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UNPACKING THE MYSTERY OF THESE GETAWAYS THAT REFRESH AND REVITALIZE

Just what happens on wellness retreats depends, largely, on what you’re looking for.

Need a weekend away, a few days, an entire week, or even longer?

Health resorts and wellness retreats come in all shapes and sizes, so you can always find one to fit your schedule.

Curious to understand more about the hype surrounding health retreats?

Here’s a primer on what to expect from a wellness retreat.

REFRESH, REVIVE, REJUVENATE

Most wellness retreats happen in stunning natural surroundings.

Think
mountains,
oceans,
hot springs,
crystal waters,
quiet pools,
lush foliage,
or some combination of all of the above.

These natural environments help you relax and unwind.

They also make for incredible photos!

Wellness retreats can be in exotic locales far away or tucked away in the area you already live. Instead of a vacation where you come back even more exhausted by all you did, a health retreat aims for you to leave the experience recharged and energized.

DISCONNECT FOR INWARD FOCUS
Many people go to a wellness retreat to unplug and recharge.

Some resorts have a suggested no cellphone policy, others ban all electronics outright.

With all the distractions in our daily lives, sometimes people feel completely disoriented without the potential for constant contact.

But when you unplug, you’re able to focus more on the present, whether it’s eating a delicious meal, getting a massage or going on a hike.

Eliminating distractions also allows you to turn your thoughts inwards.
Maybe you’ll meditate, do yoga or try another mindfulness practice.

Maybe you’ll sit in a quiet spot and just look at the sky.

Having free time lets you really decompress and reconnect to what it is you really want.

CLEANSE

Wellness retreats usually include some kind of cleanse, from a detoxifying meal plan to colonics, which irrigate your colon as a way to speed up the detox process.

For example, at Life Mastery, participants detox with a food program packed with nutrient-rich vegetable and fruit juices, raw foods, fresh wheatgrass and essential oils to quickly cleanse the body of unwanted toxins and restore vital nutrients.

The results?

Reclaimed energy and enhanced mental processing.

REVITALIZE
Even though with all the relaxing you’ll do at a wellness retreat, that doesn’t mean you’ll be sitting still.

With your unplugged lifestyle, you’ll have time and energy for everything from
fitness classes to
hikes,
massages
to swims.

And, depending on location, don’t forget the range of possible spa treatments.

MAKE NEW PATTERNS

Of course, the secret to a health retreat is to understand how to replicate the process back home.

Even if you don’t have the same incredible view or option to be unplugged 24/7, quality wellness retreats educate attendees on how to keep up their new habits.

Maybe this is incorporating aerobic exercise into your daily routine, learning how to prepare raw foods, or creating a sustainable meal plan that fits your lifestyle.

After spending all this time making your body and mind feel great, you don’t want to slip back into the bad habits you’ve broken, whether it’s caffeine addiction or candy.

Rhythm of breathing enhances memory recall and emotional judgement.

A new study reports the rhythm of your breathing can influence neural activity that enhances memory recall and emotional judgement.

Breathing is not just for oxygen; it’s now linked to brain function and behavior.

It has been discovered for the first time that the rhythm of breathing creates electrical activity in the human brain that enhances emotional judgments and memory recall.

These effects on behavior depend critically on whether you inhale or exhale and whether you breathe through the nose or mouth.

In the study, individuals were able to identify a fearful face more quickly if they encountered the face when breathing in compared to breathing out.

Individuals also were more likely to remember an object if they encountered it on the inhaled breath than the exhaled one.

The effect disappeared if breathing was through the mouth.

“One of the major findings in this study is that there is a dramatic difference in brain activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during inhalation compared with exhalation.”

“When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, all across the limbic system.”

The study was published Dec. 6 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Jay Gottfried, professor of neurology at Feinberg. Northwestern scientists first discovered these differences in brain activity while studying seven patients with epilepsy who were scheduled for brain surgery.

A week prior to surgery, a surgeon implanted electrodes into the patients’ brains in order to identify the origin of their seizures.

This allowed scientists to acquire electro-physiological data directly from their brains.

The recorded electrical signals showed brain activity fluctuated with breathing.

The activity occurs in brain areas where emotions, memory and smells are processed.

This discovery led scientists to ask whether cognitive functions typically associated with these brain areas, in particular fear processing and memory could also be affected by breathing.

 

The amygdala is strongly linked to emotional processing, in particular fear-related emotions.

So scientists asked about 60 subjects to make rapid decisions on emotional expressions in the lab environment while recording their breathing.

Presented with pictures of faces showing expressions of either fear or surprise, the subjects had to indicate, as quickly as they could, which emotion each face was expressing.

When faces were encountered during inhalation, subjects recognized them as fearful more quickly than when faces were encountered during exhalation.

This was not true for faces expressing surprise.

These effects diminished when subjects performed the same task while breathing through their mouths.

Thus the effect was specific to fearful stimuli during nasal breathing only.

In an experiment aimed at assessing memory function — tied to the hippocampus — the same subjects were shown pictures of objects on a computer screen and told to remember them.

Later, they were asked to recall those objects.

Researchers found that recall was better if the images were encountered during inhalation.

The findings imply that rapid breathing may confer an advantage when someone is in a dangerous situation.

“If you are in a panic state, your breathing rhythm becomes faster.”

“As a result you’ll spend proportionally more time inhaling than when in a calm state.

Thus, our body’s innate response to fear with faster breathing could have a positive impact on brain function and result in faster response times to dangerous stimuli in the environment.”

Another potential insight of the research is on the basic mechanisms of meditation or focused breathing.

“When you inhale, you are in a sense synchronizing brain oscillations across the limbic network,” Zelano noted.
Abstract: Nasal Respiration Entrains Human Limbic Oscillations and Modulates Cognitive Function

The need to breathe links the mammalian olfactory system inextricably to the respiratory rhythms that draw air through the nose.

In rodents and other small animals, slow oscillations of local field potential activity are driven at the rate of breathing (∼2–12 Hz) in olfactory bulb and cortex, and faster oscillatory bursts are coupled to specific phases of the respiratory cycle.

These dynamic rhythms are thought to regulate cortical excitability and coordinate network interactions, helping to shape olfactory coding, memory and behavior.

However, while respiratory oscillations are a ubiquitous hallmark of olfactory system function in animals, direct evidence for such patterns is lacking in humans.

In this study, we acquired intracranial EEG data from rare patients (Ps) with medically refractory epilepsy, enabling us to test the hypothesis that cortical oscillatory activity would be entrained to the human respiratory cycle, albeit at the much slower rhythm of ∼0.16–0.33 Hz.
Results reveal that natural breathing synchronizes electrical activity in human piriform (olfactory) cortex, as well as in limbic-related brain areas, including amygdala and hippocampus.

Notably, oscillatory power peaked during inspiration and dissipated when breathing was diverted from nose to mouth.

Parallel behavioral experiments showed that breathing phase enhances fear discrimination and memory retrieval.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT
Animal studies have long shown that olfactory oscillatory activity emerges in line with the natural rhythm of breathing, even in the absence of an odor stimulus.

Whether the breathing cycle induces cortical oscillations in the human brain is poorly understood. In this study, we collected intracranial EEG data from rare patients with medically intractable epilepsy, and found evidence for respiratory entrainment of local field potential activity in human piriform cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.

These effects diminished when breathing was diverted to the mouth, highlighting the importance of nasal airflow for generating respiratory oscillations.

Finally, behavioral data in healthy subjects suggest that breathing phase systematically influences cognitive tasks related to amygdala and hippocampal functions.

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Align your PERSONALITY with your PURPOSE and nobody can touch you. My personality needs to serve my soul.

I’m not living the dream because I’m special. I’m living the dream because I was obedient to the call of the dream.

”My definition of LUCK is PREPARATION meeting the moment of OPPORTUNITY.”

No matter what challenges, setbacks or disappointment you may encountered along the way, you will find true success and happiness, if you have only one goal.

There really is only ONE GOAL and that is this, to fulfill the highest, most truthful expression of yourself.

So I say to you, forget about the fast lane.

   “If you really want to fly, just harness your power to your PASSION. 

   Honor your CALLING. Everyone has one.

   Trust your heart and SUCCESS will come to you.

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Relax, it’s going to be okay!

⁃ Oprah Winfrey