Why Do I Feel Better When I Get Away From Everything? Have you ever noticed that you can feel completely overwhelmed by your life, yet the moment you get away from it all, something inside you begins to settle? You might leave home feeling exhausted, irritable, anxious or simply fed up, convinced that you need to sort your life out. Then, a few hours or a day later, you find yourself somewhere completely different, perhaps sitting outside with a cup of coffee, looking at a view you have never seen before, breathing air that feels cleaner and listening to sounds that have nothing to do with traffic, phones, emails or other people’s demands. Nothing in your life has necessarily changed, yet somehow you feel different. So why does that happen?
It is a question I have thought about a great deal, both through my work and through my own experience of creating Vista Alcantara Mountain Wellness Retreat here in Sicily. There is something very powerful about physically removing ourselves from the environment in which our usual patterns take place. Sometimes we think we need to change ourselves when what we really need, at least temporarily, is to change what surrounds us. This does not mean that running away from our problems makes them disappear, because sadly life does not work quite that conveniently. You can travel halfway around the world and still take your thoughts, worries and unresolved emotions with you. What can change, however, is the amount of stimulation around you, the routines you have become trapped inside, the expectations placed upon you and the constant reminders of everything you believe you should be doing. When those things become quieter, you can sometimes hear yourself again.
Most of us live within remarkably repetitive environments. We wake up in the same place, follow the same roads, look at the same screens, answer the same messages, carry the same responsibilities and move through the same routines. There is nothing inherently wrong with routine; in fact, routine can provide comfort and stability. The problem begins when the environment itself becomes associated with constant demands. Your home can become the place where you work, worry, organise, clean, answer emails and think about everything that still needs doing. Your phone can become a portable reminder that you are permanently available. Even when you are technically resting, your mind may still be working.
Changing your environment interrupts that cycle. This is one of the reasons travel can feel so restorative. You are not necessarily becoming a different person when you go away. You are giving yourself the opportunity to experience yourself outside the circumstances that normally trigger your familiar responses. There is something particularly interesting about arriving somewhere completely different because your attention naturally begins to move outward. You notice the landscape, the smells, the sounds, the weather, the food, the architecture and the little details that you would normally walk straight past. Your brain has something new to process, but unlike the constant stream of notifications and demands that characterises modern life, these new experiences do not necessarily require you to do anything. You can simply notice them.
I see this repeatedly here at Vista Alcantara, a mountain retreat overlooking the Alcantara Valley and Mount Etna in rural Sicily. People arrive carrying their normal lives with them. They may have spent weeks or months rushing from one responsibility to another, working too much, sleeping badly, thinking constantly or simply feeling that they have no space left for themselves. They arrive at the mountain and, initially, they may still be carrying all of that inside them. Then, gradually, something begins to change. Perhaps it is sitting on the terrace looking across the valley, swimming in the pool while the landscape stretches out beyond you, walking among the olive trees or simply sitting quietly without feeling that you should be accomplishing something. Perhaps it is joining a Tai Chi, Qigong, stretching, yoga or meditation session and discovering that, for an hour, nobody is asking you to answer an email or make a decision.
These things may sound very simple, but perhaps that is part of their value. We have become remarkably good at making rest complicated. We buy things to help us relax, download applications to remind us to breathe, schedule activities designed to make us less stressed and then sometimes feel guilty because we are not relaxing efficiently enough. There is a certain irony in trying to turn relaxation into another task that we need to perform correctly. Sometimes what we need is much simpler: space, a change of scenery and time in which nobody expects anything from us. We need to remember what it feels like to have a meal without rushing, to wake up without immediately reaching for a phone, to sit outside without needing to photograph the experience and to go to bed without mentally working through tomorrow’s list of obligations.
This is one of the reasons I believe that the environment around us matters so much when we are thinking about wellbeing. We cannot always change our jobs, our families, our financial circumstances or the responsibilities we carry. There are many things in life that require us to remain where we are and deal with what is in front of us. Yet even a temporary change can give us enough distance to see those things differently. Distance can create perspective. Imagine looking at a complicated problem while standing directly in the middle of it, with every part of it feeling immediate and everything competing for your attention. Now imagine stepping back far enough to see the whole picture. The problem has not necessarily disappeared, but your relationship with it has changed. That is what getting away can sometimes provide.
Sicily is particularly good at reminding you that life does not have to move at the speed we have become accustomed to. Rural Sicily has its own rhythm. The landscape changes with the seasons, the olive trees do not care about your deadlines, the mountains are completely uninterested in your inbox and the valley below continues its ancient existence regardless of whether you have answered the message that arrived ten minutes ago. There is something wonderfully humbling about that. At Vista Alcantara, we are high in the mountains between Messina and Catania, looking across the Alcantara Valley towards Mount Etna. It is not a place designed for people who want to spend their holiday rushing from one attraction to another. It is a place for people who want to slow down enough to notice where they actually are.
That does not mean sitting silently in a room for a week unless that is what you want. There can be movement, conversation, swimming, walking, yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, meditation, good food and time spent exploring Sicily. There can also be absolutely nothing planned for an afternoon, which, for somebody who has become accustomed to filling every available minute, can feel surprisingly radical. Perhaps this is something we underestimate: doing nothing can feel uncomfortable when we have spent years measuring our value by what we accomplish. If your normal life revolves around productivity, you may arrive somewhere beautiful and initially find yourself wondering what you are supposed to do. You may feel guilty for lying beside the pool, think you should be answering emails or suddenly start mentally reorganising your kitchen from three hundred kilometres away. You may even remember six things you forgot to do before leaving. That is perfectly human. Getting away does not necessarily switch your mind off like a light; it gives your mind a different environment in which to gradually settle.
The longer you remain away from the familiar demands, the more you may begin to notice things that were difficult to see when you were constantly rushing. You may realise how tired you actually are, notice how much time you spend worrying about things that have not happened or discover that you have forgotten what you enjoy because so much of your life has become about what you have to do. Sometimes that awareness can be uncomfortable, but it can also be incredibly valuable. A change of environment can give you enough breathing space to ask questions that are difficult to ask when you are constantly reacting to life. What do I actually want? What has been making me unhappy? What am I tolerating because I have become used to it? When did I last feel properly rested? What would my life look like if I stopped believing that everything had to be done immediately?
You do not have to answer all of those questions while sitting beneath an olive tree in Sicily. In fact, please do not turn that into another task! Sometimes the answer comes precisely because you have stopped trying so hard to find it. There is another reason getting away can feel so good: you temporarily step outside your usual identity. At home, you may be the person who manages everything. You may be a parent, partner, business owner, employee, carer, organiser, problem-solver or the person everybody phones when something goes wrong. Those identities are important, but when you are constantly performing them, it can become difficult to remember who you are underneath them.
Travel can create a strange little pocket of freedom. Nobody at the table knows that you have a mountain of paperwork waiting for you at home. Nobody in the village knows that you have been worrying about that difficult conversation for three weeks. The person sitting beside you at breakfast does not care whether you answered every email yesterday. For a short while, you are simply yourself, and that can be surprisingly restorative.
It is also why I do not see a wellness retreat as somewhere people go because they are broken and need fixing. I have never particularly liked that idea. Sometimes you do not need fixing. Sometimes you are simply exhausted from living in an environment that gives you very little opportunity to stop. A retreat can provide a pause. That pause may be two nights, several days or a longer period of completely switching off from ordinary life. What matters is not necessarily the number of days but what you allow yourself to do with the space.
At Vista Alcantara, our philosophy is built around Relax, Rejuvenate, Rebalance and Restore. Those words are deliberately simple because wellbeing does not always need to be complicated. Sometimes relaxation means sleeping properly. Rejuvenation might mean spending time outdoors. Rebalancing might mean reconnecting with your body through movement. Restoration might mean finally giving yourself permission to stop being available to everybody else for a little while.
There is no magic mountain that will solve every problem in your life, and I certainly would not promise that. What a place like Vista Alcantara can offer is something much more realistic and, perhaps, much more useful: the opportunity to step away from the noise long enough to hear your own thoughts without everything else shouting over them. You may return home with exactly the same job, the same family, the same responsibilities and some of the same problems waiting for you. Yet you may see them differently because you have slept, breathed, moved your body, spent time outdoors and remembered that your life is more than the list of things you have to get done.
Perhaps that is the real answer to the question, “Why do I feel better when I get away from everything?” It is not necessarily because everything has changed. Sometimes it is because you have changed your relationship with everything. You have stepped outside the routines, expectations and constant stimulation that had become so familiar that you no longer noticed how much they were affecting you. You have given yourself room to breathe, to notice, to move, to rest and simply to exist without constantly asking yourself what comes next. Sometimes we need to get away in order to remember what it feels like to be here.
Perhaps that is what a few days in Sicily can give you. Not an escape from your life, but enough distance from it to come back to it with a little more space, a little more clarity and, hopefully, a little more of yourself. If you have reached the point where you are craving quiet, nature, fresh air and a genuine pause from the demands of everyday life, Vista Alcantara Mountain Wellness Retreat, high above the Alcantara Valley in Sicily, might just be the place where you can finally give yourself permission to stop for a while.
Why Simplicity Is the New Luxury: Slow Living Near Mount Etna in Sicily