5 ways to ruin your vacation
RE:Center is an entirely seed-oil-free retreat, detox and wellness center near Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. Our team recently stayed on the property and felt incredibly impressed and fully refreshed.
Read our full review of our stay at the end of this email, and use promo code SEEDOIL35 to save 35% on your stay if you decide to take the plunge.
Vacations work.
A meta-analysis found that time off improves health and well-being, but the benefits start fading the moment work resumes.
So book the trip. Just don't sprint the benefits into the ground before you've even left the airport, somewhere between the Hudson News snack wall and Terminal C.
1. Stay Glued To Your Phone
Your phone is basically a slot machine with a camera.
One PET imaging study linked heavier social-app use to lower dopamine synthesis capacity in a reward-and-habit region of the brain. A separate "brain drain" study found that simply having a smartphone within reach shrinks your available mental bandwidth, even with the phone face-down and untouched, just present.
The vacation rule:
No phone for the first 60 minutes after waking.
Keep it on airplane mode until breakfast, ideally until lunch.
Batch your photos and posting into one or two windows a day.
Use an app blocker if willpower has already been replaced by Reels.
Win the morning and the trip actually feels like an escape.
2. Eat Tourist Slop
Captive diners get garbage food.
Hotel buffets, airports, stadiums, and tourist strips are all optimizing for the same three things: speed, margin, and "will this family from Ohio pay $24 for chicken fingers?"
The fix:
Book an Airbnb with a kitchen for anything longer than a weekend.
Pack jerky, fruit, cheese, dark chocolate, or clean protein.
In airports, be boring. Jerky and water beats a seed-oil Caesar wrap from Terminal C every time. And yes bringing your own food through security is totally allowed. It's usually your best move.
Use Seed Oil Scout before you're hungry — not while standing in a gift shop with crashing blood sugar.
Worst case, skip the meal entirely. A short travel fast is not a tragedy.
3. Sleep Like Garbage
New room. Weird pillows. Blue LEDs everywhere.
Sleep is where a vacation turns into actual recovery. In long-vacation research, better sleep tracked directly with higher health and well-being.
Then there's the air. Experimental sleep research found that sleep quality drops as bedroom CO₂ climbs — and a sealed hotel room can quietly turn into a carbon-dioxide jar by 3 AM.
Pack the sleep kit:
Black electrical tape for every glowing LED.
Eye mask and earplugs.
Red glasses, or just dim light, at night.
The same bedtime routine you use at home.
Run the bathroom fan, crack a window, or otherwise move some air if the room lets you.
Don't let a glowing microwave clock defeat your nervous system.
We had no issues with the above at RE:Center. Read our full report at the end of this email.
4. Overbook Yourself Into A Walking Injury
American life is mostly chairs. Vacation life is suddenly cobblestones, stairs, museum queues, and 22,000 steps.
Recent step-count data put daily averages around 6,000–7,000 steps for many groups. Tourists blow past that without noticing, because the subway is always somehow "only a 14-minute walk away."
Walking more is great. Hobbling through Paris with blisters and plantar fasciitis on day three is not.
Do this instead:
Train for the trip in the two weeks before you leave.
Bring shoes you already trust.
Schedule one anchor activity per day, not seven.
Hydrate before you're thirsty.
Treat big walking days like workouts, because that's what they are.
A vacation should feel full. It shouldn't feel like a CrossFit competition with gelato.
5. Drink Like It's Spring Break
Alcohol is the great vacation-benefit shredder.
It feels relaxing in the moment, then quietly taxes your sleep, recovery, appetite, and next-day motivation.
Contain it:
Drink with meals, not from noon to midnight.
Avoid drinking on consecutive days if possible.
Stick to clean, additive-free vodka, tequila or mezcal for minimum digestive noise.
Don't turn every evening into a metabolic overdraft.
Bottom Line
Vacations genuinely improve health and well-being, but the gains fade fast.
Protect the morning. Protect sleep. Decide on real food before hunger decides for you.
Walk a lot, but don't cosplay as an ultramarathoner on day one.
Download Seed Oil Scout before you leave, scout the clean restaurants early, and come home better than you left. 🫡
3 Days Offline at Re:Center
Our team had the opportunity to visit Re:Center for a three-day offsite and digital detox in Costa Rica. We were blown away with the attention to detail that the RE:Center team brought to designing the property, amenities and food program.
Shortly before our visit, Dr. Mark Hyman had actually stayed at the property. Quality considered, the stay was extremely affordable compared to comparable retreats.
RE:Center made going 72 hours device-free a total breeze. Our nervous system thanked us, and we even saw a measurable lift in our HRV after the short stay, based on measurements taken on-site.
Socially, RE:Center gives you space to withdraw and reflect to your own private bungalow, but also allows for organic interaction in beautiful common areas with people who were on our wavelength.
Between the gym and the floating yoga studio the programming kept us off our screens and plugged in to the real world, getting just enough movement without triggering too much nervous system load for the digital detox to take effect.
RE:Center cooked breakfast and lunch for us daily at their onsite cafe. Seed oil free, clean, simple, actually satisfying. The kind of meals that make you remember wellness food doesn’t have to be weird. Just real ingredients, cooked well, eaten with other people, without everyone photographing the plate first.
The first day, honestly, was mostly withdrawal. You realize how often your hand reaches for your phone for no real reason. All those pre-programmed, dopamine seeking loops through your social media apps and email have nowhere to run. We did allow for a Kindle, serving as a digital pacifier for our hands and brain.
By the second afternoon, something shifted. There was this feeling like a weight had been lifted off the whole group. Everyone got a little slower, a little funnier, a little more present. You realize that feeling of constant dread isn’t normal at all. It just starts to feel normal when you’re carrying the internet around in your pocket all day.
By the end, the best part wasn’t that we felt “optimized.” It was that we felt more human. Less scattered. Less reactive. More connected to each other.
Three days offline won’t fix your life. But it does show you how much noise you’ve been mistaking for life.
And once you feel the difference, it’s hard to unfeel it.
Read more about Re:Center in Rolling Stone here, and see some testimonials below.
Did you like this newsletter?
Loved it! ❤️
It could be better. 👎
Seed Oil Scout subscriptions keep this newsletter afloat! Get unlimited access to clean dining globally for a deep discount of $19.99 when you join here