When the Wellness Retreat Is the Avoidance: What a Therapist Sees in High Achievers

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By Martha Fernandez, LCSW

Every September and January, I have some version of the same conversation. Someone comes back from a place most people only see in photographs: a clifftop spa, a silent week in the desert, a lake house with no Wi-Fi. They look rested. Their shoulders say otherwise. “It was perfect,” they tell me. “And by Tuesday it was like I never left.”

The people in this piece are composites drawn from patterns I see often, not any one client.

I want to be clear about where I stand. I love a good retreat. I have come home from trips genuinely restored, and I encourage clients to take real time off. But after eight years of clinical work, much of it with executives, physicians, attorneys and founders, I have learned to listen for a particular kind of trip. It is the one booked not to rest, but to get away from something rest cannot touch.

Why the people who need it most book it at the worst time

High achievers tend to look their most impressive exactly when they are struggling most. In a 2026 review of 287 high achievers who sought therapy through the CEREVITY network, 67% said their peak professional performance came during their period of peak strain.

That is a help-seeking group, not a random sample, but the pattern rings true to me. When output is high, and the inside feels like a held breath, a week away looks like the obvious fix. It is a fix you can schedule, pay for and come home from with photos.

The research on vacations is kind but sobering. A 2009 meta-analysis led by Jessica de Bloom at Radboud University in the Netherlands found that vacations do improve health and wellbeing, but the effect is small and fades soon after people return to work. Rest is real. It just doesn’t last on its own, and it does nothing to address what sent you away in the first place.

Four ways to tell rest from avoidance

Here is what I ask clients to notice. None of it requires you to give up the trip.

1. Watch the first 48 hours back. After true rest, the return is a little bumpy but mostly neutral. You unpack, you answer email, you resent the alarm. After an escape, the return lands like a weight. The Sunday night dread shows up on schedule, sometimes heavier than before you left. If you notice that drop, treat it as information, not failure.
2. Ask whether you missed work or dreaded it. Somewhere around day four of a good vacation, many people catch themselves thinking about a project with something like curiosity. That is a mind recovering. If the thought of your inbox tightened your stomach the whole trip, and you spent the last two days counting down with dread, the trip held something back instead of letting something go.
3. Plan the week after, not just the week away. People spend months choosing the resort and no time at all on what happens when they land. Keep the first morning back clear. Choose one habit from the trip, a long walk, an early dinner, a phone left in another room, and put it on the calendar for the next three weeks. If you cannot imagine protecting even that much time at home, notice what that says about the life you are coming back to.
4. Notice what you could not leave behind. Sleep that only came with a pill or a third glass of wine. The conversation with your partner you avoided all week. The knot that loosened on the beach and tightened again the moment the plane touched down. These aren’t signs you picked the wrong destination. They are signs that something needs attention in a different setting.

When a retreat should come with real support

The retreats I hear the most about are built on immersion: go deep for a concentrated stretch instead of doing a little each week. That instinct feels clinically sound.

CEREVITY’s white paper Why Standard Therapy Fails lays out what it calls the Dose-and-Depth Model. Some work needs more uninterrupted time than a 50-minute hour allows, and the format should fit the material and the person’s calendar, not the other way around.

The same logic applies to whatever you were trying to outrun. If the strain has been building for a year, a week of massages will not reach it, and neither will a quick check-in squeezed between meetings.

For some people, the answer is weekly therapy. For others, especially those with travel-heavy schedules, a concentrated format such as 3-hour therapy intensives fits the way they already like to work: focused, deep and time-bound.

The point is not to choose between the retreat and the help. It is to stop asking the retreat to be the help.

What I tell people before they book

Go. Book the hot springs, the hike, the long table under the olive trees. Be honest with yourself about what you hope the trip will do. If the answer is “rest,” you will probably get it. If the answer is “make the feeling go away,” pay attention to that too.

It is one of the clearest signals your mind can send that it is time to talk to someone, and that conversation can start the week you get home.

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