7 Reasons Why Travel Is Good For Your Health.

Travel is fun, exhilarating, refreshing and transformative but also travel can be good for your health. There’s been many studies done on the health benefits of travel, from increasing creativity and improving mental health to increasing antibodies and decreasing cardiovascular disease. Traveling the world isn’t just fun and exciting; it can be highly beneficial for your mental, physical and emotional health. Want to find out more? Read the following list on 7 reasons why travel is good for your health.

Improves Your Mental Health

1. Travel Improves Creativity

Traveling is so much more than seeing a new place, although that is a part of it. Something happens to your brain when you travel; there is fresh perspective; a sense of peace and loss of stress and anxiety; and an ability to see yourself and grow as a person. Travel can open your mind to new cultures and people.

These multi-cultural experiences can open new brain pathways that can increase creativity. Neural pathways, or how the brain is wired, “are influenced by environment and habit, meaning they’re also sensitive to change: New sounds, smells, language, tastes, sensations, and sights spark different synapses in the brain and may have the potential to revitalize the mind.” (Brent Crane, The Atlantic)

Travel helps clear your mind and improve your thoughts to be more creative and open up to new ideas and opportunities. Many authors, painters and other creators have used travel to spark new creativity and now science is backing that up. Travel, especially international travel, improves creativity by increasing your brain’s flexibility, depth and integrativeness of thought. However, it isn’t just hanging on the beach that will improve creativity. It takes engagement, immersion, and adaptation with the local culture to really make a difference in creativity.

So if chilling on the beach is more your style, that’s awesome. But if you want to improve your creativity, engage with the local culture. Hang out at the local coffee shop or park. Spark conversation with the people there. Listen and learn about what makes their community unique. And visit cultural sites to learn even more and spark that creativity!

2. Travel Strengthens One’s Trust in Humanity

Traveling can strengthen your trust in humanity. Having multi-cultural experiences, either abroad or even in your own neighborhood, can pull you out of your ‘social comfort zone’. It can also increase your trust in people. As Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School states, “We found that when people had experiences traveling to other countries it increased what’s called generalized trust, or their general faith in humanity. When we engage in other cultures, we start to have experience with different people and recognize that most people treat you in similar ways. That produces an increase in trust.”

Travel is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

When you travel, you meet many different kinds of people and engage with the local culture. You open your mind to new ways of thinking and living. You begin to understand new beliefs and values which can strengthen and enforce your own set of values. You get out of your bubble and discover a larger world.

Improves Your Physical Health

3. Travel Can Decrease Cardiovascular Disease

Travel allows your body to rest from stress and anxiety, to ‘recharge your batteries. And because high stress levels can increase heart-related health issues, finding ways to reduce that stress can also reduce those stress-related health issues, especially heart disease. Travel improves your mood, removes the normal everyday stressors, and gives your body the rest it needs.

In the long-running Framingham Heart Study, women age 45-64 were asked how often they took vacations. In a 20-year follow-up study, researchers found that women who only vacationed every six years (or less frequently) had a significantly higher risk of developing a heart attack or coronary death compared with women who vacationed at least twice a year, even after adjusting for traditional risk factors such as blood pressure. That is a great reason to start planning your next trip, my friends!

And if you think the health benefits of travel are only for women, check this out. In a 9 year study of 12,000 men with high risk of heart disease, they found that those men who took frequent annual vacations were 32 percent less likely to die from heart disease than those who did not take vacations. Time to get your husband or even your dad spinning off to the next travel adventure!

And here is more good news for all of us. Even days after vacation, travelers can feel more rested, less anxious, and in a better mood. And these improvements don’t disappear when you return home; they can last for weeks afterward. Less stress, better health, longer life….all great reasons to get out and travel.

4. Travel Can Maintain Fitness

This can seem somewhat counterintuitive given that we tend to relax and lay around more when we travel. However, we can do more physical activity as well. We can spend hours walking the streets of old cities. We might try a new sport or do more extended hikes to find the best view. And even those days on the beach walking on sand can help work those muscles in new ways.

In addition, some travel and vacation destinations are all about exercise and exertion. Maybe it’s a skiing trip, a backpacking excursion, or a walking tour of multiple cities. All of these activities will keep you active and fit during your travels. For a few more ideas on staying healthy on a road trip, check out this post.

5. Travel Can Increase Antibodies

Traveling exposes our bodies to new microbes and thus forces our body to develop new antibodies to fight the new microbe or bacteria. When you travel from place to place, your body adapts to thousands of new bacteria, which in turn makes it much stronger. Your body is an amazing machine that knows how to protect itself. So allowing it to produce its own defenses, rather than killing everything with antibacterial soap, wash or whatever, will actually make you healthier overall.

As Mary Ruebush, PHD states, “…the more frequent the exposure, the more powerful the standing immunological army, and the larger our immunological reserve. Over a lifetime of this challenge-and-response dynamic, a healthy person’s immune system grows so well-trained that it can knock out invasion attempts before a single symptom becomes noticeable.”

When you travel to other places, whether internationally or locally, your body faces new bacterial challenges and creates an army of antibodies to defend against those challenges. So go get dirty, do new things and create a healthier immune system.

Improves Your Emotional Health

6. Anticipating Travel Makes You Happy

Travel makes you happy and satisfied, both during the trip as well as the anticipation that occurs in the planning stages. I know that is very true for me. It can be so satisfying and exciting just planning a trip, thinking about what I’m going to do and experience, and even the packing and what to bring brings a feeling of joy and pleasure. But it’s not just me.

Research also shows that “people derive more happiness from the anticipation of experiential purchases and that waiting for an experience tends to be more pleasurable and exciting than waiting to receive a material good”. Psychological Science Journal

And according to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, those who travel tend to be more open and emotionally stable. But to take full advantage of these benefits, be sure to leave work at home. Taking your work computer or files with you and conducting work related activities will lessen the health and happiness benefits of travel. So be purposeful when you travel and free yourself completely from work. In a nutshell, be free, enjoy your time and be a Gypsy.

7. Travel Can Improve Relationships

The old saying, people who play together, stay together is true. When you travel with your loved ones, you are all more relaxed, less stressed and so generally get along better. You also experience the same things at the same time and thus grow and learn together, which improves a relationship.

In fact, a study by the Arizona Department of Health and Human Services found that women who took vacations were more satisfied with their marriages. And a study from the Marshfield Clinic in Wisconsin found that women who vacation at least twice a year areless likely to suffer from depression and chronic stress than women who vacation less than once every two years.

Wow! That’s quite a list! But doesn’t it just make you want to go out and book your next travel adventure? With so many health benefits of travel, why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of it? Improving your mental, physical and emotional health are great reasons why travel is good for your health. Now go out and make travel, and your health, a priority!

If you have more thoughts or comments about the health benefits of travel, or if you have other ideas you’d like to talk about, I’d love to hear from you. Let’s start a conversation! Scroll down and leave a comment. Thanks!

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