Women come to retreats for such a diverse range of reasons. Many with goals of what they want to achieve. We know so much can happen to help shift guests from when they arrive to when they leave. We also know that you don’t change your life in one week yet it’s what happens after that makes all the difference. You also change it in the little, quiet moves that you do consistently. That’s the magic of retreat: a fresh setting, a simple plan that’s organised for you, and a string of small wins that quietly snowball. These things build self trust and you feel the difference when you do them daily on retreat. It makes you want to make space for them at home so you can take that magical retreat feeling home with you.

Here’s the habit science (and how we build it into every day with us in Bali on retreat).

Why “small and consistent” works

• Habits stick when a cue and a behaviour keep showing up together. As James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits “Habits run on a loop – a cue triggers a craving, which leads to a response and ends with a reward. The key lever is the cue: make it obvious and you’ll do the thing more often.” Keep repeating a desired behaviour in the same situation and your brain starts doing it on autopilot. For example on retreat we have lemon water after journaling, Pilates before breakfast, downshifting yoga Nidra before bed. In a well known habit study, people who repeated a tiny action daily saw “automaticity” climb along a curve; reaching ~95% automaticity took a median 66 days. Even if they missed a day it didn’t derail progress. It’s like how automatic is it to brush our teeth, get changed for bed, pack our bag for work.
• If–then planning accelerates stickiness. Writing simple plans like “If it’s 7am, then I roll out the mat for 5 minutes” significantly boosts goal follow-through across.
• Fresh starts help. People are more likely to begin aspirational behaviours right after new week, new month, birthdays etc. It’s called the fresh start effect. A retreat is essentially a designed fresh start and an opportunity to create new healthy habits.
• A new environment breaks old ruts. Disrupting daily context (like relocating – even temporarily) weakens stale habit cues and opens a window for change. That’s why stepping into a new retreat routine has outsized impact.

How we design habits into your retreat week

Retreat life is purposefully curated to make the healthy habits easy to stick.

One-minute entry points
We make the first step tiny: 60 seconds of breathwork before class; two glute activations before Reformer; a single page of journaling before breakfast. Starting small builds self trust and creates the foundation.

We minimise friction and add ease
We make it easy for you. For example yoga Mats laid out before sunrise = ‘Oh, I can just roll out of bed and onto my mat, easy”. Morning wellness shots are set out by the tea station = “Oh, I just need to drink this first, ok”. Ice-plunge set next to sauna = contrast therapy loop. These things are purposefully curated this way to create positive choice architecture for you to follow.

Fresh-start framing
We anchor your first full day on retreat as a “Day One” moment: new routine, new notebook, new self care schedule for the week, new baseline (InBody scan if you’ve selected it). It’s called the ‘Fresh Start Effect’.

Your environment is everything
Change the space you are in and you change the default. Design the room so the right cues are in your path and the wrong ones are out of sight. (That’s why a retreat—new routines, new layout, mats pre-set—gives habits an easy runway.) Behavioral science calls this a habit discontinuity: an environment change like this (being on retreat) weakens your old habits and opens a window for to embrace new ones. Retreat is a designed fresh start: new week, new room, new routine – exactly the context shift James Clear says makes change stick.

Belonging & accountability
Daily check-ins, gentle partner prompts in class, and small celebration rituals (hello, coconut cheers). The impact of support of others makes a big impact on habits taking hold.