Why People Look for a Retreat

Almost everything written about retreats assumes you've already decided. It tells you what to pack, how to choose a centre, what to expect from the week, what it costs.

This article asks the earlier questions. Why people leave. What happens in their body and their head when they do. And why, fairly often, three weeks after getting back they're exactly where they started.

I have data for all three, and the third answer is uncomfortable for the industry I work in. I'll say it anyway, because I think it's the only way any of this is useful.

What follows is long on purpose. If you're weighing whether to go and want to understand what you're buying, this is everything I would want to know before spending the money and the time.

The seven reasons

A research team interviewed 26 people who had attended psychedelic retreats and organized their answers into seven categories (Neitzke-Spruill et al., 2024). Most gave more than one answer. It's a small qualitative sample, so the proportions are best read as orientation rather than population statistics.

There's a detail in that order worth sitting with. Personal development comes first, at 81%, above self-medication. But when you open that second category, what's inside is depression, anxiety, trauma, addiction, and grief, in 73% of cases.

So people are suffering and would rather call it growth. I see this constantly in my practice. It costs less to say you're looking for your purpose than to say you haven't slept properly in eight months, that you haven't felt anything in two years, or that you're having three drinks every night to switch your head off.

I don't say that as criticism. That translation serves a purpose: it lets someone ask for help without declaring themselves ill. The problem shows up later, when the retreat gets designed for the stated reason rather than for the one underneath.

A much larger survey, which asked before the experience rather than after, produced similar proportions across 1,802 responses: self-exploration 81.1%, mental health 71.3%, therapy 47.9%, creativity 43.7% (Nayak et al., 2023). Two different methods and two very different sample sizes landing in the same place suggests the pattern is real and not an artifact of how the question was asked.

What sits underneath each reason

The percentages are useful and they describe nobody. Translated into the people who arrive in my consulting room, this is what tends to be there.

An exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix

The most frequent and the most misunderstood. The person sleeps all weekend, takes two weeks off, and comes back just as empty. They try vitamins, the gym, earlier bedtimes.

When someone describes that to me in a first session, I tend to ask when they last felt bored. Almost nobody can answer, and that answer tells me more than any scale.

When rest doesn't repair, we're no longer talking about tiredness. We're talking about a system that has been running in emergency mode for a long time and has lost the ability to come down. More hours of sleep won't fix that, because the problem isn't lack of sleep: it's that the body stopped recognizing the signals that it's safe to stop.

A grief nobody knew how to accompany

Someone died, or a marriage ended, or an entire life was lost that isn't coming back. The world offers three weeks of patience and then expects everything back to normal.

Prolonged grief is among the most frequent reasons and among the least named, because there's a social expectation about how long it's acceptable to still be struggling. Plenty of people arrive at a retreat two or three years after the loss, convinced something is wrong with them for still being there.

Anxiety that won't switch off

The head that won't stop, waking at three in the morning, the physical sense that something bad is about to happen without being able to name what.

People living this way have usually tried several things already. Meditation they can't sustain, breathing apps, sometimes medication that helps without resolving. What brings them to a retreat isn't the search for one more technique. It's exhaustion from fighting their own head every day.

A pattern that repeats

This one is almost never named as a reason and sits underneath many others. The same relationship with a different person. The same conflict with a different boss. The sense of following a script you didn't write.

People arriving through this door usually have considerable clarity about their pattern. They can describe it precisely. What they can't do is stop repeating it, and that is exactly what intellectual understanding alone doesn't solve.

I worked with a man who arrived with something close to a self-diagnosis: I always choose the ones who don't choose me. He had identified it years earlier, with examples and dates. What he had never looked at was what he gained from it, and that question cost him considerably more than the diagnosis had.

The feeling that something is missing

The hardest to name and among the most common. Everything is reasonably fine: there's work, a partner, health. And there's still an emptiness that nothing within reach fills.

Viktor Frankl called this the existential vacuum, and held that it isn't a symptom to eliminate but a question to answer (Frankl, 1946/2006). Many people who arrive this way aren't depressed in a clinical sense. They're without direction, which is a different thing and needs different work.

The search for spirituality and contact with nature

This reason usually gets read as decorative, and the data say otherwise. In the epidemiological study on mescaline, with 452 people, 74% reported spiritual exploration or connection with nature as their main motivation (Uthaug et al., 2022). It's the highest proportion of any reason in any of these studies.

It's worth taking seriously rather than quickly translating into clinical language. Some people aren't coming to fix anything. They're coming to recover a relationship with something larger that they lost somewhere along the way, and that search has its own legitimacy.

If you're only looking into it

35% of the people in the study said their reason was curiosity. It's the third most frequent and almost nobody writes for them.

All the content in this sector assumes a reader who has decided and only needs to pick where. But one in three people landing on these pages isn't at that point. They're trying to work out whether this has anything to do with them, and they find pages speaking to them as if they'd already booked.

If that's you, three things. Curiosity is a legitimate reason, and you don't need to bring a crisis to have the right to ask. Looking into something commits you to nothing. And a serious space will be able to tell you not yet, or that what you need is something else, without that costing it anything.

Leaving works, and there is a trial that proves it

This is usually where the conversation gets soft. I'll go the other way.

In 2016, Translational Psychiatry published a study with an unusual design. Researchers recruited healthy women who did not meditate, had them live at a resort for six days, and randomized them: some did a meditation retreat, others stayed in the same place, without doing the program (Epel et al., 2016). They also included a third group of experienced meditators already enrolled in the retreat.

That design answers the obvious objection, the one anyone would rightly raise. People improve at a retreat because they spent a week somewhere beautiful not working, eating well and sleeping. This study put a group through exactly that, in the same place, and compared.

They measured gene expression before and after, plus biomarkers of cellular aging and wellbeing scales. This isn't a self-report study with a satisfaction survey.

And there's more evidence around it. A systematic review gathered 23 studies on residential retreats, eight of them randomized trials and six non-randomized controlled trials, and found consistent effects on health and wellbeing across populations ranging from healthy people to patients with multiple sclerosis, cancer, and heart disease (Naidoo, Schembri, & Cohen, 2018).

There's also an observational study of wellness tourists at a week-long retreat, which measured improvements across several dimensions of health and wellbeing (Cohen et al., 2017). It's a weaker design, with no control group, and I cite it for what it is: consistent with the above, not probative on its own.

This is not a field without evidence. It's a field with evidence almost nobody cites, because citing it means also citing what comes next.

And then it fades

Here's the part the wellness industry would rather not mention.

Occupational psychology has spent decades studying what happens to wellbeing after a vacation. The finding repeats across study after study: it rises during the break and returns to pre-trip levels within a few weeks of getting back. It isn't an impression, it's measured (Westman & Eden, 1997; Kühnel & Sonnentag, 2011).

The mechanism has a simple explanation. The effort-recovery model holds that work demands activate psychological and physiological systems, and that when those demands are removed, those systems return to baseline. That's recovery. The problem is that when you return, the demands return too, and the activation with them.

Put differently: a vacation doesn't change the conditions you go back to. It changes your state during the time you're outside them.

Anyone who has come home from a trip feeling like a different person and been just as irritable twenty days later recognizes the phenomenon. What fewer people know is that it has a name, nearly three decades of literature, and that trip length isn't the factor that weighs most.

Translated to the world of retreats: that last-day photo, the one where everyone is hugging and crying, is completely real. And it predicts nothing about how that person will be in March.

What made the difference

Back to the resort study, because its most interesting finding is exactly this.

All three groups improved their wellbeing equivalently right afterward. All of them. Including the ones who just rested. And all three groups showed broad changes in gene expression, which the authors called the vacation effect.

The difference appeared over time. The women who had done the meditation program held lower distress for longer than those who had only rested in the same place, with the same food, the same weather, and the same absence of work.

It wasn't the location. It wasn't the disconnection. It was having done something while they were there.

That finding is what gives the rest of this article its meaning. If leaving produces an effect that fades by default, then the only thing that can extend it is what happens during and after.

The four experiences that make recovery work

Recovery research identified four experiences that explain why time away repairs or doesn't repair (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2007). Knowing them helps in evaluating any retreat, and also in understanding why a vacation sometimes isn't enough.

Of the four, psychological detachment is the one most consistently associated with improvement. And it's the one most people fail without noticing: flying to the other side of the world and still checking email twice a day isn't detachment. The body left and nothing else did.

This has a practical consequence almost no centre says out loud. A retreat with open wifi and a flexible schedule can produce far less effect than a shorter one where phones get put away. Structure isn't rigidity: it's what makes detachment possible.

Why nature isn't decoration

Almost every retreat sits somewhere beautiful, and almost every one treats the setting as background for the photos. The evidence suggests the setting is an active ingredient.

Kaplan (1995) proposed attention restoration theory to explain something people report intuitively: natural environments restore the capacity for directed attention, which is what gets depleted by sustained cognitive work. A city demands directed attention constantly. A forest doesn't.

And there is physiological measurement. A meta-analysis on forest bathing reviewed 22 studies and found lower cortisol levels in forest-exposed groups in 20 of them, with average reductions between 12 and 18 percent (Antonelli, Barbieri, & Donelli, 2019).

That changes how to read the 74% of people who say they're looking for connection with nature. They aren't asking for a pretty landscape. They're asking, without being able to name it, for an environment that lets the nervous system do something their daily life doesn't allow.

Three paths, and which one is yours

If leaving works but what decides the outcome is what you do while you're there, the question changes entirely. It's no longer which retreat to choose. It's what process you need.

At Dynamis the path is organized in four directions: reconnect, heal, transform, integrate. That isn't decorative language, it's the structure of the house, and it works with ceremonial medicine or without it.

What you bring determines where you enter. The Healing Studio handles sustained clinical work, with Jungian psychology, the Enneagram, and logotherapy, in person or online. The seven acres of tropical dry forest do something different and equally necessary. Working with Wachuma is a specific entrance, with its own medical and psychological screening. And 9Seeds is the path when there's problematic substance use.

None is superior to another. They're different doors, and choosing the wrong one is among the most common reasons a retreat doesn't help. Someone with severe anxiety and no support network doesn't need an expanded experience: they need to stabilize first. Someone exhausted by overwork doesn't need more introspection: they need to stop.

I've watched people book the wrong path with entirely good intentions, and come back disappointed by an experience that was never for them in the first place. Almost always the mistake was detectable in twenty minutes of conversation.

So before booking any of those, there's a conversation. Sometimes that conversation ends in a no, and that is also a good outcome.

What a retreat cannot do

I want to be explicit about this, because the sector's enthusiasm tends to leave it out.

A retreat doesn't replace ongoing psychiatric treatment. If you're on medication, that decision belongs to your physician, and no centre has the standing to ask you to stop anything.

A retreat isn't the place to move through an acute crisis. If there's risk, suicidal ideation, an episode in progress, what's called for is stabilization with close, accessible professional support. A remote and beautiful place is, at that moment, exactly the wrong place.

A retreat doesn't resolve an external situation either. If the problem is a relationship that needs to end or a job that's making you ill, the week away may give you the clarity to see it. It won't have the conversation for you.

And a retreat doesn't guarantee a pleasant experience. When something loosens, what was being held appears. That can be uncomfortable, and it doesn't mean it went badly.

How to evaluate a retreat

These questions work for any centre, and I mean it: use them on us too.

The sector has a language problem. Open forty retreat websites and you'll read roughly the same words: transformation, deep healing, safe space, experienced facilitators. None of that can be verified, which is why none of it helps you decide. The questions below can be verified.

The most revealing of them is the last. A space that has never told anyone no is either not screening or not willing to lose the booking. Both possibilities tell you something.

The second most useful is the one about afterward. Much of the industry sells the week and stops there. If the effect fades by default, and we've seen that it does with three decades of literature behind it, then what happens afterward isn't an add-on: it's where the trip earns its keep. A centre that charges for integration separately is telling you how it understands its own work.

Group size matters more than it seems, and I say that from the craft. It isn't only comfort. In a group of forty, nobody can individually hold whatever surfaces for each person, however good the facilitators are.

And one figure is worth holding if you're specifically weighing ceremonial medicine. In a survey of 1,993 people about their worst psychedelic experience, only 2.7% had a sober, experienced, trusted guide present (Carbonaro et al., 2016). Most of what people fear about these medicines isn't a risk of the substance. It's a risk of the context, and context is the one thing that can be controlled completely.

The right question

People looking for a retreat are almost never looking for an experience. They're looking to get out of something, and often they can't even name what.

The evidence says three things and they're best held together. Leaving produces a real, measurable change, down to the expression of genes. That change switches itself off within weeks. And what sustains it isn't the length or the location, but having done something during, and having someone to process it with afterward.

So the question isn't which retreat I should go to. It's three questions: what am I actually trying to resolve, what do I need to happen while I'm there, and who is going to be with me when I come back.

If you can answer those three, you already know what to look for. And if you can't answer the first, start there, because it's the one that matters most.

References

Antonelli, M., Barbieri, G., & Donelli, D. (2019). Effects of forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) on levels of cortisol as a stress biomarker: A systematic review and meta-analysis. International Journal of Biometeorology, 63(8), 1117-1134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01717-x

Carbonaro, T. M., Bradstreet, M. P., Barrett, F. S., MacLean, K. A., Jesse, R., Johnson, M. W., & Griffiths, R. R. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1268-1278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116662634

Cohen, M. M., Elliott, F., Oates, L., Schembri, A., & Mantri, N. (2017). Do wellness tourists get well? An observational study of multiple dimensions of health and well-being after a week-long retreat. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 23(2), 140-148. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2016.0268

Epel, E. S., Puterman, E., Lin, J., Blackburn, E. H., Lum, P. Y., Beckmann, N. D., Zhu, J., Lee, E., Gilbert, A., Rissman, R. A., Tanzi, R. E., & Schadt, E. E. (2016). Meditation and vacation effects have an impact on disease-associated molecular phenotypes. Translational Psychiatry, 6(8), e880. https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2016.164

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169-182.

Kühnel, J., & Sonnentag, S. (2011). How long do you benefit from vacation? A closer look at the fade-out of vacation effects. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(1), 125-143. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.699

Nayak, S. M., Jackson, H., Sepeda, N. D., Mathai, D. S., So, S., Yaffe, A., Zaki, H., Brasher, T. J., Lowe, M. X., Jolly, D. R. P., Barrett, F. S., Griffiths, R. R., Strickland, J. C., Johnson, M. W., Jackson, H., & Garcia-Romeu, A. (2023). Naturalistic psilocybin use is associated with persisting improvements in mental health and wellbeing: Results from a prospective, longitudinal survey. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, 1199642. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1199642

Neitzke-Spruill, L., Beit, C., Robinson, J., Blevins, K., Reynolds, J., Evans, N. G., & McGuire, A. L. (2024). A transformative trip? Experiences of psychedelic use. Neuroethics, 17, 33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-024-09567-0

Naidoo, D., Schembri, A., & Cohen, M. (2018). The health impact of residential retreats: A systematic review. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 18, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12906-017-2078-4

Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204-221.

Uthaug, M. V., Davis, A. K., Haas, T. F., Davis, D., Dolan, S. B., Lancelotta, R., Timmermann, C., & Ramaekers, J. G. (2022). The epidemiology of mescaline use: Pattern of use, motivations for consumption, and perceived consequences, benefits, and acute and enduring subjective effects. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 36(3), 309-320. https://doi.org/10.1177/02698811211013583

Westman, M., & Eden, D. (1997). Effects of a respite from work on burnout: Vacation relief and fade-out. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(4), 516-527.