I didn’t eat for 23 days, lost 49lb and felt healthier than ever, says DONAL MACINTYRE. So when the longevity guru doctor behind it raved about three-day total darkness experiment, I wanted to take part. What happened next changed my life…

Why would anyone in their right mind volunteer to sit alone in a pitch-black, soundproofed room for three days? More to the point, who would pay about £1,800 for the privilege?

Or perhaps I should say torture, because that’s how most of us would regard being cut off from everything that anchors us to our everyday lives: no phone, no laptop, no television, no books, no music, no human contact – living in silence with no sense of time.

In prisons, they call it solitary confinement. But the modern monastic cell, in which I recently found myself isolated, is part of a high-end therapeutic experience billed as ‘The Ultimate Darkness Retreat’.

This might sound like a wellness industry version of America’s Guantanamo Bay detention centre, especially to someone like me whose fear of the dark means I always sleep with a bedside light on.

Yet this adventure in sensory deprivation takes place in rural Poland and the website of Within, the company running it, promises benefits ranging from stress reduction and better sleep quality to improved memory and greater immunity from disease.

As an investigative journalist, I’m more cynical than most when it comes to such claims. But the experience came highly recommended by someone whose advice I really trust: longevity expert Dr Ash Kapoor.

Daily Mail readers may remember that it was Dr Kapoor who, in January last year, guided me through the extreme 23-day fast. This tested every ounce of my determination and self-control, yet during those three weeks, I lost 43lb and, in the following six months, dropped another 6lb, bringing me to 14st.

I’m fitter now than I have been for years, running and going to the gym. And, having turned my ­physical health around, I realised that I also needed a mental reset.

As TV viewers might guess from my hyper, fast-talking exterior, I have up to eight cups of coffee a day. Everything about my life shrieks hyperactivity. If there was anyone most in need of an escape like this, it was me. But it would also be hard to think of someone more unsuited to the challenge.

I thrive on being surrounded by people every day, both at work and in my family life, and I have had a mobile phone attached to me since the early 1990s. Umbilically so.

Giving it up would feel like an amputation. But Dr Kapoor had raved about the benefits of the darkness retreat. And I was even more intrigued when he put me in touch with its founder, Ananda-Jey Wojciech, the very unlikely spiritual guide who set up the retreat at the end of 2024.

If you’re picturing him as a ­linen-clad mystic who drifted in from Bali with a gong, think again. AJ, as he’s known, is a self-made Polish multimillionaire, a hugely successful corporate lawyer who made his money running industrial-scale farms and various other businesses, and then one day found himself wondering what the point of it all was.

Turning to yoga, meditation and cold-endurance sessions with Dutch wellness guru Wim Hof, the so-called ‘Iceman’, AJ also did a darkness retreat in Oregon, US. It had such a profound impact on him that he wanted to bring it to his own ­country and so built five darkness cabins on his sprawling estate near the historic city of Poznan, about 200miles west of Warsaw.

Greeting me in the luxurious ­surroundings of his grand country house three weeks ago, AJ explained the retreat puts together groups of five people who will go through the experience – albeit in separate ­cabins – at the same time. This approach was inspired by his experience of setting up companies which provide treatment for addiction.

Group sessions have a proven track record in helping drug and alcohol addicts and, since he regards the darkness retreats as a form of therapy, participants meet for pre-session counselling and to talk about their hopes and fears about the experience on the night before.

The other four people I was ­introduced to were hard-core ­meditation types. All in their 30s or 40s, so much younger than me, they included an athletic Norwegian stockbroker, who was a former ­basketball player, an American expert in therapeutic breathing techniques, a Belgian relationship counsellor and an Irish mum, who was a veteran of many retreats.

With my dodgy knees, I can barely cross my legs, let alone get into the lotus position, but still I was looking forward to getting started as we were led out into the grounds, where the doors leading to the pods were buried in a hillside like the entrances to nuclear bunkers.

My inner sceptic was ready to be surprised and enlightened, but first we had to prepare for the ­practicalities of life in the dark.

We were each introduced to our sparsely furnished but beautiful accommodation, with soft bedding and cushions on the floor. And, on that first night, we were encouraged to have the lights on as brightly or dimly as we wanted while we learnt the layout of our surroundings.

Along with the toilet, the shower and an intercom we could use to contact staff in an emergency, I familiarised myself with the hatch through which the day’s supply of delicious plant-based meals would be passed each breakfast time.

The next morning, it was time for my mobile phone to be handed over, the lights to be turned off, and my immersion into darkness to begin.

With the door closed, there was no faint glow, no crack of light, not even the red dot of standby electronics. All light was denied me. I could wave my hand in front of my face and see nothing.

The first 24 hours were not spiritual. They were slightly irritating. My brain kept reaching for my phone like a phantom limb. I mentally drafted emails, imagined headlines, replayed unfinished conversations. Remove stimulation and you ­discover how addicted you are to it.

There were soon compensations. Darkness stimulates melatonin production, the natural hormone which regulates the body’s sleep-wake cycle. Without artificial light, the body begins to reset that ­circadian rhythm, leading to the deeper and more restful sleep I enjoyed that night.

This was all the more surprising given that timidity about the dark I mentioned. The moment I entered the pod, I never gave this primal fear a second thought, and soon I discovered another benefit of the darkness.

Cortisol – the stress hormone – begins to drop when external ­triggers vanish, and eventually my nervous system felt as if someone had turned down the volume.

Showering in the dark, everything seemed in slow motion and I felt the droplets on my back like never before. My food experiences were explosive. When unwrapping Secret Santa-style meals, only the aroma gave you a hint of what you were eating. A raw carrot tasted like a Heston Blumenthal dish as every flavour was amplified.

It was a revelation. It felt hedonistic. But more was to come. When deprived of external stimuli, the part of the brain which processes visual images begins generating its own content: geometric patterns, flashes, internal imagery.

I could gauge the passing of time only by a daily safety check – a gentle knock at the door, answered by my whispered confirmation that I remained alive. Other than that: silence, total darkness. Just like that experienced by my 89-year-old mother who, living on her own and remarkable in many ways, was recently registered blind.

The doors to the cabins are not locked and, at any point, I could have turned on the light or called the staff who are on 24-hour duty.

I did not need to reach out, though, and I could understand why few of the 200 or so who have completed the programme have done so.

Slowly I felt boredom ­dissolving into something more interesting: old ­memories surfaced – not ­traumatic flashbacks, simply long-ignored fragments, conversations, decisions, regrets, small moments of pride.

In the absence of distraction, your internal archive replays itself. This is what AJ calls ‘self-enquiry’. He had talked about the nervous system living in fight-or-flight mode. Darkness, he argues, allows the parasympathetic system – rest and repair – to dominate instead.

Lying there in complete blackness, I could feel that change. My resting heart rate dropped, my breathing slowed, my sense of urgency evaporated. I was not achieving anything and, strangely, that felt like a good thing. There were moments of restlessness. Moments I longed for conversation. At one point, I did press-ups in the dark purely to confirm my continued existence. But I did not feel abandoned.

When King Charles spoke in his Christmas address about pausing, quietening our minds, stepping away from devices, he did not mean sitting in complete ­darkness in a Polish pod, yet I had new insight into what he said.

He had quoted poet T.S. Eliot’s description about being at the ‘still point of the turning world’ and that felt suddenly even more poetic and resonant, as did the Simon & Garfunkel lyrics which returned to me again and again: ‘Hello darkness, my old friend’. Gradually, the darkness did feel like a friend. And when the third safety check came, and I realised that the hours were counting down, I found myself unusually calm and untroubled.

Finally, I heard the instruction that we should put on the eye masks provided and, with the door opened, I was led with the others into antechamber lit only by the glow of a wood-burning stove. There, when we felt ready, we lifted the eye masks and the orange light, although subdued, felt almost aggressive.

As we walked back to the house in silence and I was handed back my phone to ­discover it hadn’t been swamped with messages, I knew my greatest realisation from the retreat was not mystical. It was that I am far more addicted to noise than I realised. And when the noise stops, I do not disappear, and the world does not stop.

Although the £1,800 cost of the retreat would put it out of the reach of many people, AJ has plans to turn his organisation into a charity which will focus on making it as accessible as possible.

Until then, of course, you could achieve darkness more cheaply: a cave, a blackout room, a tent in the Highlands. Even if it’s just putting your mobile away for the day, I’d recommend it.

Since completing the retreat, I have come to understand that the real test is not surviving three days without light. It is trying to carry a fragment of that stillness back into the glare.

We used to call that church, but as that disappears from our lives, we have to seek new moments and spaces for contemplation.

Although it is for others to judge, I feel the darkness retreat has led to a better version of me: less convinced that urgency equals importance, recognising more easily those in need and feeling better equipped to reach out and help.

Perhaps in a month I will return to the person I was before I entered my luxurious cave. I hope not.