If we want a generation capable of deep focus and meaningful civic engagement, we have to protect their ability to direct their own minds, Thais Freitas writes.Melissa Tait/The Globe and Mail
Thais Freitas is communications manager at Outward Bound Canada.
As provinces scramble to ban phones in classrooms, the public debate has largely centred on academic distraction. While that’s a critical concern, it misses a deeper neurological crisis. We’re in the middle of a massive experiment on the minds of young Canadians, and there are growing signs that our youth are losing the ability to lead their own lives.
In my work with wilderness programs across Canada, I regularly see a phenomenon that looks less like a typical adjustment to summer camp and more like clinical withdrawal. When teenagers first hand over their devices, the reaction is visceral. More than boredom, they exhibit a profound physical restlessness, reaching for phantom vibrations in empty pockets, their eyes searching for the stimuli that have defined their reality.
More than a bad habit, this restlessness is the physical evidence of a brain struggling to rewire itself for a slower reality. In Dopamine Nation, psychiatrist Anna Lembke explains how our brains evolved to handle scarcity, not the non-stop stimulation of the digital age. When we’re constantly flooded with high-speed digital rewards, our internal balance tips. To compensate for the “highs,” our brains leave us in a chronic state of deficit where anything slow or quiet feels physically intolerable.
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The Canadian wilderness has become perhaps the last place where we can observe the “control group” of this social experiment. One instructor told me you can see the moment the silence hits; participants look lost without a screen to tell them what to do with their hands and thoughts. For the first couple of days, the silence is heavy. Conversations feel stunted because the “slow” reality of a forest feels insufficient to a brain conditioned by the 10-second loops of social-media algorithms.
However, somewhere around the third or fourth day, a transformation begins as the brain starts to rebalance. Attention that was once shattered by optimized feeds begins to gather itself. On a windy lake, paying attention is no longer a lifestyle choice; it’s a functional requirement. Whether co-ordinating paddle strokes or managing a camp stove in the rain, distraction has immediate consequences. If you lose focus, the boat drifts or the dinner burns and everyone suffers.
This is the change from passive user to active leader. Against a digital landscape designed to turn us into consumers prompted and predicted by algorithms, the wilderness demands an “unpromptable” human. It requires a person who can look at a complex situation and make decisions based on shared values and physical reality instead of a notification.
Once that digital noise clears, human connection changes. Conversations move past the superficial, touching on future aspirations and showing genuine curiosity. This is what community living looks like – the realization that your well-being is tied to the person next to you. It’s a truth often drowned out by the hyper-individualism of the digital world.
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Last year, youth in our programs spent more than 292,000 hours away from screens. While a tech executive might see that as a loss of engagement, it’s a significant period of reclaimed independence. We focus on youth mental health through clinical capacity, but rarely discuss the power of building self-trust. Navigating a river provides a teenager with concrete evidence of their own capacity. It’s the ultimate preparation for a life of purpose: The ability to face uncertainty and trust one’s own mind without needing constant online approval.
The transformation doesn’t end when participants return home. Parents and teachers tell us regularly that the teenagers who walk back into their classrooms aren’t the same ones who left. They have a new sense of composure, greater patience and a renewed ability to engage. The wilderness is a powerful catalyst that provides an internal anchor in a world of constant digital drift.
If we want a generation capable of deep focus and meaningful civic engagement, we have to protect their ability to direct their own minds. A person who cannot control their own attention is easy to manipulate. The changes we see in the woods are subtle, such as more perseverance or a longer gaze at the horizon, but they represent a powerful reclamation of the self. When childhood focus is treated as a commodity, the ability to look at a lake and feel nothing but the wind might be the most subversive and necessary life skill a young person can have. It’s the difference between being a passenger in a digital system and being the driver of their own future.