easier.
High Atlas
Valleys at altitude, villages, long walking days. Signal exists in patches, which is a harder test than having none, and some groups choose it for exactly that reason.
The Atlantic coast
Taghazout and Essaouira: surf in the morning, a town to walk in the afternoon, and enough going on that nobody feels confined. The gentlest first week for someone unsure about a lockbox.
A phone-free retreat, answered
- What if my family needs to reach me?
- They call the Umnya lead, whose number everyone leaves behind before departure. We find you within the hour, anywhere on the programme. Nobody is unreachable; you are simply not carrying the phone.
- Can I keep my phone for photographs?
- No, and that is the whole design. We provide a camera on the weeks that want one, and on photography weeks it is a proper camera rather than a screen. A phone kept for one purpose ends up used for all of them.
- What about work emergencies?
- Same answer as family: the lead is reachable and will come and find you. People who genuinely cannot be away for a week are better served by a shorter format, and we will say so rather than sell the long one.
- Does it actually change anything in a week?
- The honest version: most people report sleeping better from the third night and noticing the shift in attention around forty-eight hours. Whether it survives the return home depends on what they do with the phone in the first week back.
From the journal
4 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.
4 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.
4 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.
Before the dates exist
Tell us when. We will tell you where.
We open a small number of weeks each season. Choose the window you have in mind and what you come for, and you will hear about those dates before they are published.
Which window?
What you come for
Phone-Free Retreat
Five to eight days. No notifications. No exceptions.