Candice Williamson
While the COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us unable to travel as we would like, the importance of travel is impossible to deny.
Whether it’s to see old friends or family members, immerse yourself in a new culture, or just experience something you’ve only ever seen in movies, travel has so much to offer us.
However, one effect of travel that might be somewhat less obvious is its improvement in our mental health and happiness. While not everyone realizes it, travel can have a huge role to play in keeping us happy and healthy.
To learn about the seven most essential ways in which travel helps with our health and happiness, keep reading.
You Break the Monotony of Everyday Life
No matter how much you love your ordinary routine, you’re bound to get tired of it sometimes. After a while, staying in the same place and doing the same thing every day will start to wear down on your health and happiness.
When you’ve had enough of your day to day existence, it’s time to pack up your car roof rack with vacation essentials and hit the road. Even if you only go away for the weekend, your health and happiness will thank you for it.
You Get to Have New Experiences
Whether it’s trekking through the Andes in South America or puffing on some legal cannabis in Amsterdam, having new experiences is the essential benefit of travel. It’s also very beneficial to your health and happiness.
We all love home. It’s where our friends and family are, and where we keep everything that’s important in our lives.
However, without making journeys to other places, you’ll never live up to your true potential.
You Can Get Active
This isn’t something that applies to every trip. Everyone has spent at least one summer vacation sipping cocktails by a swimming pool.
However, many kinds of vacations allow you to get active. The more you exercise, the healthier you are, so it’s great to have the opportunity to stay active while traveling.
Many vacations involve physical activity, including skiing and hiking trips.
You Can Relieve Some Stress
This is perhaps the most obvious benefit of going on vacation, health-related or otherwise. Ask anyone why they go on holiday, and you’re likely to hear some reference to stress relief.
However, not everyone realizes just how crucial stress management is for our health and happiness. Stress is closely linked to anxiety, which is the most common mental health issue affecting Americans today.
There are many ways to combat stress and anxiety. Traveling is one great example.
Getting away from home will help you put your worries into perspective. By the time you get home, you’ll have a much healthier attitude to the issues in your life.
You Can Start Learning New Things
Nothing is better for our health and happiness than learning new skills. If you like to travel, there are plenty of opportunities for you to pick up and perfect new things.
An obvious example is a new language. If you studied literature in school or college, but you haven’t practiced it a lot recently, going to a place where that language is spoken the best way to sharpen those skills.
Finding the right place to go to practice your language can be relatively easy or very difficult, depending on the style. If you’re trying to practice Italian, you don’t have any option other than Italy itself.
If you’re trying to speak Spanish, however, you have almost all of South and Central America to choose from.
Traveling Will Boost Your Immunity
This might seem like an odd reason to travel, but it is a real thing. Those who regularly travel to different places have a more robust immune system than those who stay put.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Going to different places exposes your body to different kinds of immune system threats, which your body can then learn to deal with.
Also, the more you travel, the more varied your diet becomes. This nutritional diversity will strengthen your immune responses, as well.
With the COVID-19 pandemic remaining a threat to all of us, a robust immune system is more important than ever for our health and happiness.
You, Will, Learn to Be More Resilient
Traveling can be a lot of fun. However, when things start to go wrong, it can also present challenges.
If you’re going on a long trip with many different destinations, chances are you’ll run into some kind of problem at some stage. Maybe you’ll miss a train or get lost on the way to your hostel in the middle of the night. The longer you spend on the road, the more likely it is something will go astray.
This kind of situation is brilliant for honing your problem-solving skills. When you’re in a different place with no access to your usual support systems, you have no option but to address the issue at hand yourself.
Keeping the Blues at Bay with a Trip Away
We know that not everyone has the luxury of travel right now. If you live somewhere with stringent travel restrictions, your next journey might be a few months away.
However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get planning! The great travel destinations of the world will all still be in place when COVID-19 is a distant memory, so get your thinking cap on and start deciding where you’ll be going on your next big vacation.
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