Why do we travel? Simply because it’s fun. Plus we must occasionally pay a visit to our relatives or attend that conference on soybean investigation your boss forces you to go to annually. But, while doing so, travel can pay off in lots of ways, and science backs it up.
Listed below are the 4 main ways that travel can improve your life.
1. Travel makes you younger
David Eagleman, recently profiled as ‘The Possibilian’ in the New Yorker, research time perception at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and has made numerous experiments relating to how life-threatening moments feel slowed down.
Visit new places has always felt like stretched time to me too; a week in Guatemala may seem to last as long as 3 weeks in the Outer Banks – in a good way. Thus I asked him, for my recent CNN piece on travel to new destinations, whether science can support my gut response.
Eagleman explained adults’ sense of time is a bit more ‘compressed’ than children’s, but that travel to new or ‘novel’ places – the more exotic, the better – is an equalizer of sorts. ‘It basically puts you, neurally, in the same position as when you were a kid.’
Travel: the elixir of youth! And, with its perceived time-stretching opportunities, a life-saver even when you only take one or two weeks for vacation this summer.
2. Travel makes you smarter
It’s a favorite cliché that travel broadens your mind. I’d scoff if it weren’t true. A current psychological study at Indiana University found college students had broader solutions when they thought the study was imported from Greece, instead of homegrown. What the scientists call ‘psychological distance’ – that which we might call ‘armchair travel’ – increases your creativity. A current report on the psychological distance concept, implies that travel, or even planning travel and imagining yourself in an unfamiliar and distant location, may not just improve creativity but self-awareness as well.
William Maddux, an American social psychologist, reports how those who live abroad come home become more creative too. He explained to me on the phone that ‘immersion’ in a place is key – one of the reasons, according to him, he’s working in France.
‘It all depends on someone’s state of mind when traveling’, he said. ‘Are they really open to it? If they are not, and all they do is sit and watch TV, it probably won’t make them more creative… And you don’t necessarily have to cross a border either. What’s more similar New York and Toronto, or New York and Savannah?’
3. Travel makes you more productive
Americans’ relative deficiency of holiday period might be defended as a strong ‘work ethic’, and a reason the nation is so productive. But is it?
This fun Businessweek slideshow shows just how many countries’ economic output rivals the united states, with much less work time. France, for instance, takes off 60% more days off (40 in comparison to the USA’s 25), and records 98% GDP an hour worked. While the USA continues to be world’s top ‘competitive’ country, runner-up, Switzerland, nearly matches the US mark with a week more vacation time.
Some argue taking extended time is a lot better. In a TED Video on taking sabbaticals, graphic-designer Stefan Sagmeister illustrates how he plans a one-year break from work to ‘experiment’ every seven years simply to generate new ideas.
4. Travel makes you sexier
It’s not just a tan you return with, but stories. In accordance with one recent ItsJustLunch.com survey, the ideal first-date conversation topic was hobbies, with travel following second. Somehow manage to combine both, and brace yourself Romeo. It is important to have traded your Paraguayan guaraní into dollars right before the bill arrives.
And if travel has now done its job by making you more creative, youthful, self-aware and productive, you’re bound to be looking pretty good out there.
No related posts.