Get Your Mind Right: The Mental Health Benefits of Travel

The following is adapted from Get Away! by David Axelrod.

Americans tend to undervalue leisure travel. Work always comes first, but at a cost: we suffer when we don’t prioritize rest and wonder, and it makes us less productive and less joyful in day-to-day life.

In short, not traveling is bad for our mental health.

The mental health benefits of travel are widely documented. In this article, I’m going to share just how your brain benefits from getaways. Maybe it will be just the push you need to take that trip you’ve been putting off for years.

Benefit #1: Increase Joy

Psychologist Jessica de Bloom studied the effect of vacations on health and well-being. After tracking travelers’ physical and emotional well-being before, during, and after various types of vacations, de Bloom reported increases in joy and contentment due to the replenishment of depleted cognitive resources.

Newsflash: occasionally distancing yourself from routine hassles makes you feel better!

One set of de Bloom’s data came from travelers who had taken nine-day active winter sports vacations, although her hypothesis held up among travelers who took short vacations in the Netherlands and longer summer vacations. The health benefits of vacations, she found, were not defined by the type of trip travelers took as much as the degree to which they were able to savor their experience.

So take enough time to soak in the wonder of the place you’re in, be it Times Square or Tahiti.

Benefit #2: Decrease Depression

While you experience joy if you take a trip, the converse is also true: you may be more prone to depression if you don’t.

The Wisconsin Rural Women’s Health Study took a random sample of women in Wisconsin and measured their odds of depression over a six-year span. The odds of depression increased in women who took vacations only once every two years compared to women who took vacations twice or more per year.

The study even found that a decrease in the frequency of vacations correlated to a decrease in marital satisfaction. Travel saves cheese-head marriages, and it could save yours, too.

Benefit #3: Remap Your Brain

There are myriad long-term, vitality-enhancing benefits of travel, such as increasing resilience, motivation, and perspective. Travel remaps your brain by increasing its neuroplasticity. Predictability and routine lead to cognitive decay, but new environments, challenges, and sensations shock your synapses and take your brain off autopilot.

Clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Paul Nussbaum affirms, “Travel is an important behavior that promotes brain health and builds resilience.” Solving problems, deciphering languages, experimenting, and exposing yourself to new experiences sprouts so many dendrites in your brain that “it literally begins to look like a jungle.”

What kind of brain do you want: A crusty spaghetti cerebellum clumped in a colander?

Or a flowering forest of blazing neurons?

Benefit #4: Open Up

Travel reduces stress and keeps your brain sharp, but the benefits don’t stop there. Travel even improves your personality. A 2013 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology tracked the personality development of “sojourners.”

The study confirmed a benefit of travel that most travelers feel is true but perhaps have never had a way to validate; traveling is associated with increases in openness and agreeableness as well as a decrease in neuroticism.

The study’s findings suggest that conscientious, international sojourners become better versions of themselves by spending time abroad.

Benefit #5: Collective Restoration

Lastly, what would happen to a society whose members all valued vacations more highly, and took them more frequently? Swedish environmental psychologist Terry Hartig argues that vacations not only restore depleted individual resources but also our capacity to provide support and companionship to vulnerable members of our communities.

Hartig calls this phenomenon collective restoration, an oft-neglected benefit of an entire population placing greater emphasis on travel. And it makes perfect sense.

Can we fully show up to support the vulnerable, suffering, or elderly members of our society if we as individuals are not fully restored? No, because as Hartig puts it, “Depletion of individual resources has social consequences.”

Get Your Mind Right

In 2020, earthlings grappled with unprecedented contagion in the form of a virus that wreaked havoc on not only our physical, but our mental health. I’ve shown that the restorative benefits of travel are viral, too. We must travel for the health and wellness of ourselves and others.

For more advice on how travel benefits your brain, you can find Get Away! on Amazon.

David Axelrod is a seven-continent explorer and professional globonaut whose lifelong travel obsession has taken him to over fifty countries. Regularly featured by travel and hospitality brands such as AFAR, Fodor’s, Exclusive Resorts, Matador Network, and Relais & Châteaux, he published his debut essay collection in 2014. David fuses art and travel as an internationally collected fine art travel photographer and Creative Director of 2STRAWS Print Shop. A sought-after travel consultant, speaker, and leisure champion, he helps freedom-seekers design their ideal trip at davidaxelrod.co. When he’s not planning getaways, he’s making smoothie bowls and frolicking with his bernedoodle in Seattle.