Wellness Should Change You

Extraordinary Luxury, Lasting Wellness 

Outstanding hospitality and wellness experiences change what happens after you leave.

Six Senses London is built around a simple idea: the best experiences don't end when guests leave.

Six Senses has built its brand around an idea that is surprisingly uncommon in the hospitality industry: measure first, then intervene. At its new London property, guests can undergo a wellness screening that measures biomarkers and combines those data with information about lifestyle, movement, and sleep to personalize what happens next.

That’s very different from the way most resorts approach wellness.

We exercise because exercise is good for us. We meditate because meditation is supposed to reduce stress. We change our diets, track our sleep, take supplements, sit in saunas, plunge into cold water, and increasingly strap devices to our bodies that produce an avalanche of data.

But there’s a fundamental question we rarely ask:

Is any of this actually making us better?

Wellness Isn’t the Absence of Illness

I think "wellness" is a bad idea.  Bad because it sets the bar too low.  For decades, health was largely defined by what was wrong with us. High blood pressure. Obesity. Diabetes. Depression. Chronic disease.

Avoid those and you were doing pretty well said the medical professionals. 

My lab's research has focused on thriving.  Thriving is the physical and emotional capacity and desire to engage deeply with work, relationships, and the world.  This sets the goal far above wellness and provides an opportunity to truly flourish, not just survive.

My published research has shown that thriving occurs when daily experiences activate the brain, creating joy and energy.  That is how thriving manifests.

This sounds easy, but thriving requires both motivation and the technology to measure it.  The technology is essential because the brain determines how to allocate scarce resources. Experiences that are valuable activate regions in the brain associated with emotional responses and thus the investment in processing it.  High value experiences have a measurable neural signature and metaphorically stretch the brain into doing new things.  The technical term for this is "neuroplasticity."

 My research discovered the brain's valuation network and I named it "Immersion" because people get lost in peak Immersion experiences.  

Here is the most important thing to know: Peak Immersion experiences induce neuroplasticity and thereby facilitate thriving.  Just like you need to push yourself to exercise to stay physically fit, peak emotional experiences push our emotional systems and thereby grow our ability to be present and emotionally open

Think about who you want to be around.  Those who have high energy and a positive mood attract people to them and strengthen relationships among those they already know.  Fully 50% of the ability to thrive is due to the quality of our social relationships.  Debbie downer is not someone who is pleasant to associated with.  Indeed, unhappy people make those around them unhappy.

The Technology

Immersion built and released a free app called SIX that passively measures peak Immersion experiences and tells users where and when they happened.  My published research show that people who have six or more peak Immersion experiences daily are thriving, giving users a numeric goal to improve emotional fitness. 

Hospitality organizations and wellness clinics use the ImmersionLive kit to engineer peak Immersion experiences during guest visits. Continuously, passively, objectively.  Only by measuring Immersion can places like Six Senses ensure that every guest not only enjoys his or her visit, but leaves with a boost in the ability to thrive.  

That’s why effective wellness interventions should not simply produce a pleasant afternoon.

They should change behavior.

Measure, Intervene, Measure again

This is what I liked about the methodology at Six Senses London.

Their wellness programs use technology to assess guests and then personalize treatments, activities, movement, sleep, and nutrition recommendations. The goal isn’t simply to feel good during the stay, but to sustain the benefits after returning home.

That’s an important distinction.

If wellness programs are designed to produce lasting change, they need to use the scientific loop:

Measure → Intervene → Measure again.

Did sleep improve?

Did stress decline?

Did energy increase?

Did the person become more physically active?

Did emotional fitness improve?

Did they actually change what they do when they returned to everyday life?

Without measurement, wellness risks becoming theater.

With measurement, it becomes nice to visit, but no need to return.

The Experience Is the Intervention

There is another reason places like Six Senses matter.

As I wrote about earlier, novel environments have a positive effect on brain activity and change behavior.

A beautiful and surprising setting interrupts our routines. Novelty increases attention. Removing people from their normal surroundings creates psychological space to reconsider habits that otherwise run automatically.

Six Senses London was deliberately designed around this idea of shifting perspective, combining high-tech wellness with deeply moving experiences. Its 2,300-square-meter wellness space includes fitness and movement facilities, flotation, cryotherapy, red-light therapies, biomarker screening, and personalized programs.

But the hardware isn’t the point.

The experience is.  And, so are the professionals that facilitate every part of it.

The best wellness experiences create the conditions for people to become receptive to change.

Technology can identify when changes lead to thriving. Experts can recommend what to do. But the experience has to make us want to do it.

That’s where neuroscience meets hospitality.

From Wellness to Transformation

This was also a fitting place to finish my recent travels.  Six Senses invited me to give a talk on thriving to their guests and staff, which I was happy to do.

From Greenland to Iceland, Spain, Normandy, and finally London, I kept encountering the same phenomenon in very different forms.

Extraordinary places change us.

Sometimes they create awe. Sometimes they deepen relationships. Sometimes they connect us to history. And sometimes they give us enough distance from our normal lives to reconsider how we’re living them.

The opportunity for companies that design experiences is bigger than entertainment or satisfaction.

Design for transformation.

Measure to find out if it happened.

Use the data to improve the experience.

And most importantly, determine whether the experience changed what they did next.

Because the best wellness experiences are not the ones that leaves you relaxed for an afternoon.

It’s the one that sends a different person home.

Get a demo of ImmersionLive today using this link.