Can a Retreat Help With Burnout?
Updated: Aug 10
Updated: August 2026
What Stepping Away Can, and Cannot, Offer When You Have Been Carrying Too Much
Editorial Note: This article was originally published in 2023 following a retreat experience in Costa Rica. It has been substantially revised to reflect my evolving philosophy of retreats, not as spaces for immediate transformation, though powerful shifts happen, but as intentional spaces for awareness, embodied experience, reflection, and the beginning of meaningful change.
As I made my way home, reminiscing on moments of pure bliss, my mind wandered back to a particular encounter that had touched my soul, and I knew I needed to share this young woman's story with you.
During a retreat in Costa Rica, I met a young woman who told me she had been carrying more than she could sustain. She was balancing a demanding job with graduate school, and although she had traveled somewhere beautiful, the exhaustion of her everyday life had followed her there.
Our conversation was brief and human; the kind that can happen when two people find themselves far from home, surrounded by nature, with enough spaciousness to speak honestly.
I do not know the whole of her story or what unfolded after our paths crossed. But something about the encounter stayed with me because her exhaustion felt so familiar. I have heard different versions of it from many women over the years, and I have experienced parts of it myself:
I can keep going, but I am no longer sure I can feel myself inside the life I am maintaining.
Burnout is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like competence.
We continue working, caring for others, meeting deadlines, solving problems, and doing what needs to be done. From the outside, we may appear capable and successful. Inside, however, our lives can begin to feel increasingly narrow. We lose touch with pleasure, creativity, curiosity, rest, and the quieter parts of ourselves that cannot be heard over the demands of daily life.
Why Stepping Away Can Matter
A retreat cannot resolve every condition that contributes to burnout. It cannot repair an unsustainable workplace, eliminate caregiving responsibilities, heal longstanding trauma, or replace therapy or medical care when those are needed.
What a retreat can offer is interruption.
When we step outside our familiar environment, the routines and roles that organize our lives become less automatic. We are no longer responding to the same alarm, driving the same route, sitting at the same desk, or answering every request as it arrives. Even briefly, we may have an opportunity to notice what has been obscured by momentum.
What am I feeling beneath the exhaustion?
What have I been asking of myself?
What needs have I repeatedly postponed?
What part of me has gone quiet?
What do I miss about the person I am when I am not simply managing everything?
Sometimes we need distance from our ordinary lives before we can see them clearly. A retreat becomes a window, not an escape from reality, but an opportunity to look at our reality from another perspective.
Insight Is Only Part of Healing
As a psychoanalyst, I deeply value insight. Understanding our histories, unconscious patterns, internal expectations, and emotional conflicts can expand our freedom to choose.
But insight alone does not always change the way we experience ourselves.
During the retreat in Costa Rica, our days included meditation, time in nature, a waterfall hike, shared experiences, and even ziplining through the rainforest. Each offered a different kind of encounter with the self.
Meditation invited stillness and attention.
The waterfall and rainforest awakened the senses.
Walking asked the body to participate.
Shared experiences created connection.
Ziplining invited us to meet uncertainty while being held by something trustworthy; the equipment, the guides, and the structure surrounding the experience.
These moments were not cures or proof of transformation. They were experiences through which something new could be felt.
There is a difference between knowing intellectually, I am capable of meeting uncertainty, and having an experience in which your body discovers, I can feel afraid, remain present, and move forward.
Some things cannot be integrated through insight alone. It is through lived experience, like resting, creating, risking, relating, moving, and trying...that we gradually begin to experience ourselves differently.
A Retreat Is a Beginning, Not a Finish Line
The language of retreats can sometimes make transformation sound immediate: arrive depleted, leave renewed, and begin an entirely new life.
Real change is usually more complex.
A retreat may create a moment of clarity, but the deeper work begins when we return home. We still have to ask what the experience revealed and how we will care for that knowledge in daily life.
Perhaps you recognize that your pace is unsustainable.
Perhaps you remember how much you need creativity, nature, friendship, or solitude.
Perhaps you notice that you have been treating rest as something you must earn.
Perhaps you become aware of a boundary that needs to be established, a loss that needs to be grieved, or a conversation you have been avoiding.
The retreat does not make those changes for us. It gives us a place to see and sometimes to feel what may be ready to change.
Integration happens when we begin carrying that awareness back into our ordinary choices: how we structure our days, respond to our bodies, relate to work, receive support, protect our energy, and make room for what restores us.
What Might Stepping Away Help You See?
You do not necessarily need to travel to another country to create this kind of interruption. A retreat can take many forms: several days away, an afternoon in nature, a quiet morning without your phone, a creative workshop, a circle of women, or an intentional pause within your own home.
The essential question is not how far you go.
It is whether you can create enough space to listen.
If you have been carrying too much, you might begin by asking:
What is my exhaustion trying to tell me?
What part of my life feels most depleted?
What restores me but has gradually disappeared from my days?
Where am I continuing through effort when something needs to change?
What support might I need that I cannot provide entirely for myself?
What is one small insight I am willing to bring back into my daily life?
Burnout rarely means that we have failed. Often, it means that some part of us can no longer continue living in quite the same way.
A retreat cannot tell us exactly what should come next. But it can quiet the surrounding noise long enough for us to hear the question and perhaps begin listening for our own answer.
Looking Through This Window
A retreat does not have to provide every answer. Sometimes its purpose is to create enough space for a more honest question to emerge.
Take a moment to reflect:
What has my exhaustion, restlessness, or longing been trying to tell me?
What becomes easier to see when I step outside my usual roles and responsibilities?
What kind of space would help me listen more deeply to myself right now?
What is one small change I could carry into my life without waiting for everything else to change?
You might write down the question that feels most alive and allow yourself to return to it over the next several days. Wisdom does not always arrive as a sudden realization. Sometimes it unfolds as we continue listening.
Is a Retreat Calling You?
If you are longing for intentional time away, not to escape your life, but to listen to it more closely, I invite you to learn about The Next First Step Retreat. Through reflection, creativity, nature, embodied experiences, and meaningful connection with other women, the retreat offers space to step outside the noise and consider what may be ready to emerge next.
And if a retreat is not what you need right now, begin where you are. Create one small pocket of spaciousness this week and notice what becomes visible when you stop pushing long enough to listen.
About Jamie Cromer Grue
Jamie Cromer Grue (Jamie Cromer, LCSW, ACSW, FABP) is a licensed clinical social worker, board-certified psychoanalyst and Training and Supervising Analyst. She is also a Certified Ayurvedic lifestyle instructor and the founder of Windows to Wisdom.
Jamie brings more than 30 years of clinical experience to an integrated approach drawing from psychoanalysis, holistic wellness, contemplative practice, creativity, and the wisdom of everyday life. Through Windows to Wisdom, she makes complex ideas about the inner life more accessible, inviting people to listen more deeply to themselves, recognize meaningful patterns, and develop greater self-awareness, resilience, and freedom.
Jamie’s psychoanalytic knowledge and clinical experience inform the public education offered through Windows to Wisdom. Windows to Wisdom is separate from her clinical practice; reading these materials or participating in its programs does not constitute therapy or establish a therapist–patient relationship.
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