More than 50% of Australians in substance use disorder treatment also experience a co-occurring mental health disorder, according to the 2023 National Drug Strategy Household Survey.
What that number doesn’t show, though, is how many of those same people come to treatment with six or more hours a day in front of screens, quietly sustaining the very reward pathways in the brain that make recovery more difficult.
And at Sivana Bali, we are not dealing with something abstract. The current pattern appears in nearly every client that our clinical team encounters at our Kerobokan Kelod facility.
We are here to transform the lives of the people we serve by bringing access to affordable and effective addiction treatment in a luxury resort-style retreat.
We challenge the myths and stigma surrounding addictive behaviour and promote a philosophy that encourages individuals to enjoy their recovery rather than endure it.
Everything we do is predicated on a non-shaming, non-blaming therapeutic model, wherein clients experience purpose, value and meaning in a life free from substances.
And that same philosophy informs how we tackle everything we do in treatment, including a condition that most programmes just ignore entirely: the role of screen use in hindering recovery and the slow pace it takes for recovery.
What Clients Are Actually Carrying When They Arrive
So many people think early recovery is fundamentally about dealing with the substance. The clinical picture is far more complicated than that.
A nervous system trained by years of relentless digital stimulation is programmed to anticipate round-the-clock attention. If a person is already coping with the neurological disruption of withdrawal, that conditioning adds an additional source of instability to an already vulnerable system.
The key player is dopamine. Scrolling through social media feeds, replying to alerts, pursuing small digital rewards – all of these things engage the brain’s reward pathway, the same circuitry that alcohol, stimulants and opioids manipulate.
In 2022, a systematic review identified strong links between problematic social media use and higher rates of depression, anxiety, and stress. Unlike dependency on a substance, the effects are less severe, but the brain systems involved overlap enough to cause real problems in recovery.
In early recovery, a person who is still engaged in heavy screen use faces a challenge in regulating dopamine signals due to competing influences.
The more problematic the situation becomes, the greater and more predictable the cumulative consequences will be, including problems with sleep, mood swings, increased cravings, and a diminished ability to care about anything other than the shiny stuff that provides food.
The stress factor of chronic phone use adds to the reward problem as well. Negative news cycles, social media conflict and a never-ending barrage of notifications keep the body’s stress response in perpetual activation, maintaining high levels of stress hormones and increasing the physical impact on a body that withdrawal already imposes a burden on.
What this study tells us clinically is that clients who come in with both substance dependence and heavy screen use are slower to achieve emotional stability the first week than clients who don’t. The two patterns are not their burdens sitting side by side. They are amplifying each other.
Why Cutting Back Alone Doesn’t Work in Early Treatment
Moderation techniques are helpful tools, but they’re most effective when the nervous system is stable enough to implement them. Early recovery, especially for the initial two to four weeks, is seldom that moment.
Partial phone access keeps the brain constantly scanning for messages, calls, and updates. That low-grade vigilance, even when the phone is only available for short windows, is enough to prevent the deeper settling that makes true therapeutic progress possible.
This is why digital access management has been integrated into our residential treatment programme from day one of admission. It is not presented as wellness advice or a lifestyle add-on. It is a clinical decision based on how the brain reacts to competing reward signals during the most neurologically vulnerable phase of recovery.
We want to make this process clear to our clients from the outset by explaining the mechanism behind it and not just dictating a policy. Handing the phone over becomes a different conversation once you realise why it matters clinically.
There is also a practical reality that’s worth naming. Many clients have spent years relying on their phones as a coping mechanism, reaching for them when they are under stress, feeling bored, facing social discomfort, or experiencing emotional pain. To ask that same person to moderate their use while also managing withdrawal is to ask the nervous system to give up two things at once without replacing either.
The First 72 Hours: What Actually Happens
The majority of clients experience restlessness and irritability, as well as a pronounced boost in anxiety between the first 48 and 72 hours of disconnection from devices. The loss of a consistent source of dopamine input triggers a natural physiological response, not a signal of wrongdoing.
The brain has been trained to receive notifications of reward through the screen at periodic intervals. When that input ceases, the discomfort that surfaces becomes a form of withdrawal, and naming it is important because it changes clients’ interpretation of what they are experiencing.
In this phase, our clinical group employs a set of body-based coping tools from dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), called TIPP skills, because they work quickly and do not require a stable emotional baseline:
- Temperature: cold water or a cool compress to interrupt a heightened stress response in the body.
- Intense exercise: physical movement used to release tension and restlessness from an accumulation of physical components.
- Paced breathing: slowing the breath for a controlled release and body relaxer.
- Progressive muscle relaxation: release of muscle groups step by step to signal safety to the nervous system.
These physical techniques are important because the distress experienced during early digital withdrawal is physical before it becomes mental. In the clinic, it is far less efficient to attempt to make sense of the discomfort before the body has had time to adjust.
During CBT sessions, during this phase, we additionally examine the cognitive processes that excessive screen play reinforces over time: catastrophising missed messages, social comparison, and the need to always be informed. Clients learn to experience the urge simultaneously to reach for a device and the discomfort, allowing it to pass without any physical response.
By the end of the third day, the majority of the discomfort usually starts to alleviate. That change is subtle, but regular, and it signals the moment when clients can get involved in the therapeutic process and help themselves in ways that are meaningful to them rather than just endure the adjustment.
How We Structure the Device-Free Environment
The residential environment in Kerobokan Kelod facilitates clinical work. Seminyak and Canggu are nearby, but they hold exactly the kind of high-stimulation energy, packed venues, social noise, and nightlife culture that works against nervous system recovery in the initial weeks of treatment.
What Kerobokan Kelod offers are quieter streets, slower pacing, and a setting in which recovery takes place rather than competing with it. The climate in Bali really helps here, too: the area’s morning temperatures are always ideal for outdoor movement (and natural light exposure before the midday heat starts), and we make that a part of the daily schedule on purpose.
What matters most to us is that we limit our intake to 12 clients at a time so that each individual receives a clear, truly personalised schedule rather than a standardised timetable. That schedule is based on person-centred counselling, group therapy, yoga, morning beach walks, cultural excursions, Reiki, and osteopathy, depending on the treatment plan.
The point of filling that time with structured activity isn’t distraction. It is an intentional process that aims to slowly reattune the brain’s reward system around things that don’t involve a substance or the screen.
Chronic screen use first harms sleep, which we aim to restore. Evening routines in our programme are meant to cut down on stimulation well before bed, and removing devices takes away what is, for many people, the single biggest cause of late-night stress spikes.
For clients arriving from Sydney, Melbourne or Perth, the geographic distance from their home environment has therapeutic weight of its own. Staying in the same environment where substance use and screen dependency formed made those patterns a lot harder to disrupt, and coming to Bali creates a clear separation from the triggers, patterns, and associations that reinforce the cycle at home.
Treating Screen Compulsion and Substance Use as One Problem
It’s when a client has both substance dependence and compulsive digital behaviour, either social media, gaming, or other forms of online content, that we form one comprehensive treatment plan, not two plans running side by side.
At Sivana, we see these as related expressions of the same underlying difficulty: a nervous system unable to manage emotional and physical stress without external input. Because the two risks are connected, our approach to treating compulsive digital behaviour is also built into relapse prevention planning for substance use.
But the problem is not so simple. If a person stops taking substances but continues to rely on screens as their primary tool for emotional regulation, the emotional instability that drove the substance use is still present, and the risk for relapse stays elevated even when things appear stable on the surface.
At Sivana, relapse prevention planning reflects these realities. Before a client leaves, we look closely at their digital habits, how they use screens, when they reach for them, and what emotional state typically precedes that reach. That analysis shapes the strategies they take home alongside their substance use relapse plan.
What Families Ask Most Often
The question families most often ask us is whether or not they have access to the emergency phone; in response, we respond in a clinical rather than an inflexible manner. Ditching all devices entirely calms the nervous system more than limited access can, because a tiny amount of access keeps the brain on alert for incoming messages.
That being said, we do not discount our legitimate family obligations. We also make a communication plan ahead of treatment beginning with considerations such as children, ageing parents, or professional work commitments that cannot be fully deferred or totally paused. Our clinical team then provides the contact point if there is really a need.
And we support clients in remaining connected with their families. The phone as a kind of constant ambient presence and the phone as an emergency channel – what I mean clinically by the two are two totally dissimilar things.
Next comes the most common question: Is removing the phone going to make your anxiety worse? It occurs quite often in those early days. By the end of the first week, the majority of clients say that most or all of their anxiety levels have decreased substantially compared to where they arrived before, which resembles clinically what we see here: that initial discomfort is real, it’s normal and it’s something we know is going to occur, but it isn’t where it is going to stay.
What Changes After the First Week
By day four or five, the change in most clients is apparent. Sleep becomes better; emotions are easier to manage; and the continual low-level noise of an overstimulated nervous system begins to subside.
People begin to notice the physical environment around them, the sounds they hear in the morning, the quality of light, and the pace of a day that isn’t built around a screen. That returning to environmental presence is not a trivial lifestyle step. It is what allows the larger work to take place: processing challenging events, developing coping strategies and gaining some meaningful awareness of the patterns that led both to the substance use and the digital dependency.
Appetite also seems to be normalised during this time too. Chronic stress and screen overstimulation suppress hunger cues and interrupt eating cycles, and, as the nervous system settles, clients frequently report that food tastes better and mealtimes feel less like obligations.
The World Health Organisation has progressively acknowledged that digital behaviours are linked to mental health as an appropriate public health issue. This is what matters most in treatment, not just a temporary escape: treating digital behaviour within the framework of a structured residential programme.
What we do consistently observe is that those clients who enter the device-free environment completely (two weeks) come to therapy in an appreciably different state than those who resist it. Clients are calmer, able to stay present with painful experiences and sit with the difficult emotions without shutting down in a way most can’t.
The Practical Next Step
If you are considering residential treatment for yourself or someone close to you, the honest starting point is a complete picture of what is actually driving the difficulty. Substance use rarely arrives alone, and a history of heavy screen use, chronic digital stress, or compulsive online behaviour matters and should be part of the conversation from the very first call.
Our residential programmes at Sivana Bali run for 28, 60 or 90 days. Every programme begins the same way: handing over the phone and giving the nervous system the conditions it actually needs to start recovering.
To speak with our admissions team, call our Australia toll-free number at 1800 650 010 or send a confidential WhatsApp message to +62 8123 9909 771.