What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear summer? Exactly! A nice vacation with your friends on a cool new spot, on the beach or in the mountains. Traveling around the world is always exciting, it is a chance to meet new people, explore different cultures and discover new places. Here are some reasons why traveling is good for you.
1. Traveling makes you healthier!
According to Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) and Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies® (TCRS)*, traveling makes you healthier.
The study “Journey to Healthy Aging: Planning for Travel in Retirement”, claims that people are dreaming about traveling in their retirement, but are not saving enough for it.
If you are interested to know more about that, you can read further following the links down below*.
But do you really want to wait until retirement? Probably not, so here are few more benefits from traveling.
2. Traveling can relieve stress.
Stress is becoming a more serious issue every day. Some countries already have recognized the “Burnout syndrome”. Basically, when you are burned out to the maximum you are incapable to work. You don’t feel and act like yourself and can’t concentrate.
Ultimately, these people alienate friends and family, become depressed and don’t have any desire to work or socialize. Some need years to recover and start working. It is stress and overworking that leads to burnout. According to NBC news* and Todor Gerovski co-founder of 15toGO, stress can be relieved by traveling. Todor says that after spending time abroad on a vacation he is much more relaxed and people around him notice that immediately. There are also some other techniques for relieving stress like physical exercises, meditation, working less and concentrating on your inner world. Have you ever heard of the “fight or flight response”? When you are stressed your body goes into hyper mode as it thinks there is a tiger attacking us and it releases hormones to boost our physical capabilities. If we are stressed all the time the body can’t recover from this state and you get ill. When you have nothing to worry about and just enjoy your time with friends and family, your stress levels naturally decrease.
3. Traveling can enhance your creativity.
According to this Larry Alton*and common knowledge when you are brainstorming and come up with solutions your creativity gets better.
The CEO and co-founder of 15toGO, Peter Lozanov, confirms that usually when he comes back from a trip he feels renewed and ready to take on challenges he was stuck on. Traveling enables you to stay away from the issues and look from a different angle. Visiting a new country inspires and allows us to look our surroundings and ourselves from a new perspective. It gives us a different point of view, new ideas to think about and it is more likely to solve the problems. When we travel, the world opens to us and our perspectives broaden. Moreover, positive thoughts are produced which leads to more creative and inspired version of you. According to Adam Galinski*, who is a professor at Columbia Business School and author of studies on the connection between creativity and international travel, the key is to engage with the locals and their way of life. If you do not, you will probably not enhance your creativity that much.
4. While traveling you will meet a lot of new people and develop your communication skills.
If you live in a more developed country, you are most probably concentrated on work and developing your dream career. All your social contacts and time spent with friends during your years of studying are becoming a distant memory while you mainly go to work and go home. Participating in an organized group trip is a bit different than just going abroad on a vacation. There is a big chance that some of the people you meet during the vacation live near to you and can keep in contact with them.
If you go alone or with a friend you will most probably speak only to that friend. On organized group trips, you will be all the time surrounded by different people who are constantly interacting with each other. This will give you the chance to make new friendships, meet people with common interests and have fun during the trip.
5. You get to form deeper connections with yourself and the people around you.
While traveling, you will definitely go out of your comfort zone. You cannot do the usual things you normally do and will have to be present and think of how to tackle those new challenges. This state of being present to the moment will help you speak easily with people that you meet for the first time. Moreover, you can present yourself in a new way, not in that one, your everyday life expects you to be, but in which you want to be.
Nobody will judge you, in fact, nobody cares as everyone is too consumed by their own thoughts. But still, people have their own limitations and in a new environment without the ones that you know, you are freer to be yourself. Considering how would you react to new experiences, cultures, situations and challenges usually prove some assumptions about yourself either right or wrong. You will also broaden your world and life as well as understand clearly what you actually like and want. This also applies to seeing how people around you would react as their deeper self comes to the surface. When abroad you will need to rely on other people as well developing a deeper trust in them and in humanity.
6. You will develop cultural sensitivity and the feeling of a global citizen.
Traveling will make you have less prejudice and prevents false beliefs about another county that could lead to unrest, unnecessary hate, and even war. You can understand people from different cultures better by spending time with them.
For instance, what are your beliefs about the siestas in Spain? We are pretty sure that if you come from a country with a strict working ethic like Germany or Switzerland, probably you will find them being lazy. But if you spend some time with them and see how much family time has been valued, being able to sit down and have lunch together, you will see the advantages. Moreover, not to mention the high degrees during the hottest hours of the day. There are different customs and traditions all over the world and it is important to know that not everyone is thinking or acting the same way. When traveling is important to embrace the cultural differences, be self-aware and do not make any judgements based on one opinion. Do your own research and learn more about the country you will visit in advance. This will give you some background knowledge.
The knowledge that we as humans have the same needs gives us a specific feeling belonging to the same tribe. You can check Maslow’s hierarchy of needs*. Also, that human emotions are recognizable by different nations all around the world. Even by those excluded from the world in tribes without access to others, or also blind people, that have never seen how to express their emotions facially look the same as people with sight*.
References:
2. https://www.globalcoalitiononaging.com/index.php?id=press-release-121213
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response
5. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/for-a-more-creative-brain-travel/388135/
7. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/91b9/d6c7da6986d0b1a3aa066045cd7b104d2513.pdf
