About Madusha
Madusha Ranaweera has lived in a lot of places - Sri Lanka, Canada, the UK, Germany - and somewhere along the way, picked up two degrees in psychology and neuroscience, a decade of CEO and marketing experience, and an interior design diploma she originally thought of as a side hobby.
Turns out the side hobby wasn't so "side." While running an almost 1000 person international organic food company, she was also designing lounges, cafes, retail spaces, and even an industrial kitchen. CEO-ing paid the bills. Design fed something else entirely.
Now she lives in Halifax with her husband (who’s completing a M.Sc. in Psychotherapy) and two dogs who don't care about her LinkedIn profile. And like a lot of people right now, she was drowning in digital overwhelm- the AI anxiety, the news on her phone, the phantom vibrations in her pocket, the sinking realization that the productivity tools were causing more stress than they solved.
She understood what was happening neurologically. Dopamine addiction. Cortisol spikes from chronic screen exposure. The way constant notifications fracture attention and erode the brain's capacity for deep work. Understanding it didn't fix it.
The digital detox industry existed, but only in formats that didn't work for her life: thousand-dollar retreats in remote locations, multi-day commitments that required vacation time she didn't have. She needed something urban, hourly, accessible, and enforced - something she could book the way she'd book a massage, not a week-long escape. So she's building it. The Disconnection Lounge is neuroscience-backed, designed with the same attention to space and experience she brought to every cafe and lounge she's ever built, and run by someone who's scaled businesses across three continents and knows exactly what operational infrastructure looks like.
It's also personal. She needed this space. And if she needed it, so do a lot of other people.
Madusha is also the CEO and founder of Conscious Survival Guide Inc., a leadership consultancy that uses a proprietary psych-backed method she developed to help people negotiate high-stakes moments by flipping the script and starting with decoding their audience first. She is also the host and founder of the Luminary Dinner Series that recently launched in Halifax, bringing high-functioning, high-profile CEOs of the Atlantic provinces together at highly curated dinners.
Her philosophy is simple. Whether navigating complicated career ladders or surviving the future of work, the approach is the same: understand the psychology (your own and that of others), then act. The Disconnection Lounge is the physical manifestation of the same belief: survival in the digital age requires infrastructure, not just intention.