I went into rehab recently…

Posted on by Live & Learn

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. […]

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…

— Dana Milbank, read more here: “I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened.” (Washingon Post, February 13, 2026

35 thoughts on “I went into rehab recently…”

  1. Hi DK. You caught me in a deeper dive moment with this one.
    In this scenario disturbance is profound and transformational…. And in such a way to give us a glimpse of the freedom beyond the thinking mind. Instead of saying “I went into rehab” it may be more real to say “I found a healthier reality”. Rehab is associated with illness, and let’s face it, no normal person wants to be told they are ill, addicted or needing something else, when they feel they are fine. I felt this too, when Buddhists were saying I was suffering. It didn’t feel like that… until I woke up and saw that everything I do was based on my conditioning. There is a bridge of understanding to cross here. 🙏🏻

  2. I can imagine that it would that it would be completely mind and body shifting and hard to imagine unless I was to actually experience it. he described how shocked he was by all of it and I imagine it would shock any of us, we are so trained by our technology and the multi-taking busy-ness of being in the fast-paced world.

  3. This sounds like a plea for you to get the newest “flip” phone. Just for Saturdays of course….

    GREAT to see a blogpost. Don’t stay away too long DK!

      1. Says the guy who somehow found a way to take me from the iPhone- to 2 cameras and 4 lenses in a year….

  6. The first thing that came to my mind was, “First world problems.”
    But no, this is across the board.
    People mostly gravitate to numb. Numb is, unfortunately, their baseline.

          5. Lovely to hear from you too, Paul. Hope you’ve been well.
            You’ll hear from me more if dk posts more 🙂

  7. My experience attending a 10 day silent retreat was mind blowing. To be with only ones mind and thoughts can be a scary thing. I did mine in western MA. The Temple was Buddhist but I saw no actual followers but instead a total of 750 messed up people full of pain and desire to live a better life. So many hours spent in quiet meditation. Walking by others as well as eating beside each other with no conversation was tough for me but I made it out the other side with so much love for myself, as well as strength.

  8. Lovely to see a post from you and with a link to a most interesting article (Yes, I read the whole thing). I am curious how I would react to such an experience. We are such a plugged-in society aren’t we? Hmmm…..

  9. a fascinating post to “break” you blogging silence with.

    I would like to go on one of these retreats, and three days, two nights seems just about right.

    I would like one that offered gentle yoga, silence, abstinence from technology, and perhaps a little weight loss 🙂

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