Travel Improves Your Brain Health

Traveling improves your brain health because escaping your everyday life and discovering new sights, smells and places has some amazing benefits.

Your cognitive structures ‘light up’ when you activate your reward system, break your routine and undo your stress and anxiety. You also free your mind and awaken your emotions.

Everyone needs a vacation. Yet, strangely enough, there are many employees who do not want or cannot take these much-needed days off. And then there are the people who don’t even know how to really ‘disconnect’ themselves. They don’t know how to slow down and put their responsibilities aside for a while.

This could be one of the reasons why the number of heart attacks, for example, is increasing every year. We have turned into an exhausted society that just doesn’t know how to take a break.

The solution to this problem is simple: go on a trip. We’re not saying you have to go to the other side of the world to do this. You don’t have to travel thousands of miles and find an unknown language and time zone.

There are cities and places nearby that you’ve probably never been to that can have the same effect. They help you to escape from your daily life for a while. They also give your brain new stimuli and break the thinking patterns in which you are stuck at home.

Traveling improves your brain health: 5 ways this is true

There are times in life when it’s the best thing you can do for yourself. Leave so you can come home again. Walking away from your daily life so that you can return to it with new energy. A journey will always change us in one way or another, you cannot escape this.

It always brings us something good. It always gives us something back, something positive that can help us become better people in every way. Plus, getting out of your comfort zone and breathing in the air of another time zone, hemisphere, or even a nearby city is an adventure that knows no age.

Traveling isn’t just for young people if you sometimes think so. There are several studies that say that traveling regularly in middle age and older can especially improve your health.

As you get older, there’s nothing better than breaking out of your routines and opening your mind to new experiences and stimuli. Now let’s take a look at exactly why travel improves brain health.

1. It activates and optimizes your cognitive processes

• When you arrive at a new location, you need to use more of your brain’s power. You have to look at maps and use your spatial intelligence to orient yourself, remember directions, streets, meeting points, routes and so on…
• Travel also improves your focus. You are more motivated and this helps you to store memories and information more easily.

2. More neural connections

Somehow, every journey forces you to do something new and confront certain fears. Getting on a plane, a boat, a cable car, riding a horse, or a camel, forcing yourself to speak other languages, or giving yourself the chance to travel alone.

All these experiences create new connections in your brain. Your dopamine and serotonin levels rise, your circulation improves, you provide your brain with oxygen… All these new, positive stimuli ‘activate’ your neurons and brain tissue. In other words, it’s the best form of energy you can give your brain.

It’s like giving that brain of yours the best exercise possible, which will make it work faster and store more information.

3. It makes you more empathetic

Traveling also improves your brain health because you gain all kinds of new knowledge. You get to know new environments, new sensations, tastes and experiences. You also get to know new people. This is just as important as shedding old habits so you can learn new ones. It helps you look at the world in a much more humble, intimate way.

Travel makes you more tolerant. It shows you different perspectives on life and forces you to be much more flexible in things. What all this brings is empathy. It stimulates your ability to empathize and see other realities as unique as your own.

4. Travel improves your brain health because it stimulates creativity

Travel knows no age. You are never too old for it, just as you are never too old to learn. However, jobs and routines get you stuck in repetitive cycles where nothing new ever happens, or at least almost never happens.

Your daily life eventually causes you to get stuck. The lack of stimulation and new things reduces your ability to come up with innovative ideas and inspiring thoughts.

Traveling improves your brain health because it wakes up your mind. It challenges your senses.

It takes you places you’ve never been, there are faces you’ve never seen, stories you’ve never known, foods you’ve never tried, side streets full of secrets and hidden shops with strange smells and endless amazing books and objects.

Travel is culture, although you probably already knew that. It also leads to an inner awakening where you can awaken your imagination and think about concepts, ideas and old frameworks. It means getting inspired and learning new things that you will never forget.

5. It improves your mood and reduces stress

Traveling and enjoying your experiences and your time to rest will lower the cortisol levels in your body. You reduce the production of this stress hormone and this has a positive influence on your well-being.

You have no outside pressures here, just the chance to enjoy your surroundings and all it offers. Nature, vibrant cities, culture on every corner and on every balcony, good food, beaches, museums, musical events and so on…

Each escape is a way to get the best out of yourself, rediscover and even transform yourself. And you will do this with a much more open, receptive and optimistic frame of mind.

Travel improves your brain health because it encourages you to see the world from a broader, clearer perspective. So don’t hesitate. It is always worthwhile to have a passport full of stamps, along with fascinating stories that can only tell you. Because in the end, only you experienced them.