The science has spoken. Traveling does wonders for your mental and physical health, from keeping you mindful to keeping you alive for longer. Traveling comes with so many benefits that you’re easily getting more than your money’s worth every time you embark on a new adventure. You’re not just paying for your plane tickets or a place to stay. Your experiences, the people you meet, and the places you explore play a role in your health and happiness.
But, if you’re still having trouble convincing yourself to go on your next vacation, we’ve got you covered. Here are nine amazing benefits of traveling that you can look forward to taking advantage of on your next trip!
Table of Contents
- 1. Traveling Keeps You Active
- 2. Traveling Decreases Your Risk of Heart Disease
- 3. Traveling Sharpens Your Mind
- 4. Traveling Can Reduce Stress
- 5. Traveling Boosts Serotonin
- 6. Traveling Gives You a Creative Edge
- 7. Traveling Makes You Happy
- 8. Traveling Builds Confidence
- 9. Traveling Changes You as a Person
- Take Advantage of the Benefits of Traveling With a Flight from Next Vacay
1. Traveling Keeps You Active
One of the most comprehensive benefits of travel is keeping you active. Now, you may be thinking that being active is the last thing you want to be on vacation. Instead, your idea of a good time may be sprawling out on a lounge chair with a drink and a view.
But, according to the World Health Organization, one in four adults doesn’t get enough exercise. Juxtapose that info against the clear benefits of regular physical activity, ranging from improved sleep to reduced anxiety and better brain health. Suddenly, the reasons to get active are piling up.
You may be a total couch potato at home, and we can’t blame you. Who doesn’t love wrapping themselves up like a burrito and chilling on a comfy surface? However, travel encourages you to leave the couches—and the blankets and the burritos—behind for something a little more exciting.
Staying active is one of the best ways to improve your overall health, and studies have shown that active travel increases physical activity. With increased physical activity, you can decrease your risk for commonly occurring cancers and other health problems. So, the more time you spend on physical activities during active vacations, the greater the positive effects on your physical health and mental well-being.
While active travel may make you think of accomplishing epic feats like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, rest assured, your active vacation doesn’t need to be anywhere near that intense to garner some benefits. Simply walking between landmarks or kayaking out to secret islands can help you reap the rewards that increased physical activity offers.
That’s not even getting into all the ways traveling can open your mind to new and healthier lifestyles. Whether it’s finding new ways to move, like picking up yoga in India, or finding new hobbies to enjoy, like bike riding, travel can expand your options for healthier ways of living.
2. Traveling Decreases Your Risk of Heart Disease
Travel can save your life. How? Simple, by saving your heart.
We’re not talking about saving you from heartbreak or an existential upheaval of Eat Pray Love proportions. Although, we’re reasonably confident that travel can help take your mind off your troubles at home. No, the type of heart healing we’re talking about here is the kind likely to get your doctor excited.
It’s no secret that Americans struggle with high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease. In 2018, the American Heart Association estimated that over 100 million American adults have high blood pressure. Unfortunately, that number continues to climb, which means more Americans are at risk of dying from coronary-related health problems and stroke.
Those are some scary numbers, so how can travel make them less scary? Researchers have found that travel decreases the risk of heart attack and heart issues in men and women.
The Framingham Heart Study research concluded that vacationing just twice a year significantly reduced a woman’s risk of heart attack or coronary-related death compared to women who travel every six years.
Men also benefit from these travel-related perks. For example, taking an annual vacation resulted in men having a significantly lower risk of death from all causes and an even lesser possibility of death from heart disease.
So, travel is good for the heart and can help you put years back into your life? Sign us up because our bags are already packed.
3. Traveling Sharpens Your Mind
Think of your brain like a pencil. Stress can shrink your brain, and simple things like repeated routines can wear it down until that once knife-point tip becomes dull and rounded. Travel is the sharpener that shaves away that dull haze to leave your brain sharp as a tack.
Okay, so maybe imagining your brain against the whirring blades of a pencil sharpener isn’t what some would call pleasant. Still, travel is real-life education that helps hone your mind more than any classroom ever could.
Encountering new stimuli and experiences, as is often the case with travel, can help keep your mind sharp. It’s one of the reasons people report higher cognitive functioning when they come back from a trip. In fact, the U.S. Travel Association discovered that people who took more vacations were promoted more often. Coincidence? We don’t think so.
Traveling gives your brain time to rest and reset while exposing it to new situations and events. In addition, these novel environments can help your brain grow by keeping it active and engaged and forcing it to form new ideas and judgments based on lived experiences.
Experience increases your problem-solving skills and ability to form deep connections. This is especially true when you travel to a foreign country. Every time you travel to a new country or encounter new cultures, your brain has to work to make new connections and categorize new information.
So, the next time you consider a new hobby, like puzzles or learning a language to help keep your brain sharp and ready, consider adding travel to the list of potential candidates. You could knock out all three at once!
4. Traveling Can Reduce Stress
Life doesn’t pull its punches. Stress can hit you all at once or slowly build up and wear you down to the point you find yourself burnt out. The majority of the American workforce doesn’t do itself any favors, either. For example, in 2018, the U.S. Travel Association recorded 768 million vacation days left unused by American workers.
More than half of Americans squander their paid vacation days. Consider the irony of people unwilling to take time off when that time off may be just what they need to lower their stress levels and reset their health and wellness. One study found that vacations serving as a break from work reduced stress during and immediately after vacation.
It’s proven that vacations aren’t just an indulgence; they’re essential for boosting emotional health and alleviating chronic stress.
Even short, mini-vacations have a positive effect on well-being. Case in point, employees who took short vacations of four to five days saw an improvement in their mental health and overall wellness. These effects also carried over after the return home.
The most important factor in reducing stress with travel is disengaging from work entirely. Your time off should be a break from the usual suspects, from the small stresses of everyday life to more chronic stresses. For a break to be effective, you have to leave behind the environments and activities causing you anxiety. Stepping away physically and mentally will give your mind a rest and allow you to reset your stress levels.
That means it’s time to put the laptop away, turn off your notifications, and be in the moment.
5. Traveling Boosts Serotonin
We can all use a boost to our mood now and then. When that happens, you can’t just call up your brain and tell it to feel happy for a bit, though how convenient that would be. Instead of playing telephone with the chemicals in your body, there’s a much easier way to boost your well-being and mood: travel.
You probably won’t be shocked to learn that among the many benefits of traveling, improving your sense of well-being is one. Anytime we can take a break from our problems and relax is time well spent.
But what you may not know is that travel can improve your mental health at a fundamental level.
A study conducted in 2005 found that women were less likely to become depressed, tense, or tired when they vacationed frequently. These benefits could be seen in women who traveled at least once every two years.
Considering it can have such significant health benefits, taking the time to utilize your vacation time and travel is critical. Because depression has such a huge impact globally and most prevalently in women, knowing travel can reduce your risk makes scheduling your next trip a necessity. One that your brain—and your mood—will thank you for.
6. Traveling Gives You a Creative Edge
A change of scenery can do wonders for the imagination, but it can also do so much more. One of the many benefits traveling can have is increasing creativity.
A professor at Columbia Business School, Adam Galinsky, says, “Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.” In simple terms, international travel broadens the mind. By traveling and engaging directly with the world, the brain finds and forms new connections and deeper understandings.
Studies by Galinsky and colleagues prove this to be true. For example, by studying more than a decade of fashion collections and comparing it to the designer’s foreign professional experience, the researchers found that those designers who had spent more time abroad made more creative collections.
The same is true for creativity overall. Additional research by Galinsky showed that students who lived abroad had better creative insights than those who didn’t.
Adapting to new surroundings through learning the local culture, overcoming a language barrier, and interacting with new people of different backgrounds helps drive this boost in creativity.
We may have just found the perfect excuse to convince our boss we’re ready to work remotely.
7. Traveling Makes You Happy
If you want to talk about the benefits of traveling, then its effect on your happiness has to be among the best reasons to take a holiday.
Now, you likely don’t need Sherlock Holmes’s impeccable sleuthing skills to deduce that travel and happiness go hand in hand.
But while the results may be obvious, the science behind it is fascinating to explore. Studies have found that novel and diverse experiences are intricately linked with enhanced feelings of happiness. So, getting out and exploring new places is connected to positive emotions like happiness and increased well-being. No surprises there. Being happy while you’re traveling is a given.
But did you know traveling can make you happier for weeks and months before you depart? Researchers at Cornell University found that anticipating experiential purchases like future travel made people happier than anticipating material purchases.
So, not only does travel make you happier while you’re traveling, but it can also positively affect your mood prior to your trip. In fact, simply talking about your trip and describing your plans to others can give your happiness levels a serious boost. And that’s before you’ve even stepped foot out the door!
8. Traveling Builds Confidence
One of the many benefits of traveling is its profound impact on a person’s confidence.
What does confidence have to do with your health, you might ask? Self-confidence affects how you make decisions and face challenges that affect your physical and mental health.
Experienced travelers recommend leaving your comfort zone behind and striking out into new lands for a good reason. Removing yourself from the comforts of home to experience the world and other cultures can expose you to new experiences and newfound confidence.
Traveling constantly forces you to flex language skills and adapt to unfamiliar customs and traditions while only relying on yourself and your abilities. It’s a similar story for people traveling solo. As a solo traveler, the only one to turn to for tough decisions is you. And as you make more decisions and grow as a traveler, your confidence grows with you.
That influx of confidence can profoundly impact how people see themselves and the world, which in turn can positively affect their relationships and feelings of depression and anxiety.
9. Traveling Changes You as a Person
It’s no secret that life experience impacts who you are. What you see and experience can shape your perspectives and understanding of the world and the people in it.
So, it makes sense that traveling would play a significant role in personal growth and development. But, it’s not just common sense that backs this up. Research shows it to be true. For example, a study of university students revealed that studying abroad for both short and long-term periods increased openness and agreeableness. Furthermore, living abroad can improve one’s sense of identity and self-confidence. Science shows that people make cultural connections and reflect on their experiences and behaviors in more nuanced ways when they travel.
Speaking of reflecting, traveling can change just how you experience the world. Stepping outside of your comfort zone and into novel situations, the routines of daily life fade away. Travel forces you to abandon living on autopilot and fully experience your surroundings by being as mentally present as you are physically present.
This increase in mindfulness can have stated benefits like helping to reduce stress and build self-awareness. However, it also has immeasurable benefits like feeling more stimulated, happier, and more compassionate toward others.
Take Advantage of the Benefits of Traveling With a Flight from Next Vacay
Reaping the benefits of travel can be hard when you’re stressing out about planning and budgeting for a trip. The last thing you want to do is get off on the wrong foot with your travel plans. So, go easy on yourself and make your planning process that much easier with Next Vacay.
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