Surfing and Mindfulness: Anyone Else Over the Wellness Hacks?

Is anyone else feeling a bit over all the wellness hacks? Every time I open my phone there’s a new one: sleep trackers, smart rings, step counts, cold plunges, mushroom coffee and a twelve-step morning routine borrowed from a podcast. I actually don’t do any of it. No ring, no plunge, no sleep score. But I see it everywhere, and it’s got me thinking.

Wellness was meant to help us slow down and feel better. Instead, it feels like we’re being handed more homework. My antidote is a lot simpler: surfing. For me, surfing and mindfulness have always gone hand in hand.

After more than ten years of watching people paddle out at Waluaa, I’ve come to think most of us don’t need more wellness. We need more presence. Less optimising, more actually being where we are. And surfing is one of the ultimate mindfulness practices I know, mostly because it doesn’t give you any choice.

When did feeling good become homework?

Life already feels full enough. Now we’re getting overwhelmed by the very things that are meant to make us feel less overwhelmed. There’s a metric for everything, and a score to go with it. Apparently you can wake up feeling perfectly fine, check your sleep score, and decide you’re tired after all.

I’m not making that up. Sleep researchers even have a word for it now: orthosomnia, which is basically worrying about whether your sleep data is good enough. One recent US study found close to a third of adults who track their sleep showed signs of it. Which is a bit like losing sleep over your sleep.

At the other end of the spectrum, we’re told to switch off, do less, protect our peace. Good advice. But then switching off becomes one more thing to be good at, and doing nothing becomes something to schedule. Either way, it’s homework!

No wonder so many people arrive at our retreats tired in a way a long weekend can’t fix. 

The real problem: we’re never fully anywhere

Here’s the bit I find most interesting. Gloria Mark, a professor at UC Irvine who has studied attention for more than twenty years, found that the average time we spend on one screen before switching has dropped to about 47 seconds. When she started, it was around two and a half minutes.

Forty-seven seconds! Most of us are half in the inbox, half in the next thing, and never quite present for any of it. Can you relate?

I know that feeling well. In my advertising years in Sydney, London and New York, I was very good at juggling. Even now, running Waluaa in Panama from our place in Lennox Head with two young boys, there’s always something pinging. A WhatsApp from Santa Catalina, a school note, a booking question.

More wellness tools don’t fix that. If anything, they’re more things to pay attention to.

How surfing became my antidote

Sergio and I met in Costa Rica in 2013. He was a lawyer in Buenos Aires, I was in advertising, and we’d both quietly reached the same conclusion: there had to be more to life than the corporate grind. Two years later I left my job in New York and we opened Waluaa in Santa Catalina, a small surf and fishing village on Panama’s Pacific coast. (The longer version is here.)

What I didn’t fully understand back then was why surfing felt so different from everything else I’d tried.

Now I think I get it. Surfing asks you to be completely present. You can’t half-do it. You’re watching the horizon for the next set, working out which wave will break and where, timing your paddle, then trying to get to your feet on something that’s moving underneath you. There’s no room left over for the to-do list. A wave won’t wait while you check your phone.

I can go into the water stressed, with a million things running through my head, and come out feeling completely different. Happier, calmer, more alive. A good surf puts everything back into perspective. The things that were worrying me before just don’t seem like such a big deal. Surfers have always known that feeling. They just don’t usually call it mindfulness.

Mindfulness you don’t have to try at

In one session, surfing does what most wellness routines try to piece together:

• It moves your body. Paddling, popping up, riding the waves. A full workout, without once thinking of it as exercise.
• It puts you in nature. Salt water, sun, wind, the horizon. Nothing to scroll.
• It clears your head. Not because you’re trying to meditate, but because the ocean takes up all the space.
• It gives your mind something new to learn. Being a beginner is a gift. There’s no performance to protect, just the next wave.
  

I teach meditation, and I love it. But I’ll be honest: sitting still and watching your thoughts is hard work for a busy mind or someone new to it. Surfing gets you to the same place through a different door. You don’t have to try to be present. The ocean just doesn’t give you another option. 

Then there’s the part no study measures. You fall off. You laugh. Someone in the group gets their first proper wave and can’t stop talking about it over dinner. There’s real joy in doing something together that none of you is good at yet.

Bringing wellness back to nature and simplicity

This is how we’ve always thought about wellness at Waluaa: not a list of things to tick off, but a few simple things done well. Surf in the morning. Some yoga to look after the body doing the surfing. Good food, shared. And proper free time, on purpose, to sit on the beach with a coffee and do absolutely nothing useful.

No juice cleanses. No forced group bonding. No one telling you who to be. Just the ocean, a bit of effort, a lot of ease, and that moment when you feel your shoulders finally drop.

You don’t need to be young, fit or a “surfer”

The thing we hear most is, “I’ve always wanted to learn, but I thought I’d left it too late.” You haven’t. Most of our guests are somewhere between 35 and 65, and plenty catch their first wave in their 40s, 50s and beyond. You don’t need to be super fit or part of surf culture. You just need to be willing to give it a go.

If that’s the bit holding you back, have a read of why a surf retreat belongs on your 40+ bucket list and what first-timers usually worry about (and why you don’t need to).

Frequently asked questions

Come and try it

If you’re in Australia, we’re bringing Waluaa home. Our four-night Surf & Wellness Retreats in Lennox Head, twenty minutes south of Byron Bay, start on 11 November with just seven places, then run again in February 2027. Two surfers per coach, your own beachfront apartment, and plenty of time to switch off in a village where surfing is just part of everyday life.

If you’d like the quick version, Concrete Playground covered the Lennox Head launch here.

If you’ve been dreaming of somewhere further away, our home base is still Santa Catalina, Panama, where around 1,500 guests have surfed with us since 2015. A week on our Surf + Yoga Retreat is warm water, uncrowded waves and a town where you’ll forget what day it is.

Either way, leave the watch on the bedside table. Come and surf with us, and let the ocean tell you how you’re doing.

Vickie
Co-founder, Waluaa