So you think travel is a great stress-buster? You are right. This is now common knowledge that travel helps relieve stress, puts you on a sight-seeing beauty of a place and helps you loosen up for a change. It is a deviation from the routine and humdrum life that we all are living at the moment.
As a travel expert, Rick Steves mentioned in his conversations with the New York Times, “This virus can stop our travel plans, but it cannot stop our travel dreams”
However, scientists and psychologists have always known something more than this. Travelling, as they postulate, improves mental health and overall wellness. Let us reveal the same to you too!
- Pandemic might have put a stop on travel plans. But that doesn’t mean you stop planning. Scientists have noticed that just thinking about travel (planning but not gone yet) can boost brain areas and improve mood. Travelling. In general, it provides a sense of happiness that is a great mood enhancer.
- Psychologists emphasize travelling to a new place to gain optimal benefits. In a 2013 survey in the U.S, 485 adults gave conclusive results that travel enhanced empathy, energy and focus. Another study related to a similar hypothesis also noted that visiting a foreign country, trying to adapt to their customs and ways of living may be instrumental in facilitating creative ideas.
- Travel plans can help us anticipate our moves which can help us be better precautioned once the travelling resumes. It may be that the pandemic might not be over yet and hence, our planning area in the brain helps us keep anxiety at bay.
- Experiential aspects of planning a trip can boost the brain. Imagining that you are on a beach or under a waterfall or on a mountain garden helps build good feelings in the brain.
- Hitting a “reset button” while travelling helps wellness and lowers the risk of depression.
- Travelling helps rewire your brain. With new experiences, culture, customs, traditions and ways of living that you encounter; your perceptions undergo a shift. This without your realisation is moving the cogs in your cognition. As author Anita Desai quotes, “ Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow”.
- Scientists and anthropologists have noted that those who travel a lot with minimal budget also tend to be better in empathy, understanding and creativity than other travellers. This is so because they get to live more with the local populace due to the shoestring budget.
- You learn when you travel and therefore your focus improves. When you are in an unfamiliar place, you tend to think of roads, maps, signs and all aspects that jolt you out of your autopilot comfortable routine back home in a familiar cocoon.
- Traveling also facilitates meditative advantages. Author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, Dan Harris talks of how talking to different people across the countries in the United States helped shape up the book as well as a better understanding of meditation for himself
- Travel always has ‘carry-forward’ effects. The good feeling after the travel ends stays in the form of memories. That “I am still not out of vacation mood” is precisely this!
Rumi had said,” Travel brings power and love back into your life”. What greater love for yourself than to travel and feel the force within you. Revitalized, relaxed and full of energy after that travel is what you experience. That’s what Rumi says in a much better way.
Still not able to shake the negative effects of Covid19? Here’s something for you by Terry Pratchett, to think on:
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
