Encourage Event Attendees to Try a Digital Detox
During your conference, help meeting participants put away their phones and live in the moment.
Are you reading this article on your phone? Is your favorite device basically glued to your hand?
One of the latest wellness trends is a direct response to how much time we spend on our screens and how hard it is to break away. In the Global Wellness Summit’s list of 2025 Wellness Trends, no. 1 of 10 is “Analog Wellness,” a move toward digital detoxing and making sure we take meaningful breaks from the deluge of information we’ve gotten used to. The movement even has its own acronym: JOLO, the joy of logging off.
The GWS predicts, “More people will get intentional about disconnecting from an online world that is costing us our minds, focus, joy, humanity, in-person social lives and financial wellness.”
“The key is to be connected, not consumed,” says digital-wellness advocate Jeff Wozer, who will conduct a session on digital detox at Northstar’s Small & Boutique Meetings – Spring, June 1-3 at the Hotel Champlain in Burlington, Vt. “Unfortunately, most of us are being consumed, averaging 3 hours and 54 minutes per day on our phones. Over the course of one year, that equals 58 days, almost two months that could have been devoted to something more fulfilling — such as bonding with family, tending to a hobby or pursuing an exercise regimen.”
Analog wellness and meetings
Encourage event attendees to put their phones in their pockets and try some (retro) ways to connect. For example:
Theme the relaxation room. Offer a listening lounge where attendees can play DJ with vinyl selections. Have a reading room with a table full of books where people can unwind and find a new favorite author. Have a craft room full of paper and crayons, pens, markers and more to encourage artistic expression. The options are nearly endless.
Go hands-on and phone-free with corporate social responsibility sessions. Arranging a CSR activity with a building element — assembling bicycles, putting together stuffed animals, filling lunchbags for schoolchildren — allows attendees to chat with each other while they are busily doing good deeds. A great example comes from Teambonding, a company that specializes in team-building activities. In their Prosthetic Hand Project, the hands that participants build are distributed to a variety of charities in developing countries.
Get outside — without the phones. Staying at a beautiful resort property or in the middle of an exciting city? Arrange group walks or sight-seeing tours where the experience of the moment is the draw.
Encourage candid event snaps. Distribute or strategically place around the meeting room disposable cameras (such as the Kodak FunSaver Disposable Camera with Flash). Collect them at the end of the event, get the film processed and opt for the digital versions of the pictures so you can reach out to the participants and share the best of the candids.
“Unplugging helps raise awareness to all the important things we’re forfeiting to constant time-sucking distraction,” says Wozer. “Being present is life’s magic time, when we’re at our best, getting things done, honoring our true north, and heeding poet Mary Oliver’s ‘one wild and precious life.’”
Source: NorthstarMeetingsGroup.com
