how does travel open your mind

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Traveling Opens Your Mind: Here's How

Raised in the small suburb of Schaumburg, Adriana Perez knew there was more to life than a white ...

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Mark Twain said it, your travel advisor said it, even you've told it to yourself—traveling opens your mind. But what exactly does that mean? What does that look like in your day-to-day life abroad? 

Panoramic view over the city of Barcelona seen from Parque GuellPhoto credit to Natalia Sleszynska

Yes, travel CAN broaden the mind, but it's up to the traveler to tune in, pay attention, and simultaneously practice humility and self-reflection. Here's our take on how travel broadens the mind.

What is relativism?

It is a fancy way of saying to keep an open mind and be aware that how you see the world is not how everyone else sees the world. Priorities, morals, values, every possible social aspect of a culture are unique and open to interpretation depending on who is experiencing it.

The opposite of relativism is ethnocentrism. While the word has a negative, racist connotation, it just means being unaware of the other cultures around you and not accepting the differences in how other people may see the world. Sometimes ethnocentrism is intentional, but more often than not is purely ignorance, which can be easily fixed with knowledge. 

How is this different than culture shock?

Culture shock affects some people more than others, but no matter how tolerant or learned someone is, that initial contact with a new culture is always eye opening. It is one thing to read about a culture, how it is different, and to keep an open mind. It is another thing entirely to experience firsthand a conflict of cultural norms. Many assume that the greater the difference, the greater the culture shock. This is not always the case, though, and sometimes having only subtle differences can be just as disarming because they are so subtle that they no longer appear as cultural differences; rather they come off as potential personality traits or character flaws. 

A few examples of how traveling opens your mind

In Barcelona, it is very common for a waiter to be taking your order and if he sees that you are slow in saying what you want, or hesitant and uncertain at the last minute, to walk away from you and begin to take care of another table. This is a subtle difference in cultures that happens frequently, and is very normal, but to an American traveler may come off as rude or impatient. These feelings are ethnocentric, but feel valid because the cultural difference is so subtle that it is not as obviously a cultural difference. It is important to understand and be ready for these subtle differences in culture, because someone may interpret an experience like this negatively, and let it negatively impact the rest of their day and ruin what should have been a nice evening. 

Another example of this is riding on public transportation. In many cultures it is considered rude to stare, but in Barcelona it is not taken quite as offensively. Because of this, many people commuting will be faced with looks or intense stares. Some can interpret this offensively and let it bother them the rest of the day, perhaps cause them to think there is something on their face or they had been doing something wrong, but that is not the case. It is a common occurrence, and should you be stared at, shake it off and do not take it personally. Perhaps join in on the cultural habit and stare at others as well, gauging how they respond to it. 

On top of a mountain in Cape Town, South AfricaPhoto credit to Hillary Federico

It is a lot harder to experience events like this and think, “I am in a new culture, it is different from mine, and they see the world through a different lens than I do” than if the difference was more obvious. 

But just like a photographer packs many lenses for his or her camera, it is just as important for a traveler to pack some cultural lenses, and prepare themselves for seeing the world in a different way than they are used to doing.

Travel broadens the mind if you are open to it

Life and the encounters experienced are all based off of how they are interpreted and perceived. Someone walking down the street that gets pushed can either interpret it as an act of hostility or as an accident. These interpretations are what create experiences, and experiences vary internally from person to person, even if the actions that occur are the same externally. 

Traveling is a unique experience, and it is over before you know it, so it is crucial to take advantage of every moment and make everyday a positive one. Feeling upset or irritated are normal human emotions, and it’s impossible to not feel down every once in awhile, but it is good to minimize feeling these negative sensations when they can be controlled. Including a relativistic view of the world and the cultures within it can help in reducing these negative sensations, using knowledge and an open mind as a shield from potential emotional threats. 

Any experience can be a positive one if you have the right mindset. Whether you are heading to the other end of the world, or to Barcelona, it is important to note the cultural differences and be prepared for what is to come. Everyone always warns you about the big cultural differences, but the subtle cultural differences can be just as important to take note of. Some you can read about and be prepared for, but no matter what there will always be those that catch you by surprise. Remember to pack a relativistic mindset, and every experience abroad should be a learning experience for you, opening your mind in ways that you never imagined were possible.

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The Transformative Effects of Travel on the Brain: How Travel Boosts Creativity, Improves Cognitive Function, Reduces Stress, Increases Empathy, and Enhances Social Connections

Travel is an incredible way to explore new cultures, meet new people, and experience new things. But did you know that travel can also have a profound effect on your brain? Recent research has shown that travel can have a variety of positive effects on the brain, including boosting creativity, improving cognitive function, and reducing stress.

In this article, we’ll explore how travel changes your brain and how you can make the most of your travels to reap these benefits.

• Boosts Creativity

One of the most notable ways that travel changes your brain is by boosting creativity. Travel exposes you to new sights, sounds, and experiences, which can inspire and stimulate your brain in new ways. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who lived abroad scored higher on creativity tests than those who had never lived abroad.

Travel can also help you break out of your usual routine and thought patterns, which can further stimulate creativity. When you travel, you’re forced to navigate unfamiliar environments and solve new problems, which can help your brain create new neural pathways and associations.

• Improves Cognitive Function

Travel has also been shown to improve cognitive function, including memory, attention, and decision-making. A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that spending time in nature, such as on a hiking or camping trip, can improve cognitive function and increase creativity.

Travel can also challenge your brain in new ways, such as by learning a new language or navigating a new city. These activities can help improve memory and attention and may even help delay the onset of age-related cognitive decline.

• Reduces Stress

Travel can also have a powerful effect on reducing stress levels. Stress is a major contributor to many health problems, including anxiety, depression, and heart disease. A study published in the Journal of Travel Medicine found that people who went on vacation reported lower stress levels and better overall health than those who stayed at home.

Travel can help reduce stress by giving you a break from your daily routine and responsibilities. When you travel, you can focus on experiencing new things and enjoying your surroundings, which can help take your mind off of stressors at home.

• Increases Empathy

Travel can also increase empathy, or the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. When you travel, you’re exposed to new cultures and ways of life, which can broaden your perspective and help you see things from different points of view.

A study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that people who had lived abroad were more likely to score higher on empathy tests than those who had never lived abroad. Travel can help you develop a deeper understanding of different cultures and may even help you become a more compassionate and understanding person.

• Enhances Social Connections

Travel is also a great way to enhance social connections and build new relationships. When you travel, you have the opportunity to meet new people from all over the world, including locals and other travelers. These connections can be a great source of support and friendship, and can even lead to lifelong relationships.

Travel can also help you build social skills and improve your communication and interpersonal skills. When you’re in a new environment, you have to navigate unfamiliar social norms and customs, which can help you become more adaptable and comfortable in new social situations.

In conclusion, travel can have a powerful effect on the brain, including boosting creativity, improving cognitive function, reducing stress, increasing empathy, and enhancing social connections. To make the most of your travels, try to engage in activities that challenge your brain and expose you to new experiences and cultures. Take time to reflect on your experiences and appreciate the ways in which travel is changing your brain and your life.

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How Travel Can Help Us Process Grief, Trauma, and Anxiety

Whether we are healing from pandemic trauma, personal tragedy, or other mental or physical health challenges, travel has an ability to play a critical role in the recovery journey, research shows..

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For one traveler, the beauty of the Oregon coast has offered a way to navigate grief.

Photo by Katie Musial/Unsplash

In February 2022, Adam Sawyer lost his whole world. A catastrophic fire burned down his house near Mount Rainier and claimed his partner’s life. In the year since, Sawyer has frequently set out into nature, often retracing the trails he walked—and journeys he took—with his late partner.

“I was purposefully going to places that she and I had traveled to together before. It seems like a means of self-flagellation, but it was also a way to really lean into the grieving process,” says Sawyer, who writes about travel and the outdoors . “I would go somewhere on a trail as far as I could go, and I would cry for as long as I needed to. In going to these places, it was a way of acknowledging the pain and acknowledging what I was going through and also bridging the gap sooner to get to where those memories were hopeful and pleasant.”

For Sawyer, traveling to places that were meaningful to him and his late partner, in addition to other “road trips to nowhere” or treks into nature (he’s been spending a lot of time driving up and down the Oregon coast, for instance, appreciating “the scenery and that zen of driving through pretty country”), has been an integral part of the healing voyage.

“Traveling to these places and trying to process those memories—when I do that, when I have those crying sessions, when I deal with the guilt in those places, it’s akin to getting it over with, like vomiting. I cried it out and I processed that and I understand what that memory means to me now and why I came here and I actually feel better,” says Sawyer.

Sawyer isn’t alone in having found some sense of hope or relief when traveling in the aftermath of trauma or tragedy. In July 2022, Hara Maderich was widowed after being married for 40 years “to the love of my life,” she says.

“Staring months ahead at a lonely Christmas and bereft New Year, I decided to go back to my solace, the ocean,” says Maderich, an AFAR reader who lives in Costa Rica. She booked herself and her best friend on a southern Caribbean Celebrity Equinox cruise over the holidays.

“New Year’s Eve was both spectacular and heart wrenching at the same time,” says Maderich. But, she adds, “realizing I was on a ship in the middle of the ocean, hearing live music, drinking champagne, and watching lasers and fireworks with tears streaming down was so much better than sitting home and crying alone.”

Maderich started 2023 with, quite literally, a new outlook—a breakfast view of a rainbow over Martinique “and a glimmer of hope that life going forward alone could be a new adventure with ports as yet unexplored.”

For many people, including Sawyer and Maderich, travel—escaping either to new or familiar places—can and does play a critical role in how they manage grief, loss, tragedy, trauma, mental health challenges, or physical health setbacks.

Waking up to a beautiful view of a new place can bring a fresh perspective on life.

Photo by Daniel Oberg/Unsplash

We’ve all been through a lot—travel can help

During the pandemic, at a time when many were experiencing the collective trauma and isolation of living through a deadly, global public health crisis, travel was one of the tools in the traditional coping toolbox that was made temporarily unavailable to us.

“Research has shown that there is a link between social isolation and loneliness to poor mental and physical health, which was then further exacerbated by the pandemic,” says Terry Randolph, a licensed professional counselor and chief program officer at Pyx Health , a female- and LGBTQ+-led telehealth service dedicated to helping those suffering from loneliness and isolation. “The pandemic rescinded the ability for [people] to physically escape their daily routines and responsibilities, leaving people feeling trapped and isolated. This ultimately impacted their mental health.”

For some, they were able to get an emotional boost just by thinking about the ways in which they might get away in the future. In August 2020, a survey of 263 U.S.-based adults commissioned by a coalition of travel companies revealed that 97 percent of people felt happier simply planning future travel .

And a small but growing body of research indicates that there are some very real mental and physical health benefits of travel that we can finally fully access again. A 2018 study conducted by a team of researchers in Austria who analyzed a group of 40 “middle managers” found that stress decreased and overall well-being improved for a period of 15 to 45 days after a vacation or getaway. One year later, a study published in the journal Psychology & Health concluded that higher vacation frequency reduced the odds of metabolic syndrome, a group of conditions that can increase your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke.

“Traveling contributes to a happier and more fulfilled life, and it does more for our minds than simply giving us a break,” says Randolph.

The health benefits of travel

According to Randolph, there are “numerous lasting benefits travel can have on your mental state.” They include:

• Lowered stress and anxiety: Travel provides a mental reset, which reduces your overall stress and anxiety levels.
• Better relationships and connectedness: If you are lonely, traveling is a great way to form closer connections and stronger bonds with both your travel companions and new people you meet along your journey.
• More creativity: Experiencing new cultures, food, and arts can broaden your perspective and open your mind to fresh ideas and ways of thinking, which can be applied to your work and home life.
• Improved physical health: Often people are outdoors more when they travel and walk around new places to explore, which can improve their overall physical well-being.

In fact, the gains are so pronounced that in January 2022, Canada’s national parks service Parks Canada developed a program called PaRx that allows doctors to actually prescribe travel by way of a free annual pass to Canada’s national parks for patients who could benefit from time spent in nature.

The program “is a breakthrough for how we treat mental and physical health challenges,” Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister who oversees Parks Canada, stated in a press release about the nature prescription program. “Medical research now clearly shows the positive health benefits of connecting with nature.”

Last year, Canadian doctors began prescribing time in national parks.

Photo by Jacky Huang/Unsplash

Learning from new people and new surroundings

As Randolph mentioned, it’s not just the beautiful places we visit on our travels that can calm and inspire the mind and body, but also the meaningful connections we make on our journeys that contribute to our overall well-being. Michael Brein, a social psychologist who specializes in travel, has interviewed thousands of people about their travels and the effects travel has had on them. He’s observed several significant takeaways in terms of the social connections we make when we travel.

When you travel “you extricate yourself from an environment that is pathological or [where] you’re totally immersed in your problems,” says Brein, who adds, “Let’s face it, when we’re at home in our everyday workaday lives . . . it’s not that fulfilling nor does it provide us with new ideas.”

According to Brein, one of the key benefits of travel is that it offers invaluable learning opportunities. When you travel “you are more curious and more open to new experiences … you learn to relate to people better because you have a need to interact with new people. And therefore you have an influx of new ways of looking at things.”

A January 2023 study published in the Journal of Transport & Health confirmed the important role travel plays in accessing “social participation” and the connections between that social participation and our overall health. The study found that when people didn’t have access to opportunities to travel beyond 15 miles from their home, they were more likely to self-report poorer personal health than those who did.

For Sawyer in Oregon, he acknowledges that while he often sets out on solo missions, travel also provides him with a crucial outlet for meeting and interacting with new people who can offer a distraction from his grief or a new perspective on life.

There are some times when “I also absolutely need other people. I will just go to some local dive bar wherever I’m at and just hang out and chat with the locals and just lose myself in them and their stories and what they have going on. And it makes for a wonderful diversion,” says Sawyer. He adds, “I felt some guilt over this early on, but it’s OK to compartmentalize a little bit to get through and have a normal day where you’re laughing with people, you’re enjoying dinner. You’re traveling for fun. And that’s also been a great relief, too. It’s OK for me to take a time out and go actually enjoy a place with other people.”

An escapist mindset

Finding a much-needed break from reality in southern Utah

Photo by John Fowler/Unsplash

This past fall, when a dear friend of mine was going through the stress and trauma of losing her mother to rapid onset dementia, we decided to escape to southern Utah for a few days. We enjoyed a canyonland-filled hiking trip that offered her a small but meaningful break from the daily worries that had consumed her life. But even as we were able to find joy, awe, relief, and laughter among the stunning desert landscapes, we also knew this retreat was temporary and that whatever problems she faced would be waiting for her back at home.

While some might view travel as simply a means of running away from one’s problems, experts believe there is a notable difference between escapism and embracing a healthy attitude toward any escape.

“Escapism is defined as ‘a desire or behavior to ignore or avoid reality.’ During traumatic experiences, many people will ‘escape’ the situation mentally to avoid further stress,” explains Pyx Health’s Randolph.

Travel in and of itself is not the solution to our problems, and for many people travel can also be laced with additional stresses, fears, and anxieties . But depending on how we apply the knowledge and experiences we gain when we travel into our healing journeys, there is evidence to suggest that it can have a more lasting effect. And there are also ways in which we can integrate an escape-like mindset into our day-to-day lives—for instance, we can take staycations to parks and cultural landmarks close to home, or take mental breaks from our work lives by seeking new activities and experiences similar to how we would when we’re traveling (learn how to play tennis or join a local hiking group, for example)—to help re-create those benefits even if and when we cannot or do not want to travel.

“To transition travel from just a temporary fix to a more impactful one, you have to really be willing to incorporate lifestyle changes that promote less stress and anxiety,” says Randolph. “The daily use of activities that replicate the escapism effects of travel can help create lasting improvements to mental and physical health.”

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14 ways traveling stimulates inner growth

Travel has a unique way of exposing us to experiences that create a mental shift within us that you just can't find by any other means. Here are some ways travel helps stimulate inner growth!

Rachael Let's Grow There

Apr 01, 2023

What is it about travel that propels us towards change and improvement ? 

Perhaps it's because as we explore, our eyes are opened to a more appealing lifestyle that we'd like to try for ourselves. Maybe we've been impacted by a new culture or religion that we'd like to get immersed in. 

As we travel, we are constantly stepping outside of our comfort zones , pushing ourselves to really live in the different, unique destinations we travel to. We return home feeling like a new and improved version of ourselves because we've experienced things that have enabled us to grow. 

If we continue to seek out unfamiliar surroundings, meet new people, and tackle uncertainty head on , we will no doubt begin to notice a change within ourselves over time. An open mind will get you very far on your travels! It will help you remain receptive to change as you soak it all in, effectively stimulating inner growth along the way. 

Here are some ways you can let the travel bug teach you a thing or two not only about the world, but about yourself. Travel is a tool for make us better.

• Travel is the greatest teacher
• Challenges start to look more like opportunities
• You experience a dramatic shift in perspective
• You're able to connect with yourself and others better
• "The people you meet create the paradise you find." — Robin Esrock
• Travel cultivates a growth mindset
• You improve your communication skills
• Experiences are greater than things
• You learn how to be more present
• Adapting to change becomes easier
• You gain a deeper understanding of different cultures, values, religions, and ways of life
• You develop more confidence and learn to embrace independence
• Travel teaches you how to grow from adversity
• You ditch your comfort zone and become a "yes man"


1. Travel is the greatest teacher

It's one thing to learn about a place through devoted study of the best travel guides, maps, blogs, and other travel media, but nothing beats actually setting foot there . When you have the opportunity to explore a new destination, you come face-to-face with a new culture that presents new challenges that your brain hasn't faced before.

Problem-solving in a new country is the best way to immerse yourself in a new culture on a personal level, which forces you to learn and grow at a fast pace. You're able to connect with the locals, pick up on new languages, dive into the history of the area, and alter your perspective for the better . 

Travel is pure form of education as it has the unique ability to teach new travelers by thrusting them out of their comfort zones and giving them a first-hand experience of the unknown. After all, the best way to learn is by doing!

2. Challenges start to look more like opportunities

Traveling is no easy task! The unfamiliar customs, language barriers, and stressful act of navigating public transport are all difficult to get used to in a new destination.

Figuring out some of these new challenges is often a rewarding experience. Any small win on the road is a big win for the brave traveler. The odds are stacked against us when we travel, and overcoming those odds boosts our confidence and helps us overcome even more than we thought we could.

Sure, you'll meet your fair share of failures while exploring the globe. Once you start to see those failures as chances to learn and do better, any obstacle you meet will become less of a threat and more of an opportunity to grow . 

It's human nature to adapt, persevere, and survive under pressure, which teaches our brain to discover better ways to solve problems . Soon, travel becomes second nature to us and we can return from each trip knowing we have become more creative and fearless.

3. You experience a dramatic shift in perspective

Nothing will open your eyes to just how small you are in the world more than travel. Becoming detached from your comfort zone and leaving the little corner of the world you inhabit can be a very humbling experience. 

You will quickly come to realize that your problems aren't so bad compared to the issues other countries face on a daily basis. It's important to address the culture shock you encounter with empathy as you take time to reflect and reassess your values.

Seeing how other cultures thrive challenges any preconceived ideas you may have had about their lifestyle. You are able to appreciate their way of life, embrace cultural differences , and at the same time, be more thankful for your own community and roots.

In short, travel makes you more open-minded , and you are transformed for the better. They aren't kidding when they say that  travel changes you !

You might also like :  TOP 5 Reasons why you should volunteer abroad

4. You're able to connect with yourself and others better

Traveling to a new country, especially if you're traveling the world alone , can be a daunting task that can make you feel isolated and alone. That's why it's important to get out there and make connections with people, whether you're looking for guidance or just need a travel companion to keep you company on your adventure. 

Engage with the locals at lively events or foodie hot spots, spend a few nights in a hostel to get to know other travelers and swap stories with them, or travel with friends to get to know them better.

Work exchange is a great way to connect with your local community (and yourself!) while traveling. In exchange for a few hours of each day, you'll receive free accommodation and other benefits.  Worldpackers offers are opportunities to work in  hostels , schools , NGOs , permaculture projects , eco-villages , holistic centers , and more. This is truly a great way to learn new skills abroad, while having the support of a local, collaborative community behind you.

If you want to travel as a means to connect more deeply to yourself and the world around you, I highly recommend learning more about the Worldpackers travel experience .

Read more about :  Top reasons why volunteering is important for personal development

5. "The people you meet create the paradise you find." — Robin Esrock

Try to interact instead of being a bystander; open yourself up to make friends while traveling ! You never know what you'll be invited to or what insider tips you might not find elsewhere. 

Chances are the people you meet will share a meaningful or unique experience with you and you'll end up having the time of your life with some awesome memories to bring back as souvenirs.

Don't forget to smile as much as much as you can so you are more approachable and friendly. One little smile can go a long way!

6. Travel cultivates a growth mindset

Some live their lives with a fixed mindset, meaning they never seek new learning experiences, are content with the skills they currently possess, and are threatened by change or the success of others. On the other hand, if you strive to live with a growth mindset , you believe your skills and intelligence grow with effort. With this mindset, you are always seeking new learning opportunities to broaden your talents, you embrace challenges, and see failure as a stepping stone towards improvement. 

Travel is directly tied with the growth mindset because you are thrust into a completely new environment where learning is mandatory . Especially if you're traveling long-term , living in a new country means adapting is necessary to get by.

Change itself keeps our brain in a healthy, plastic state so that we're able to learn and retain more over time. The world is ever-changing, which means we must change along with it, evolving and growing all the time. 

Traveling as often as possible is the perfect way to cultivate that growth mindset , effectively keeping our minds open, fueling our curiosity, and help us stay prepared for whatever life throws our way.

7. You improve your communication skills

If you strive to interact with locals and other travelers while you wander, you will end up developing better social skills. Being able to strike up a conversation with a total stranger will eventually become one of your strong suits if you travel a lot. 

This is good news for introverts who need a little extra practice! Plus, it's really fascinating to learn from others' experiences , hear what inspires them, and listen to travel tales!

8. Experiences are greater than things

Now more than ever, people are gifting experiences to their loves ones as opposed to merchandise or material things. Experiences can leave an imprint on a person for an entire lifetime, while the "stuff" we accumulate just gives us a temporary sense of satisfaction. That feeling will soon fade, and we begin to find ourselves trying to replace that lost feeling with yet another shiny new toy. 

Travel isn't merely a thing, but a lifestyle shift that you open yourself up to in order to receive some form of enlightenment. The more you travel, the more you'll embrace the minimalist travel mindset . Essentially, you'll realize what's important to you and be better able to cut out some things out of your life that don't measure up. 

Travel is the perfect way to begin collecting loads of memories and ditch the dead weight that might be holding you back from leading a fulfilling life.

9. You learn how to be more present

"Travel is like a good, challenging book: it demands presentness — the ability to live completely in the moment, absorbed in the words or vision of reality before you." — Robert Kaplan


Sometimes we get so excited to conquer new experiences and make lasting memories of them that we forget to savor them as they are happening. For some of us, travel is an escape from our extremely busy lives, but what's the point of escaping that lifestyle only to travel with an equally busy itinerary? 

Embracing slow travel is essential for soaking up your experiences so that you can record your memories in more depth, focusing on the little details that made the destination so special to you. While traveling, your main focus is to absorb your new surroundings and try new things rather than thinking about the future! 

Seek to deepen your connections with the people you meet and the places you visit, sit down and take time to meditate or people-watch, and keep a structured, light itinerary. You'll eventually learn to appreciate the present and in turn, better appreciate the memories you create. 

10. Adapting to change becomes easier

Sometimes travel can be very spontaneous and you may have to change up your itinerary at the drop of a hat. Travel heightens your awareness of what's going on around you, and the more you plan for, the more you have to be prepared for. This is a great skill to have if you're always on the go and need a backup plan to resort to in case your plans don't work out. 

Traveling is about venturing into the great unknown . It helps eradicate any fears you may have of what you cannot control and you are better able to embrace the unfamiliar with an open mind. Repeatedly exiting that pesky comfort zone will help you adapt to change more easily and soon you'll be welcoming it into your life as a healthy opportunity to grow !

11. You gain a deeper understanding of different cultures, values, religions, and ways of life

The world is diverse and filled with amazing people who practice different beliefs and lifestyles than you do. Travel opens the door that takes you on the path towards understanding these differences better and appreciating them for what they are.

Approaching a new country with an open mind and a caring heart is guaranteed to help you fully absorb what another culture has to offer. Who knows, you might find a new favorite dish to make at home, adopt certain values into your life that you admire, or fall in love with the culture as a whole.

Our perspectives are widened when we travel, and this contributes greatly to our personal inner growth . When we see the good in the world we are more compelled to do good ourselves. Becoming better individuals is a small but necessary step towards becoming better as a human race.

12. You develop more confidence and learn to embrace independence

You can do it! The more cool activities and meaningful experiences you check off your bucket list, the more power you'll gain over your self-doubts. 

Slowly but surely, you'll begin to realize that you're racking up experience points in the realm of travel, and you can plan your schedule with freedom and confidence. Traveling solo can help especially with cultivating that sense of fearlessness because you have to rely on your own travel know-how to get through your trip. 

The more you travel, the more comfortable you'll get with living independently .  

Keep reading: What is a Staycation and why now is the best time to have one.

13. Travel teaches you how to grow from adversity

Contrary to popular belief, travel isn't always the beautiful, carefree experience we expect. This is why it's important to be prepared for anything life may throw your way, so that when a challenge arises, you know how to turn it into a learning experience .

Some have medical emergencies while abroad. You could miss your flight and get stuck in an airport for an eternity or run out of food on a backpacking trip. You never know what could happen, despite your efforts to plan for every outcome!

When a troubling situation such as these arises, those who are resilient and determined enough will walk away from their hardship transformed. Patience and a clear head will help you get through these difficult circumstances and teach you a hard-earned lesson, which you'll be able to apply to other challenges you may face in the future. 

Inner growth occurs when, despite being knocked down by the challenges we face, we choose to get back up again and progress. 

14. You ditch your comfort zone and become a "yes man"

Say "no" to saying no! Travel is all about trying new things . 

If you can't banish your comfort zone for at least some portions of your trip, your growth will come to an abrupt halt. That doesn't mean you have to say "yes" to everything, you just have to participate in those things you know will teach you something new or give you a broader perspective . 

Your comfort zone is that little voice that creates excuses for things you can't or won't do. The act of traveling itself means that you don't mind stepping out of your comfort zone and everything you're used to behind in order to see the world. 

Try to actively pop that comfort zone bubble! Take risks, ride public transit, overcome fears, eat street food, meet new people, and say "yes" to more opportunities that present themselves to you. 

You'd be surprised at how liberating you'll feel after accomplishing something you never thought you would. It gives you room to grow, boosts your confidence, gives you courage, and gives you that validation you need to go out and do hard things. 

Let travel eradicate those excuses once and for all. 


As you embark on your next big adventure, remember to stay present and record your thoughts and memories as often as you can! Not only will you be able to look back on them fondly, but you can track your progress to see how much you've grown as time goes on. Write down your goals, what you'd like to learn, or what you knowledge you were able to glean on your trip. 

I hope you use this article to inspire you to plan your next trip and get out there. Immersing yourself in a different country may seem scary at first, but you'll be amazed at the new skills you'll pick up, the deep insight you'll gain, and you'll be able to turn your attention inward as you self-evaluate how your experiences have enriched your life. 

You'll be a savvy traveler in no time! Let your inner growth spurts shine through to serve as evidence that  travel is truly life-changing . 

"Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad of new sights, smells, and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way." ⁠— Ralph Crawshaw

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Rachael Grow

Let's Grow There

Over the past five years I have worn many hats as a creative freelancer and have been able to pursue adventures across the globe. To me, travel is more than checking a box or sitting on the perfect beach all day. Travel is about self-discovery, keeping an open mind, and learning through culture immersion. In 2017 I was chosen by one of my favorite travel bloggers, The Blonde Abroad, to attend her first ever blogging retreat in Bali with a handful of other inspiring bloggers. It was truly a dream that taught me so much more than I could imagine. Fast-forward to 2019 when I was given the role of one of the lead English writer for Worldpackers. My in-depth articles touched on subjects like volunteer work, overcoming post-travel blues, outdoorsy tips, and boldly adventuring. Inner growth is my jam.

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9 ways to step out of your comfort zone while traveling

How traveling makes you more open-minded.

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Open-Mindedness: What Every Traveler Needs to Know

One of the most important traits a traveler can develop is open-mindedness.

But what is open-mindedness?

Open-mindedness is a willingness to search actively for evidence against your current beliefs, plans, or goals and to weigh this evidence fairly.

Open-mindedness is the ability to move beyond our more primitive instincts and to use the rational parts of our brains—the thing that most makes us human—to its full capacity.

Open-mindedness transform the world from a place filled with fear and danger into a garden overflowing with possibility and delight.

Crescent Lake, an oasis in China's Gobi Desert.

Fortunately, anyone can become more open-minded. You just have to follow a few simple steps and next thing you know you’ll be turning every moment into an opportunity to learn and grow—to go to bed wiser, happier, and healthier than you woke up.

What is Open-Mindedness?

To be open minded is to reject certainty and embrace a world of new ideas and exciting possibilities. It is to allow for the possibility that your deeply held beliefs are false or misguided.

It is to experience people and places without rushing to judgement. It is to consider changing how you live your life.

Don't you want to live life with this kind of energy and enthusiasm?

The open-minded traveler sees a world filled with opportunity. They understand that they don’t have all the answers within and so they set out on the road to discover a better self.

They learn what they can from others and bring that knowledge home with them. They take comfort in their uncertainty, as they feel no need to defend their world view to every person they encounter.

Open-mindedness is not intellectual wishywashinessy. Rather, it’s the most principled, courageous thing you can do—to search for the truth regardless of where it takes you or how uncomfortable it makes you.

Being open-minded also does not mean  you can't have judgement. You can remain both principled and skeptical, saying 'no' when you know something to be wrong.

You can be open-minded and still maintain strong life principles.

Why Open-Mindedness is So Important (Both While Traveling and in Daily Life)

1.) open-mindedness makes travel (and life) more exciting..

Whether at home or on the road, doing, seeing, and thinking the same thing every day is boring.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what closed-minded people do. In an effort to maintain their beliefs, they live in a bubble of comfort and sameness with limited exposure to alternative viewpoints or ways of doing things.

In contrast, open-minded people’s lives are much more interesting. They don’t let the possibility of changing their opinions prevent them from experiencing all that life has to offer.

Rather than rigidly following routines, open-minded people regularly seek out novelty in the form of new ideas and activities—all of which makes for more exciting travel and a more exciting life.

2.) Open-mindedness promotes personal growth.

Why do some people repeat the same mistakes again and again while others make constant progress in life? The answer is open-mindedness.

The first group digs their heels into the ground and would rather die than be wrong while the second group is wiling to learn from past mistakes.

Being open-minded allows you to weigh new ideas, even if (and especially if) you don’t instantly agree with them. And the more you’re wiling to do this, the faster you will grow.

3.) Open-mindedness leads to better relationships.

Want to have more high-quality relationships? Then become more open-minded.

Open-minded people attract more interesting people—and develop deeper connections in the long run—than their closed-minded counterparts.

Rather than automatically avoiding someone based upon a potential difference in beliefs, open-minded people go out of their way to meet eclectic and intriguing people, knowing that such individuals often have the most to teach.

And since open-minded people allow others to simply be themselves, the people they meet often will want to stick around, sharing their deepest personal beliefs while appreciating the non-judgmental vibe.

So next time you’re looking to connect with the locals while on the road or build up a network of high-quality friends at home, consider being more open-minded.

4.) Open-mindedness makes things more relaxing.

Basing your identity on a rigid set of never-questioned beliefs can be exhausting.

No matter how well you insulate yourself from the outside world, you’ll inevitably have to face someone or something that challenges your ideas—and when you do, you’ll have to fight back with all your might. After all, admitting you were wrong would be to give up part of yourself.

Open-minded people don’t have to worry about this issue. Because they admit that they don’t know it all, they don’t have to see new ideas as threats to their very existence. And as a result, their travels are more relaxing.

Open-mindedness can give you more of this on your next trip.

5.) Open-mindedness promotes self-confidence.

There’s something empowering about questioning one’s beliefs.

Giving yourself the freedom to examine your thoughts—breaking down the logic behind them and considering alternative solutions—is what creates stable, easily-defendable belief systems.

And a life based on sound, well-reasoned principles is one that naturally breeds confidence.

You worry less about the road ahead when you're open-minded and confident.

So when someone in New York confronts you for believing that it’s important to spend time with family or when someone in Mumbai questions your insistence on regular exercise, you’ll be able to easily and comfortably explain why.

6.) Open-mindedness leads to better problem solving.

No matter how experienced of a traveler you are, unexpected problems can and will occur when you’re on the road.

Fortunately, being open-minded helps you to more quickly and easily solve these issues.

Because they don’t automatically reject ideas, open-minded people can see solutions that close-minded people cannot. 

7.) Open-mindedness creates safer travel.

When you're able to correctly determine what should and shouldn't worry you, you're a much safer traveler.

The open-minded traveler is a safer traveler. They don’t rely on stereotypes or previously-conceived notions to understand their world.

Rather, they see things as they are, adapting their perspective to new information and responding accordingly.

How to Become More Open-Minded

Now that you’ve seen how beneficial open-mindedness is, you’re probably wondering how you yourself can be more open-minded.

Fortunately, there’s a number of simple (if not always easy) things you can do at home and on the road to encourage open-mindedness.

How to be More Open-Minded At Home

1.) find your motivation.

The easiest way to motivate yourself to become more open-minded is to find your motivation for doing so.

Write down a list of ways in which your life would improve if you were to be more open-minded. What would change on a daily basis? What would change in the long run (both professionally and personally)? How would your travels become more enjoyable?

2.) Start practicing

There are a number of activities you can do before your next trip to become more open-minded.

1.) Remember a time when you were wronged by someone. Wright down three plausible reasons why that person intentionally or accidentally wronged you.

2.) Find someone who, in your opinion, believes things very strongly and very differently from you, and have a dialogue. Pause a few seconds after every sentence they say, so as to ensure that you’re actually thinking about their words rather than just preparing for a rebuttal.

3.) Read a book about a topic you’ve never explored before, such as exotic cat ownership, kite sailing, or Peruvian cooking.

Learning to cook a new type of cuisine is often an mind-opening (and mouth-watering) experience.

As you do these activities again and again, your default mode of thinking will start to change. You'll begin to look for explanations rather than immediately passing judgement.

Looking for more exercises to help get you ready for your next trip? Get your FREE guide here. It's packed with interesting and inspiring activities that are guaranteed to have you prepared for the trip of a lifetime.

3.) Practice Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness mediation—the act of purposefully bringing one’s attention to the preset moment in a non-judgmental way—can greatly encourage open-mindedness.

To learn how to meditate mindfully, check out this informative article  from Mindful.org.

How to be More Open-Minded While Traveling

1.) listen more than you talk..

One of the easiest ways to be more open-minded while traveling is to listen more than you talk.

So often our impulse when having a conversation—especially with someone we disagree with—is to think about our next point rather than what our partner is saying. As a result, we fail to truly appreciate their points.

It's amazing how much you hear when you just stop and listen.

Instead of trying to “win” every conversation, make a point to learn as much as you can from whomever you’re speaking with.

Whether you’re chatting about politics with a bartender in Buenos Ares bar, discussing soccer with taxi driver in Manchester, or debating the merits of adding cola to beer with a tour guide in Berlin, you’re interacts will be more insightful and worthwhile if you make an effort to carefully listen.

2.) Avoid making snap decisions (get the facts first).

It’s tempting to make snap decisions about things while on the road. When traveling—especially to new places—it’s easy to play things safe and remain closed off to anything that makes us feel uncomfortable.

It may seem weird at first—especially if you’ve just come from Italy, where espresso is to be drank quickly—but sipping a coffee for a few hours is a surprisingly enjoyable and relaxing French custom.

However, doing so causes you to miss out on much of what’s interesting about the world.

Behind every fear is an opportunity to learn, grow, and be amazed—if only we’re willing to give things a shot.

Whether it’s a meal, an activity, or a life philosophy, take the time to learn the how, why, and what of it before you say 'no'.

3.) Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

It’s easy to assume that everyone you meet has the same information—or lack thereof—that you do. This is true both for visitors and for locals.

Next time you find yourself unsure about something, remember this gap in knowledge and ask for clarification.

Often something that made little sense without and explanation will become perfectly logical with one.

4.) Travel more.

The best way to become open-minded is simply to travel more.

Traveling opens you up to a wide-variety of ways of thinking and being. Traveling shows you that people find happiness and health in many different ways. Traveling teaches you that just because you were taught to do things one way doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best.

The world becomes both smaller and larger when you travel, as you see both the depth of our similarities and the breadth of experiences available.

Marcel Proust once said, “ The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. ”

As you’ve seen, being open-minded helps these eyes to open up.

Open-minded individual see a world filled with opportunity and excitement. They know they don’t always have the answers so they explore the world with energy in a search for a better tomorrow without fear of what they might find.

In short, they choose to live life to its fullest.

Are you interested in becoming more open-minded and bullet-proofing your mind for travel? Get your free copy of ‘ The Traveler’s Mindset ’ right now. It’s packed full of exercises based on the latest scientific research and personal experience that are guarantee to transform how you see the world while getting you ready to make the most out of your next trip.

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For a More Creative Brain, Travel

How international experiences can open the mind to new ways of thinking

There are plenty of things to be gained from going abroad: new friends, new experiences, new stories.

But living in another country may come with a less noticeable benefit, too: Some scientists say it can also make you more creative.

Writers and thinkers have long felt the creative benefits of international travel. Ernest Hemingway, for example, drew inspiration for much of his work from his time in Spain and France. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World , moved from the U.K. to the U.S. in his 40s to branch out into screenwriting. Mark Twain, who sailed around the coast of the Mediterranean in 1869, wrote in his travelogue Innocents Abroad that travel is “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun examining more closely what many people have already learned anecdotally: that spending time abroad may have the potential to affect mental change. In general, creativity is related to neuroplasticity, or how the brain is wired. Neural pathways 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.

“Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms,” says Adam Galinsky, a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of numerous studies on the connection between creativity and international travel. Cognitive flexibility is the mind’s ability to jump between different ideas, a key component of creativity. But it’s not just about being abroad, Galinsky says: “The key, critical process is multicultural engagement, immersion, and adaptation. Someone who lives abroad and doesn’t engage with the local culture will likely get less of a creative boost than someone who travels abroad and really engages in the local environment.” In other words, going to Cancun for a week on spring break probably won’t make a person any more creative. But going to Cancun and living with local fishermen might.

In Galinsky’s latest study , published last month in the Academy of Management Journal, he and three other researchers examined the experiences of the creative directors of 270 high-end fashion houses. Combing through 11 years’ worth of fashion lines, Galinsky and his team searched for links between the creative directors’ experience working abroad and the fashion houses’ “creative innovations,” or the degree “to which final, implemented products or services are novel and useful from the standpoint of external audiences.” The level of creativity of a given product was rated by a pool of trade journalists and independent buyers. Sure enough, the researchers found a clear correlation between time spent abroad and creative output: The brands whose creative directors had lived and worked in other countries produced more consistently creative fashion lines than those whose directors had not.

The researchers also found that the more countries the executives had lived in, the more creative the lines tended to be—but only up to a point. Those who had lived and worked in more than three countries, the study found, still tended to show higher levels of creativity that those who hadn’t worked abroad at all, but less creativity that their peers who had worked in a smaller number of foreign countries. The authors hypothesized that those who had lived in too many countries hadn’t been able to properly immerse themselves culturally; they were bouncing around too much. “It gets back to this idea of a deeper level of learning that’s necessary for these effects to occur,” Galinsky says.

Cultural distance, or how different a foreign culture is from one’s own, may also play a role: Surprisingly, Galinsky and his colleagues found that living someplace with a larger cultural distance was often associated with lower creativity than living in a more familiar culture. The reason for that, they hypothesized, was that an especially different culture might come with a bigger intimidation factor, which may discourage people from immersing themselves in it—and no immersion, they explained, could mean none of the cognitive changes associated with living in another country.

Traveling may have other brain benefits, too. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, an associate professor of education and psychology at the University of Southern California, says that cross-cultural experiences have the potential to strengthen a person’s sense of self. “What a lot of psychological research has shown now is that the ability to engage with people from different backgrounds than yourself, and the ability to get out of your own social comfort zone, is helping you to build a strong and acculturated sense of your own self,” she says. “Our ability to differentiate our own beliefs and values … is tied up in the richness of the cultural experiences that we have had.”

Cross-cultural experiences have the potential to pull people out of their cultural bubbles, and in doing so, can increase their sense of connection with people from backgrounds different than their own. “We found that when people had experiences traveling to other countries it increased what’s called generalized trust, or their general faith in humanity,” Galinsky says. “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.”

This trust may play an important role in enhancing creative function. In a 2012 study out of Tel Aviv University, researchers found that people who “believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences”—beliefs the authors termed “essentialist views”—performed significantly worse in creative tests than those who saw cultural and racial divisions as arbitrary and malleable. “This categorical mindset induces a habitual closed-mindedness that transcends the social domain and hampers creativity,” the study authors wrote. In other words, those who put people in boxes had trouble thinking outside the box.

Of course, although a new country is an easy way to leave a “social comfort zone,” the cultural engagement associated with cognitive change doesn’t have to happen abroad. If a plane ticket isn’t an option, maybe try taking the subway to a new neighborhood. Sometimes, the research suggests, all that’s needed for a creative boost is a fresh cultural scene.

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Travel broadens the mind, but can it alter the brain?

Studies suggest that taking a gap year or studying abroad can positively influence your brain to make you more outgoing and open to new ideas

T here are lots of opportunities for students to travel: be it to postpone your degree and travel the world after taking your A-levels; to take a placement abroad; or to spend your summer months volunteering. Reports show that over 20,000 UK students spend time abroad for a period of over three months each year .

It’s hardly suprising so many students decide to spend time away from the UK: the benefits of travelling are well documented. You can make new friends, broaden your outlook and gain stories to tell. But that’s not all: you may also improve your brainpower and become more outgoing.

Blue-sky thinking

According to a study by Adam Galinsky , a professor at Columbia Business School, those who have lived abroad are more creative. His research found that the more countries people had lived in, the more creative their work tended to be. However Galinsky says that just being a tourist isn’t enough to see any benefit. “Someone who lives abroad and doesn’t engage with the local culture will likely get less of a creative boost than someone who travels abroad and really engages in the local environment,” he says.

Gain confidence and independence

Travelling and living abroad can also affect the way we interact with people. Research by Dr Julia Zimmermann and Dr Franz Neyer compared the personality development of a large sample of German university students who had studied abroad for at least one semester with a non-travelling group.

The results showed that those who studied abroad were generally higher in extraversion than those who chose not to travel during their studies: the travellers were likely to enjoy being around other people more than being alone. When they returned home after travelling, the participants also tended to show an increase in openness to new experiences, agreeableness and emotional stability.

Tom Champion, 26, a PhD student from the University of Sheffield who is studying in Singapore for 18 months, says he has become more accepting and compassionate since living abroad. “Seeing the world through a foreigner’s eyes has led me to realise my previously invisible cultural habits and hone my sense of empathy and my ability to understand others,” he says.

Moving abroad also allows young adults to gain a new sense of responsibility and independence, and to manage their own finances. Nikitha Aithal moved to the UK from India when she was 10 years old, and later worked in Spain for a year as part of her undergraduate language degree at the University of Leeds. She says: “Living and working in Spain made me appreciate the struggle my parents went through when moving to the UK – simple things such as setting up a bank account or paying the water bills.”

Sharpening your mind is a no-brainer

The new and unusual situations we encounter while travelling – whether trying to figure out how to navigate the local metro system, or just to order a meal in an unfamiliar language – help to keep our mind sharp, according to a study commissioned by the U.S. Travel Association.

It found that challenging new experiences can boost cognitive health, as when your brain is exposed to an environment that is novel and complex, it reacts by forming new connections as it tries to categorise the new and unusual stimuli. This grows the brain and keeps it active in a similar way as taking up a new hobby or learning a language.

So if you’re in the fortunate position of being able to chose whether or not to travel, why not take the plunge and explore the world – your brain will thank you for it.

Keep up with the latest on Guardian Students: follow us on Twitter at @GdnStudents – and become a member to receive exclusive benefits and our weekly newsletter.

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Travelers may find it difficult to empathize with locals, according to experts. Here, tourists in 2016 buy fruit juice at a market stall in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Travel is said to increase cultural understanding. Does it?

While researchers say travel does affect the brain’s neural pathways, true empathy remains an elusive destination.

Empathy is commonly defined as “putting yourself in another person’s shoes” or “feeling the emotional states of others.” It’s a critical social tool that creates social bridges by promoting shared experiences and producing compassionate behavior. But can empathy be learned? And can travel help facilitate this learning? The answer is complicated. “Research has shown that empathy is not simply inborn, but can actually be taught,” writes psychotherapist F. Diane Barth in Psychology Today . While past research has indicated that empathy is an unteachable trait, newer research—including a 2017 Harvard study —suggests that the “neurobiologically based competency” of empathy is mutable and can be taught under the right circumstances. Whether seeing the world actually opens travelers’ minds—that it makes travelers more empathetic—is up for debate. In a 2018 Harris Poll of 1,300 business travelers, 87 percent said that business trips helped them to be more empathetic to others, reports Quartz . And in a 2010 study , Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky found that travel “increases awareness of underlying connections and associations” with other cultures. While self-defined empathy and awareness are unreliable measurements, it stands to reason that cross-cultural exposure through travel would at least create conditions for checking conscious and unconscious biases. “If we are to move in the direction of a more empathic society and a more compassionate world, it is clear that working to enhance our native capacities to empathize is critical to strengthening individual, community, national, and international bonds,” writes Helen Riess, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of the 2017 report.

But the coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the global Black Lives Matter protests have forced an uncomfortable reckoning—that all the travel in the world might not be enough to engender the deep cross-cultural awareness people need now.

“There’s this false adage that travel opens minds, but that’s not [a built-in] fact about what travel does,” says Travis Levius, a Black travel journalist and hospitality consultant based in London and Atlanta. “Travel does not automatically make you a better person,” nor does it clue you into “what’s going on in terms of race relations.”

Black Travel Alliance founder Martina Jones-Johnson agrees, noting that tourism boards have made it “overwhelmingly clear that travel doesn’t necessarily build empathy.”

The lack of diversity within the travel industry itself suggests that there’s much work to be done to make the industry as inclusive as the world of travel consumers. According to a 2019 annual report by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers in the leisure and hospitality industry were overwhelmingly white. Consumers, meanwhile, say they want to spend their money on travel companies whose employees reflect the world they work in, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council .

Additionally, companies that embrace inclusivity may have a better chance of avoiding tone-deaf messages , such as using “free at last”—the line is from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” speech—to caption a billboard depicting white children jumping into the Florida Keys. The advertisement, which has since been taken down, launched in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis that sparked worldwide protests against police brutality.

(Related: Learn why it’s important to have diverse perspectives in travel.)

Karfa Diallo leads a tour of sites related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade in Bordeaux, France, in June 2020. Participating in activities that amplify marginalized voices and experiences can go a long way toward developing empathy, say experts.

A road paved with good intentions

Interestingly, modern tourism has fairly empathic origins. In the 1850s, Thomas Cook used new railway systems to develop short-haul leisure travel as respites for hard-working British laborers, according to Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, a senior lecturer on tourism management at the University of South Australia.

A hundred years later the United Nations declared reasonable working hours, paid holidays, and “rest and leisure” as human rights . By the 1960s, spurred by related movements to increase holiday time, the leisure sector had coalesced into a full-fledged professional industry.

Since then, the World Tourism Organization and international aid groups have championed tourism as both “a vital force for world peace [that] can provide the moral and intellectual basis for international understanding and interdependence,” as well as an economic development strategy for poorer nations.

But not everyone agrees that the travel industry has lived up to these lofty goals. In recent decades, it has been accused of doing just the opposite. As Stephen Wearing wrote nearly 20 years ago : “tourism perpetuates inequality” because multinational corporations from capitalist countries hold all the economic and resource power over developing nations.

(Related: This is how national parks are fighting racism.)

These days, inequality is baked into the very process of traveling, says veteran Time magazine foreign correspondent and Roads & Kingdoms co-founder Nathan Thornburgh. “Your frequent flier status, the stupid little cordon separating the boarding lines, the way you take an Uber or cab from the airport after you land, not a bus or colectivo or matatu —those all reinforce divisions, not empathy,” he writes in an email. “And that’s just getting to a place.”

Empathy’s downsides

Experts say developing empathy isn’t easy and comes with a host of problems. Joseph M. Cheer, a professor at Wakayama University’s Center for Tourism Research in Japan, notes that empathy inherently “others” another person.

In his 2019 study of westerners on a bike tour in Cambodia, Cheer found that despite the prosocial aspects of the experience—visiting local non-governmental organizations, interacting with local Cambodians—post-tour interviews revealed that the tourists didn’t understand the cultural context of the outing. The visitors leaned into problematic tropes like “happy,” “lovely,” and “generous” when describing locals or simply saw Cambodians as service providers.

This “othering” bias, Cheer says, becomes more noticeable the greater the distance between tourists and locals, and especially so in strictly transactional encounters, such as in hotels.

A worker at a resort in Bali. Researchers say visitors should make a commitment to understand local cultures by moving past transactional interactions.

Our individual travel experiences oppose our best intentions, says travel writer Bani Amor, who has written extensively on race, place, and power.

“The stated [positive] intentions are completely contradictive to what happens in the tourism industry and how oppressive it is to BIPOC [Black, indigenous, and people of color] around the world, how tourism laborers are being treated, and how they’re being dispossessed, not having a right to their own land and to enjoy our own places,” says Amor, who has worked in the tourism industry in their ancestral home of Ecuador.

“You can only really know your own experience,” adds Anu Taranath, a racial equity professor at the University of Washington Seattle and a second-generation immigrant.

“I think we can develop empathetic feelings and sort of crack open our sense of self to include other people’s experiences in it. We can only deepen our own understanding of who we are in an unequal world and how that makes us feel and how that motivates us to shift our life in some way or another.”

I think in its purest form, empathy is basically impossible. I can weep for you, but I can’t weep as you. Nathan Thornburgh , founder, Roads & Kingdoms

Or as Thornburgh puts it: “I think in its purest form, empathy is basically impossible. I can weep for you, but I can’t weep as you.”

Traveling deeper

While experts conclude that travel may not inspire enough empathy to turn tourists into social justice activists, the alternative—not traveling at all—may actually be worse.

“[B]ecause travel produces encounters between strangers, it is likely to prompt empathetic-type imaginings, which simply wouldn’t be there without the proximity created by travel,” says Hazel Tucker in a 2016 study published in the Annals of Tourism. It’s also one reason why it’s important to expose children to travel at an early age.

Yet truly transformational experiences require more than just showing up with a suitcase. It requires energy, effort, and commitment on the part of tourists, as well as specific conditions, says Higgins-Desbiolles. “Visitors need to be prepped for the interaction so that they are ready to engage with the people on an equal level,” she notes.

Taranath’s book Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World may provide some starting points. “It’s an invitation to think more carefully about our good intentions and where they really need to be challenged,” Taranath explains. “How do you think about identity and difference in an unequal world? What does it actually look like?”

Additionally, Tucker suggests embracing what she calls “unsettled empathy”: learning about the cultures you’re planning to visit and sitting with uncomfortable legacies of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and displacement from which no destinations are exempt.

Barbara Manigault, a Gullah sweet grass basket weaver, practices her craft in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. American tourists with limited travel opportunities can find many places in the U.S. to learn more about other cultures.

That background can be the basis for meaningful conversations, which Cheer found are “the key element that prompted empathy.” Thornburgh adds that travelers should seek out places where there is “an equal and humanistic exchange, or something approaching it, between the visitors and the visited.”

(Related: The E.U. has banned American travelers. So where can they go? )

Toward that end, experts generally ruled out cruises. Instead, immersive experiences like Black Heritage Tours that amplify historically marginalized voices provide better opportunities for meaningful connections.

Fortunately for would-be travelers, those opportunities can be found even in these pandemic times, when many countries are restricting international travel, especially for Americans.

“We are so lucky in this country that the whole world has come here to build their lives, in big cities and small, and that we have Black and [Native American] communities throughout,” says Thornburgh. “Go to their restaurants, lend your talents to their schools, help them raise money for their playgrounds.

“You want travel? You want to experience different cultures? Start at home. Start now.”

Related Topics

• CULTURAL TOURISM
• PEOPLE AND CULTURE

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Valued Travel

How Travel Can Improve Our Lives

How Can Travel Broaden Our Perspective on the World?

Travel has the incredible power to broaden our perspective on the world in ways that few other experiences can. Stepping outside of our familiar surroundings and immersing ourselves in new cultures, landscapes, and ways of life opens our minds and expands our understanding of the world and its complexities. In this article, we will explore how travel can broaden our perspective and help us develop a more global outlook.

Experiencing Cultural Diversity One of the most significant ways travel broadens our perspective is by exposing us to diverse cultures. Through firsthand experiences, we encounter different customs, traditions, languages, and belief systems. We learn to appreciate and respect the unique qualities of each culture, breaking down stereotypes and preconceived notions. This exposure fosters empathy, understanding, and a deeper appreciation for the richness of human diversity.

Challenging Stereotypes and Biases Traveling allows us to challenge the stereotypes and biases we may hold. By interacting with people from different backgrounds, we realize that our assumptions and generalizations are often inaccurate. We come face-to-face with the reality that there is much more to a culture, a country, or a group of people than what we may have previously believed. This process of unlearning and reevaluating our preconceptions helps us become more open-minded and compassionate individuals.

Gaining Historical and Geographical Knowledge Exploring new destinations exposes us to the historical and geographical aspects of the world. We visit ancient ruins, historical landmarks, and museums that provide valuable insights into different civilizations, events, and historical contexts. Learning about the histories and struggles of various regions deepens our understanding of the world’s complexity and helps us appreciate the interconnectedness of past and present.

Witnessing Social and Economic Inequalities Traveling allows us to witness social and economic inequalities firsthand. We may encounter poverty, unequal access to education, healthcare, and basic necessities. These experiences provide a stark reminder of the disparities that exist in the world. It compels us to reflect on our own privilege and motivates us to advocate for positive change. Through this awareness, we develop a greater sense of social responsibility and become more engaged global citizens.

Appreciating Natural Beauty and Environmental Concerns Traveling exposes us to the incredible natural beauty of our planet. From majestic mountains and serene beaches to lush rainforests and vibrant coral reefs, these experiences instill in us a sense of awe and reverence for the Earth’s natural wonders. Witnessing the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation in different regions also deepens our understanding of the urgent need for environmental conservation and sustainability.

Learning from Different Perspectives Engaging in conversations with locals and fellow travelers provides valuable opportunities to learn from different perspectives. We gain insights into local issues, cultural norms, and societal challenges. These exchanges broaden our understanding of complex global issues such as politics, social justice, and human rights. By actively listening and engaging in meaningful dialogue, we expand our worldview and become more informed global citizens.

Developing Adaptability and Flexibility Traveling often requires us to adapt to new environments, navigate unfamiliar transportation systems, and overcome unexpected challenges. These experiences cultivate adaptability, resilience, and problem-solving skills. We learn to embrace uncertainty and become more flexible in our thinking and approach to life. This adaptability extends beyond travel and allows us to navigate various situations with an open mind and a positive attitude.

Fostering a Sense of Connection and Unity Traveling connects us with people from different cultures and backgrounds, fostering a sense of connection and unity. We realize that despite our differences, there are common threads that bind us together as human beings. We discover shared values, aspirations, and emotions. This sense of connection helps break down barriers and promotes a more inclusive and compassionate worldview.

Encouraging Personal Growth and Self-Reflection Traveling provides ample opportunities for personal growth and self-reflection. Stepping outside of our comfort zones and encountering new experiences pushes us to confront our fears, embrace change, and discover our true capabilities. We gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Traveling challenges us to question our beliefs, values, and priorities, leading to personal transformation and growth.

Inspiring a Lifelong Love for Exploration and Discovery Perhaps one of the most enduring ways travel broadens our perspective is by instilling in us a lifelong love for exploration and discovery. Once we experience the transformative power of travel, we develop a thirst for knowledge and a curiosity about the world. This passion for exploration extends beyond the boundaries of travel and influences our everyday lives. We become lifelong learners, constantly seeking new experiences and opportunities for growth.

Travel is a catalyst for broadening our perspective on the world. By exposing us to diverse cultures, challenging stereotypes, and providing opportunities for learning, reflection, and personal growth, travel helps us develop a more global outlook. It fosters empathy, understanding, and a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of our world. So, let us embark on our journeys with open hearts and open minds, ready to embrace the transformative power of travel and the profound impact it has on our perspective of the world.

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The Healing Power of Travel: How Exploring the World Can Benefit Mental Health

by Katie Brenneman | Jul 12, 2023 | Lifestyle and Culture , Mental Health

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or stuck in a rut, it might be time to pack your bags and hit the road. Travel has been known to positively impact  mental health , allowing individuals to break out of their comfort zones and experience new perspectives.

In this article, we’ll dive into how travel can promote personal growth, reduce stress, and enhance overall well-being, featuring inspiring examples of travelers who have found healing through exploring the world.

The Science Behind the Mental Health Benefits of Travelling

Traveling is more than just a quick getaway from our daily routine. It can have a positive impact on mental health. Research shows that venturing to new destinations, embracing diverse customs, and challenging ourselves to expand our horizons can lead to remarkable progress in our overall well-being.

Below are some examples of how beneficial travel can be to both our physical and mental health:

How To Maintain Mental Health While Traveling

Reducing Stress and Anxiety

Travel is a powerful tool to combat stress and anxiety. Our brains thrive on new experiences, and travel offers a wealth of sights, sounds, and tastes to excite our senses. This triggers the release of dopamine and serotonin, natural chemicals that  boost feelings of well-being  and ease stress and anxiety.

While all forms of travel can do this, anywhere you can get outside and enjoy the fresh air is always good for the mind and body.  Cruising on small and large boats  is a great way to experience this. Not only can you enjoy being outside as you travel, but you can also take in the sights and enjoy the calmness of the ocean and the smell of clean ocean air.

Traveling allows us to break free from daily routines and responsibilities, providing a moment to relax and recharge. Going on a vacation is also  a way to recharge  if you feel drained.

5 Tips On Managing Travel Anxiety

Enhancing Creativity and Cognitive Flexibility

Traveling boosts our mental abilities, especially creativity and cognitive flexibility. By exposing ourselves to new cultures and experiences, our brains develop new neural connections, improving our creative thinking and adaptability capacity. Research by Professor Adam Galinsky of Columbia Business School shows that  engaging in multicultural experiences  enhances problem-solving skills and creativity.

Building Resilience and Coping Skills

Exploring the world exposes us to unfamiliar situations and challenges that require us to adapt and overcome obstacles. When this happens, we develop better emotional resilience and coping skills to help us in other areas. 

Learning to navigate uncertainty, embrace change, and find creative solutions to problems will sharpen your senses and improve your overall mental health.

Boosting Self-confidence and Personal Growth

Getting out of your comfort zone is essential; traveling more often helps you do that. By forcing yourself to interact with new people, learn unfamiliar customs and explore new destinations, you develop confidence in yourself and your abilities. With each challenge overcome, you become stronger and more self-assured.

Fostering Social Connections

Frequent travels offer an opportunity to meet and form bonds with people from different backgrounds. These relationships can effectively reduce loneliness and augment empathy, instilling a sense of belonging in oneself. In addition, strong social connections lead to better mental health and increased happiness.

Real Experiences of Individuals Supporting Their Mental Health Through Travel

It doesn’t matter your professional background, likes, interests, or beliefs; travel is a great way to keep yourself grounded and give yourself the much-needed reboot it needs over the year. Here are a few examples of  individuals who have experienced the same :

Jacintha Verdegaal , a regular traveler and the owner of a lifestyle blog called  Urban Pixels  says that “Even though I’m always busy when I travel, whether it’s sightseeing, taking photos, or just exploring a destination on foot, I know I’m the calmest and most relaxed when I travel.”

Valerie Wilson , a travel expert and owner of a highly visited travel website called  Trusted Travel Girl , says, “If you allow it, travel has the ability to expand your mind in a way you never realized was possible.” After experiencing a difficult battle with Lyme disease for several years, Valerie admitted that traveling and interacting with the world around her gave her a new passion for life. She said, “I convinced myself to travel even when I wasn’t feeling well. It has brought me happiness, given me a purpose, and has made me a strong, independent woman.”

Dr. Tamara McClintock Greenberg , a psychologist, and author of  Psychodynamic Perspectives on Aging and Illness , says that traveling is essential to promoting happiness and managing stressful situations. “It also helps us reflect on our personal goals and interests.”

Practical Tips to Incorporate Travel into Your Routine

Incorporating travel into a busy lifestyle can be difficult, but it’s possible. Here are some practical tips to help you travel without spending too much or sacrificing your work-life balance.

Make Use of Long Weekends and Holidays

Incorporating travel into your routine doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Making the most of long weekends and public holidays can help you plan short trips without compromising your work life. Keep an eye out for these dates on the calendar and try to make it a practice to yourself extended breaks throughout the year to unwind.

Combine Work and Travel

If your job allows for remote work or business trips, extend your stay and explore the destination during your free time. This way, you can experience new places without using up your vacation days or spending too much on transportation costs.

Plan Budget-Friendly Trips

There are a lot of options when trying to plan a vacation that doesn’t break your budget. Most of the time, if you can book your travel far in advance, you’ll avoid supply and demand pricing spikes and get a great deal on flights, hotels, and rental cars. 

Another way to save money on your next trip is by opting for a road trip with a camping trailer or RV. Depending on how far you travel, fuel and groceries can still be significant savings rather than planning for airfare and hotel expenses.

Maintain a Secondary Residence for Snowbirds

For those with the luxury of owning a second home in a warmer climate, becoming a “snowbird” can be a great way to incorporate travel into your life. Spending the colder months in your secondary residence allows you to experience a different location. There are also ways to  make snowbirding affordable , such as investing in an RV or a timeshare instead of a second home. This does wonders for your mental well-being during cold, depressing winters.

However, be sure to plan ahead and prepare your homes for the seasonal switch, such as winterizing your primary residence and ensuring your secondary home is ready for your arrival.

Embrace Weekend Getaways

You don’t always need a week-long vacation to experience the benefits of travel. Weekend getaways can be rewarding and provide a much-needed break from your daily routine. Look for destinations within driving distance and plan short, focused trips to maximize your limited time.

Understanding How a Healthy Lifestyle Influences Mental Health

Prioritize Travel for Your Mental Health

Traveling can be a great way to take some time off, explore new places and cultures, and find balance in life. With the proper planning and preparation, you can incorporate travel into your routine without sacrificing your work-life balance or going over budget while  giving your mental health the care it needs .

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How Travel Can Broaden the Mind

Travel has the power to broaden the mind in countless ways, from expanding our cultural understanding and knowledge of the world to helping us to develop new skills and perspectives. Whether it’s exploring new destinations, trying new foods, or simply stepping outside of our comfort zone, travel can have a profound impact on our minds and how we view the world. Here are a few ways in which travel can broaden the mind.

One of the most obvious ways that travel can broaden the mind is by exposing us to new cultures, customs, and ways of life. When we travel to different countries or regions, we have the opportunity to learn about the history, traditions, and values of those places, and to gain a deeper understanding of the diversity of the world. This can help us to develop a more open and accepting attitude, and to see things from a different point of view.

Another way that travel can broaden the mind is by challenging our preconceptions and assumptions. When we encounter unfamiliar situations or people, we are forced to think outside of our usual frame of reference and to adapt to new circumstances. This can help us to be more open-minded and flexible in our thinking, and to develop problem-solving and communication skills.

Travel can also have a positive impact on our personal growth and development. By stepping outside of our daily routine and breaking out of our usual patterns and habits, we can gain a fresh perspective and a renewed appreciation for the world around us. This can help us to develop a growth mindset and to become more resilient and adaptable.

Finally, travel has the power to expand our social connections and to increase our empathy and understanding of others. When we encounter people from different cultures and backgrounds, we have the opportunity to learn about their experiences and to gain a deeper understanding of their perspectives. This can help us to develop more meaningful relationships and to become more compassionate and understanding of others.

In summary, travel has the power to broaden the mind in a variety of ways, including exposing us to new cultures, challenging our preconceptions, promoting personal growth and development, and expanding our social connections and empathy. By embracing the opportunities that travel offers, we can enrich our lives and transform the way we think, feel, and experience the world.

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How Traveling Can Broaden Your Perspective

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5 Ways Traveling Can Change Your Mind

• Last updated May 09, 2024
• Difficulty Beginner

• Category Travel

Traveling is not just about visiting new places and experiencing different cultures; it has the potential to change your entire perspective on life. From expanding your horizons to challenging your comfort zone, travel has the power to transform your mind and open doors to new ideas and possibilities. In this article, we will explore five profound ways that traveling can change your mind and why it is more than just a vacation, but a journey of self-discovery and personal growth. Whether you are a seasoned traveler or someone who has yet to embark on their first adventure, this article will inspire you to grab a passport and set off on a transformative journey.

What You'll Learn

Broadening perspectives through cultural immersion, developing empathy and understanding through exposure to different cultures, discovering new perspectives and challenging preconceived notions, fostering personal growth and self-discovery through travel experiences.

Traveling has long been considered a way to broaden one's horizons and gain a better understanding of the world. By stepping outside our familiar routines and immersing ourselves in different cultures, we can challenge our preconceived notions, learn from others, and expand our perspectives. This article will discuss how traveling can change your mind and why it is essential for personal growth.

Breaking Cultural Barriers:

Traveling provides a unique opportunity to break down cultural barriers. When we expose ourselves to new environments, customs, and traditions, we become more open-minded and accepting of cultural diversity. We start to see the world through the eyes of others, gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation for their way of life.

Challenging Stereotypes:

One of the most significant benefits of traveling is the chance to challenge and dispel stereotypes. Through personal interactions and firsthand experiences, we can shatter the misconceptions and biases we might have held towards a particular culture or group of people. By debunking stereotypes, we foster empathy and promote a more inclusive society.

Enhancing Empathy:

Traveling provides the opportunity to connect with people from different backgrounds, allowing us to empathize with their struggles, challenges, and joys. When we witness firsthand the realities of others and engage in meaningful conversations, our capacity for empathy expands. This increased empathy can positively impact our relationships, both abroad and at home, by allowing us to relate to others and understand their perspectives.

Developing Tolerance for Uncertainty:

Traveling often involves venturing into the unknown, whether it's navigating unfamiliar streets, trying new cuisines, or communicating in a foreign language. This constant exposure to uncertainty helps us develop tolerance for ambiguity and adaptability. We become more comfortable with change and less resistant to unfamiliar situations, skills that are invaluable in an increasingly diverse and interconnected world.

Cultivating a Global Mindset:

Experiencing different cultures and ways of life broadens our mindset and fosters a global perspective. When we immerse ourselves in new environments, we learn that our way of doing things is just one of many. This realization encourages us to challenge our own cultural norms and appreciate alternative approaches to life, leading to greater adaptability, creativity, and problem-solving skills.

Encouraging Personal Growth:

Traveling pushes us out of our comfort zones, forcing us to confront challenges and adapt to new situations. This constant exposure to the unfamiliar nurtures personal growth and self-discovery. We learn about ourselves, our strengths, and our limitations, gaining a sense of resilience and self-confidence. Traveling also provides a platform for self-reflection, enabling us to reassess our values and priorities, leading to personal growth and a newfound sense of purpose.

Broadening our perspectives through cultural immersion is a transformative experience. By breaking cultural barriers, challenging stereotypes, enhancing empathy, developing tolerance for uncertainty, cultivating a global mindset, and encouraging personal growth, traveling can change our minds in profound and meaningful ways. So, pack your bags, open your mind, and embark on a journey that will not only take you to new places but also expand your worldview.

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Traveling is one of the most enriching experiences one can have in their life. It opens our minds to new perspectives, challenges our preconceived notions, and helps us build empathy and understanding towards different cultures. Through exposure to different cultures, we learn to appreciate diversity, understand the importance of cultural context, and develop a more inclusive worldview.

One way in which traveling helps develop empathy and understanding is by breaking down stereotypes. Often, we have preconceived notions about certain cultures based on what we have seen or heard through media or others. However, when we actually visit a country and interact with its people, we realize that these stereotypes are overly simplified and do not capture the complexity and richness of the culture. This experience challenges our assumptions and helps us develop a more nuanced understanding of the community we are visiting.

Furthermore, traveling also exposes us to different ways of life and cultural practices. We get to witness firsthand how people live, work, and interact in various parts of the world. This exposure helps us understand that there are different ways to approach life, and our way isn't necessarily the only or the best way. We learn to appreciate the diversity of human experiences and challenge our own beliefs and values. By stepping out of our comfort zone and immersing ourselves in different cultures, we become more open-minded and accepting of different perspectives.

Additionally, traveling provides us with opportunities to engage in meaningful conversations with locals. By talking to people from different backgrounds, we learn about their customs, traditions, and history. We gain insights into their joys, struggles, and aspirations. These conversations help us develop a sense of empathy and compassion towards others, as we realize that despite our differences, there are universal human experiences that connect us all. We also learn to value the importance of cultural context in shaping people's lives and understand that our own experiences and beliefs are shaped by our cultural background.

Moreover, traveling pushes us to step outside of our comfort zone and face new challenges. Whether it's navigating through unfamiliar territories or trying new foods, traveling forces us to adapt to different situations and embrace the unknown. This experience builds resilience and a sense of humility, as we realize that we are just a small part of a vast and diverse world. We become more tolerant and patient, understanding that not everything will go as planned, and that's okay.

In conclusion, traveling is a powerful tool for developing empathy and understanding towards different cultures. It breaks down stereotypes, exposes us to different ways of life, fosters meaningful conversations, and pushes us out of our comfort zone. Through these experiences, we learn to appreciate diversity, challenge our own beliefs, and develop a more inclusive worldview. So, the next time you have the opportunity to travel, embrace it wholeheartedly, and let it change your mind for the better.

Understanding the Importance of the F1 Visa Travel Document Number

Traveling has the incredible power to change our minds and open us up to new perspectives. By immersing ourselves in new cultures, environments, and experiences, we challenge our preconceived notions and beliefs. Here are a few ways in which traveling can transform our minds:

• Experiencing cultural diversity: One of the most enriching aspects of travel is the opportunity to experience different cultures. When we visit a foreign country, we are exposed to new traditions, customs, and ways of thinking that may differ significantly from our own. This exposure expands our horizons and helps us understand that there are multiple ways of living and perceiving the world. We learn to appreciate the beauty of diversity and gain a deeper understanding of our own values and beliefs.
• Breaking down stereotypes: Traveling allows us to challenge the stereotypes and misconceptions we may have about certain cultures or countries. By meeting local people and spending time with them, we realize that the realities on the ground are often very different from what is portrayed in the media or popular culture. This firsthand experience breaks down our stereotypes and helps us see people as individuals rather than representatives of a larger group.
• Appreciating different perspectives: When we travel, we often find ourselves in situations that are outside of our comfort zones. We may encounter different ways of doing things or encounter cultural practices that seem strange or unfamiliar. Instead of dismissing these differences, traveling encourages us to appreciate and learn from them. We start to see the world through the eyes of others and gain a new appreciation for alternative perspectives. This openness allows us to broaden our thinking and challenge our own preconceived notions.
• Developing empathy and compassion: Traveling exposes us to new realities and challenges us to understand and empathize with people whose lives may be very different from our own. By witnessing different ways of life, we become more aware of the struggles, joys, and dreams of people around the world. This exposure cultivates empathy and compassion within us, as we realize that we are all connected by our shared humanity. We learn to be more tolerant, understanding, and inclusive towards others.
• Gaining a sense of gratitude: When we step outside of our familiar surroundings and encounter different cultures, we become acutely aware of the privileges and opportunities we have in our own lives. Whether it's access to clean water, education, or healthcare, traveling often exposes us to stark differences in living conditions. This realization fosters a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation for what we have. We become more mindful of the things we often take for granted and develop a renewed sense of gratitude for the blessings in our lives.

In conclusion, traveling has the power to change our minds by introducing us to new perspectives, breaking down stereotypes, fostering empathy, and cultivating gratitude. By embracing these experiences and challenging our preconceived notions, we become more open-minded, compassionate, and understanding individuals. So, next time you have the opportunity, pack your bags, and embark on a journey that will not only take you to new places but also transform your mind.

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Traveling can be a transformative experience that fosters personal growth and self-discovery. Stepping out of your comfort zone and exploring new places can have a profound impact on your mindset, outlook on life, and overall well-being. Here are some ways in which traveling can change your mind and help you grow as an individual:

• Broadens Your Perspective: Traveling exposes you to different cultures, traditions, and ways of life. It allows you to see the world from a different perspective and challenges the assumptions and biases you may have held. By immersing yourself in a new environment, you learn to appreciate diversity and develop a more open-minded attitude towards people from different backgrounds.
• Pushes You Out of Your Comfort Zone: Traveling often involves facing unfamiliar situations and navigating through the unknown. Whether it's trying new foods, communicating in a foreign language, or adapting to local customs, traveling pushes you to step out of your comfort zone. This helps you build resilience, adaptability, and self-confidence, as you learn to overcome challenges and embrace new experiences.
• Promotes Self-Reflection: Traveling provides ample opportunities for self-reflection. When you're in a new place, away from the demands and distractions of everyday life, you have the time and space to introspect and reflect on your own values, goals, and priorities. This self-reflection allows you to gain a deeper understanding of yourself, what truly matters to you, and what you want to achieve in life.
• Encourages Independence and Problem-Solving: When you're traveling, you often have to rely on yourself to navigate through unfamiliar territories and deal with unexpected situations. This fosters a sense of independence and self-reliance as you learn to tackle challenges on your own. Figuring out how to navigate public transportation, find accommodation, or communicate with locals in a foreign language can significantly improve your problem-solving skills and boost your confidence in your own abilities.
• Builds Empathy and Compassion: Interacting with people from different cultures and backgrounds can help you develop empathy and compassion. When you see firsthand the different struggles and challenges that people face in different parts of the world, you become more understanding and empathetic towards others. This newfound empathy can extend beyond your travels and positively impact your relationships and interactions with people in your everyday life.
• Sparks Creativity and Inspiration: Traveling to new places can inspire you in countless ways. Experiencing different landscapes, architectures, cuisines, and traditions can ignite your creativity and open your mind to new possibilities. You may find yourself inspired to try new hobbies, pursue new interests, or even make significant changes in your career or lifestyle as a result of the experiences and insights gained during your travels.
• Enhances Personal Development: Traveling provides endless opportunities for personal development. It enables you to learn new skills, gain knowledge about different cultures, and develop a sense of self-awareness. You may discover hidden talents, develop new interests, or even redefine your goals and aspirations. Traveling challenges you to step outside of your comfort zone and grow as an individual.

In conclusion, traveling is a powerful catalyst for personal growth and self-discovery. It broadens your perspective, pushes you out of your comfort zone, promotes self-reflection, encourages independence and problem-solving, builds empathy and compassion, sparks creativity and inspiration, and enhances personal development. So, if you haven't already, start planning your next trip and embark on a journey that will change your mind and transform your life.

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Frequently asked questions.

Traveling exposes you to new cultures, perspectives, and experiences, which can broaden your horizons and challenge your existing beliefs and mindset. It forces you to step out of your comfort zone and adapt to new environments, leading to personal growth and a shift in mindsets.

Yes, traveling presents various challenges and obstacles that require quick thinking and problem-solving skills. Whether it's navigating a foreign city, overcoming language barriers, or dealing with unexpected situations, traveling encourages you to think on your feet and find creative solutions, ultimately improving your problem-solving abilities.

Absolutely. Traveling allows you to see different ways of life, customs, and traditions, providing a firsthand understanding of different cultures and perspectives. It helps break down stereotypes, fosters empathy, and enables you to see the world from a more comprehensive and open-minded perspective.

Traveling pushes you to step outside your comfort zone and face unfamiliar situations, which promotes personal growth. It challenges your beliefs, exposes you to new experiences, and helps you overcome fears and limitations, ultimately leading to increased self-confidence, self-awareness, and personal development.

Yes, traveling stimulates creativity by exposing you to new environments, people, and experiences. It inspires you to think differently, encourages you to embrace spontaneity, and opens your mind to new ideas and perspectives, all of which can significantly enhance your creative thinking and problem-solving abilities.

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Traveling broadens our mind and exposes us to new people, situations and cultures that we previously never knew existed. In turn, this opens us up to making new friends and learning invaluable lessons from new experiences. So, it should come as no surprise that there is actually scientific proof that traveling boosts our creativity.

Have you ever taken a trip and come back feeling slightly different? Perhaps it’s a new step in your thought process as you try to solve a problem. Or maybe you’re hit with a stroke of “genius” as a new idea develops deep within your brain. You’re not imagining it. A study published by the American Psychological Association shows that traveling can spark a person’s mind to see outside the box by cultivating a trifecta of traits that lead to heightened creativity.

But studies show not everyone gets the same effect from traveling – a lot of it depends on our ability to engage, immerse and adapt.

Engage to Open Your Mind

Professor Adam Galinsky of the Columbia Business School has conducted multiple studies on the correlation between creativity and international travel. He states that engaging in local culture and embracing a new environment and its surroundings is critical in gaining creativity. Our perspective broadens when we integrate what we’ve learned from outside influences (like new cultures) and we are able to understand what we never knew existed before. Therefore, his conclusion is that those who engage more, gain more.

What does “engagement” really look like? It means getting up, getting out, striking up a conversation with the locals and overall absorbing as much of the environment as possible.

Immerse to Stimulate Innovation

Engaging is a crucial first step, but don’t stop there. Take it one step further by implementing the meaning of this phrase: When in Rome, do what the Romans do. This age-old travel expression hits the nail on the head when it comes to immersing in a new culture.

It means letting go of our fears of looking, sounding, or feeling silly and just going with the flow. If that conversation you started with the locals progresses into an invite to their home for dinner – go for it. You’ll get a peek at how life is really like for people living in that country which is something the average tourist ever gets to see.

How else can you immerse yourself? Try new food. Eat and drink what the locals do, even if you think it’s a bit strange. Ask questions. Find out why things are done a certain way instead of just accepting it without question. Partake in local customs. Get off the beaten path. Get lost. Do the things that the rest of the tourists aren’t doing. Being as “local” as possible helps us to gain a deeper understanding of a place, its inner workings and its people.

Adapt to Gain Self-Confidence

Finally, traveling and learning to adapt to unfamiliar situations in an unknown territory works wonders for self-confidence. Drawing on these feelings of confidence can result in having the guts to make one of your future ideas a reality, which directly promotes creativity.

How does traveling help you gain confidence? Your ability to meet and engage with people from a background other than your own enhances your sense of self. The satisfaction that comes with successfully communicating with people outside of our own country expands our abilities to think outside of the box and bring more creative solutions to the table. The more flexible and adaptive you are, the more creative you’ll become in every aspect of your life.

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Why travel broadens the mind

• April 27, 2018

You may have heard and are familiar with the saying that travel broadens the mind, but is it actually true? In fact, traveling not only benefits your mind and helps you to create lasting memories, but it can also fill your soul thanks to all those experiences and lessons that you learn along the way. If you are feeling stuck in a rut, or perhaps that you are no longer as creative as you would like to be, then this could be a sign that you too should book a trip and get ready to use your brain to its full capacity. Do not be afraid to explore new countries and expand your mind.

Stress less

If you currently feel stressed and are permanently cranky, then this could be a sign that you need to take a break or even a shorter vacation to help with your stress levels. Travel is great to allow your mind a break and provide your entire body with the opportunity to unwind and rejuvenate. Plus, if you are exploring new surroundings, then you have no reason at all to feel stressed. As each and every day is different while you are out and about on the road, then you have no reason to get worked up about the usual things that would usually cause you to see red. So, if you are looking for a way to get happy and feel like your mental health has seriously improved, then get your passport ready and open your suitcase – as a trip should be on the top of your priority list.

Cope under pressure

If you usually find it difficult to cope under pressure, or struggle to make decisions, then believe it or not, travel can help you to learn to act and deal with your emotions better. When you are planning a trip, you will need to learn to cope under pressure before you have even left home, from getting planning and preparing for any adventures that you want to experience along the way, to dealing with delayed flights and travel arrangements that don’t follow suit.

If you find it difficult to act on the spur of the moment, then this too is a skill that you can learn while you are away from home. You will no longer feel overwhelmed, in fact, you may even relish having no deadlines or pressures to help you make important decisions. So, if you feel that you are no longer decisive, or have increasingly growing stress levels, then it is high time that you considered travel as the ideal way to become a calmer and more grounded individual.

If you are keen to learn new skills and get out of your comfort zone, then planning and undertaking a trip is the ideal opportunity to do so. From trying out a new sport, to basics such as getting organized and packing light, there is no better way to learn something new if you are living in paradise or against a backdrop of glaciers and mountains. Now you are traveling and have lots of new, free time, you will be able to spend moments honing your current interests, such as writing and photography or even painting, to pursuing different areas that have always interested you – but perhaps you have never had time to explore. Travel is the perfect chance to get fit, grow culturally and make the most of your free time to the maximum so you that you arrive home with a new talent under your belt.

Broaden your thought process

If you are usually very set in your ways and find it hard to break away from your daily routine, then travel could be the ideal way to broaden your mind and shape up how you view the world. From spending time volunteering to interacting with other cultures or indigenous groups, you should approach your new trip as a blank slate against which you can get ready to expand and explore your horizons. Plus, you may even feel inspired and decide that you want to make a change to your home life after a trip too, you may even decide to quit your current job or even relocate to follow your dreams. So if you are keen to see the world in a new light, and feel that you want to broaden your horizons, then a trip is the ideal way to rethink how you currently approach your daily routine and make several changes for the better – that will benefit you in the future.

Have the trip of a lifetime

If you are looking to create memories that will last you a lifetime, then consider planning a trip. If you’re unsure on how to plan your trip, companies such as Aurora Expeditions specialize in unique destinations. While destinations such as the Sahara, Niagara Falls and even Everest are all reachable, if you start planning and saving you’ll be able to see as much of the world as possible. Planning the trip of a lifetime will put all of your aptitudes to the test, from budgeting and route planning to ensuring that everything is ready before you leave home.

If you feel that you are stuck in a rut and want to make a change to your life for the better, but are unsure how, then why not consider planning a trip? Travel broadens the mind, as it teaches you to cope better under pressure and manage your stress levels while being several thousand miles away from home. Not to mention, travel is the ideal opportunity to learn new skills and practice your current interests. So, if you want to feed both your mind and soul while making memories and gaining experiences that will last you a lifetime or more, then consider planning a trip you won’t regret.

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The Morning

When travel plans go awry.

There are ways of keeping ourselves anchored, even when we enter a parallel universe disconnected from time.

By Melissa Kirsch

The weekend trip is, in theory, the perfect break. Two nights someplace else, just a small duffel bag and limited logistics standing between you and a reset. Leave on Friday, come back Sunday, fill the hours in between with enough that’s novel and return refreshed, or at least with a slightly altered perspective. You might take a weekend trip for vacation or work or to see family, but the effect is the same. You’re a little changed on return. You see your regular life a little bit differently.

I took what was meant to be a quick trip last weekend to attend a college graduation, and it was, strictly speaking, quick: I was scarcely away for 48 hours, but extreme weather marooned me for most of those hours in the liminal spaces of transit — airports, grounded planes, traffic jams — where time loses legibility. An old friend used to call these neither-here-nor-there realms the “zero world” for the way they feel unfastened from reality, parallel to daily life but separate. The flight cabin after an announcement of a fourth lightning delay is a world detached from the one you know, a temporary society populated by temporary citizens with perhaps not much in common save one deeply held belief: We need to get out of here.

I was as cranky and impatient as the rest of my fellow travelers at each complication in our journeys, but also fascinated by the communities and customs and Cibo Express markets of the zero world. Each of us was, at any given time, one captain’s announcement away from a temper tantrum, but we were also competitively careful to be polite to one another and to the airline staff, as if determined to demonstrate that those wild videos of short-tempered passengers being duct-taped to their seats did not represent us, the makeshift civilization of this departure lounge.

Graduation, when I finally arrived, was a joyous affair despite the glitches. The speaker, an astronaut, showed a photo of the farm where she grew up, the place she thought of as home for much of her life. Then she showed a photo of the limb of the Earth, the glowing edge of the atmosphere, and described how, when she went to space, home was no longer a town on a map but this planet, a shift in perspective so massive I felt a little queasy contemplating it.

On Hour 3 in the airport bar on Sunday morning, beside two German travelers practicing Spanish, I ordered an omelet and imagined my own home, which felt very far away and lit by its own otherworldly halo. What would I be doing if I were there? Reading, texting, catching up on emails — the same things I was doing here. What was so bad about this? Was it the lack of choice? The lack of fresh air?

It was all those things, and also the feeling of being trapped in a warp between origin and destination. My emotions felt out of proportion to the situation: I hadn’t traveled very far for very long, was in no peril and would still arrive in New York with enough day left to do whatever needed to be done, but I felt on the verge of tears, loosed from my moorings, floating between fixed points, dislocated. I put on my headphones, put on a favorite band whose songs are so familiar they provide a home base no matter where I am. I listened to the same album on repeat for the duration of the flight, in the car on the way home, even at home once I finally made it there.

There’s a story in The Times today about how A.S.M.R., the pleasant, brain-tingling feeling we get when hearing certain sounds or watching certain comforting scenes, has become a feature of all viral internet content, not just specialized videos devoted to inducing the sensation. You can still put on a very specific video of someone whispering into a microphone or crinkling paper, but you’re just as likely to find the stimuli in videos of people cooking or cleaning their pools. This seems like a logical extension. We’re restless beasts in need of soothing. Sometimes we’re dramatically homesick, sometimes it’s just a bad day. Why not imbue the mundane with the choreography of comfort? Why not add pleasure whenever and wherever we can?

For weekend travel inspiration: The Times’s 36 Hours series.

How to deal with the increasing unpredictability of travel .

Stunning views of Earth from space .

How A.S.M.R. became a sensation.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

The final round of the Eurovision Song Contest takes place in Sweden today. This year’s favorites include a Croatian techno act called Baby Lasagna. Read , or listen to , a guide to the competition.

“I won’t let anything break me”: Eden Golan, Israel’s 20-year-old entrant, spoke to The Times about the campaign to exclude her country from the event because of the war in Gaza.

The stage crew has 50 seconds to disassemble and reassemble sets. Watch a video from The Wall Street Journal .

Film and TV

“It’s easy to get caught up in the bigness of it all”: Owen Teague, the star of the latest “Planet of the Apes” film, and Andy Serkis, the lead in the earlier movies, sat down for a conversation .

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” is not as transporting as the previous trilogy of films, the Times critic Alissa Wilkinson writes , but “there’s still a tremendous amount to mull over.”

The latest season of “Doctor Who,” starring Ncuti Gatwa as the 15th actor to play the doctor, opened with a double episode. Read a recap.

Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a plan to bundle their Disney+, Hulu and Max streaming services this summer

The recording engineer Steve Albini, who died this week at 61, was “arguably the most influential figure ever to emerge from indie rock,” Pitchfork wrote . Listen to 10 of his essential tracks , which shaped the sound of alternative rock music.

Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s rap beef crashed the website Genius , where users can annotate lyrics to songs. Times critics discussed where the rappers’ sonic conflict goes next .

Other Big Stories

A stage version of the beloved animated film “Spirited Away” is running in London, after premiering in Japan. The adaptation is opulent and impressive, but it could use more heart , our critic writes.

A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction that would bar the Des Moines Art Center from dismantling “Greenwood Pond: Double Site,” an environmental work by Mary Miss that includes wooden walkways and sitting areas in need of repair.

The owners of the Los Angeles house where Marilyn Monroe last lived, and died, sued the city, accusing officials of “backroom machinations” to save it from a planned demolition .

David Shapiro, a lyrical poet who appeared in a famous photograph from the 1968 uprising at Columbia University, died at 77 .

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-Hamas War

A Biden administration report said that Israel may have broken international law in Gaza, but that Israel’s “credible and reliable” assurances mean the U.S. can keep sending weapons.

The Biden administration is still waiting for Israel to show how it plans to evacuate and protect civilians in Rafah ahead of a possible invasion.

The U.N. General Assembly voted to support Palestinian statehood , a symbolic move. The U.S. voted no, and Israel accused delegates of “shredding the U.N. charter.”

Michael Cohen, who paid Stormy Daniels hush money and whom prosecutors say Donald Trump reimbursed, is expected to testify Monday in Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial. The judge asked prosecutors to stop Cohen from criticizing Trump .

Russia tried to break through Ukrainian lines in the country’s north using shelling and armored columns. Ukraine said it had repelled the attacks.

Russia is upgrading a munitions depot in Belarus, possibly to house nuclear weapons , a Times analysis of satellite imagery found.

The Biden administration plans to raise tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to protect U.S. auto manufacturers.

Apple is revamping Siri to offer more advanced A.I. responses , akin to ChatGPT.

An appeals court upheld Steve Bannon’s conviction for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee. He could soon have to serve prison time.

A Virginia school board voted to restore the names of Confederate leaders — including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson — to two schools, reversing its 2020 decision to rename them .

CULTURE CALENDAR

By Desiree Ibekwe

🎥 Back to Black (Friday): You may well have seen the online discussion about this movie, an Amy Winehouse biopic directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. The movie — which focuses on Winehouse’s relationship with Blake Fielder-Civil — was No. 1 at the British box office but divided viewers and critics, some of whom found fault with the appearance of its star, Marisa Abela. “I don’t need to convince people that they’re actually watching Amy,” Abela told The Times . “I need to remind people of her soul.”

RECIPE OF THE WEEK

By Melissa Clark

Strawberry Shortcake

It’s Mother’s Day tomorrow, and if your mom has a sweet tooth (and if so, I can relate), Jane Grigson’s strawberry shortcake as adapted by Nancy Harmon Jenkins might be just the thing for a celebratory brunch. Make the biscuit dough and cut out the rounds the day before (just keep them in the fridge until baking time). Then, while they’re in the oven, you can macerate the berries (any kind you like) with sugar and prep the whipped cream. Be sure to save any leftover biscuits. They’re excellent toasted for breakfast the next day.

REAL ESTATE

The hunt: An American took a chance on the Lake Geneva area of Eastern France, with a $300,000 budget. Which home did she buy? Play our game .

What you get for $900,000: A Frank Lloyd Wright house in Wilmette, Ill.; an 1879 three-bedroom house in Wilmington, N.C.; or a renovated ranch house in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Free help: A filmmaker, feeling unhelpful in her daily life, decided to offer small favors to passers-by in Union Square.

Made for walking: Brides are increasingly pairing cowboy boots with relaxed silhouetted dresses.

Scarlett Johansson: The actress shared her beauty regimen with T Magazine.

How to: Restoring a chair is easier than one might think . Here’s how a couple known as the Brownstone Boys did it.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Food processors, blenders and choppers.

Countertop appliances can help you get a meal on the table faster, often with less work and a quicker cleanup. But deciding which gizmo is best for you can be a challenge. It depends on what kinds of foods you most frequently prepare, Wirecutter’s kitchen experts say. For example, if your main goal is to reduce the time you spend prepping ingredients, a food processor is likely your best bet. If you demand the smoothest, silkiest textures from your soups, sauces and smoothies (and have ample storage space), consider a full-size blender. Oh, and those TikTok-famous manual vegetable choppers ? No one needs those. — Rose Lorre

GAMES OF THE WEEK

W.N.B.A. season openers: A once-in-a-generation group enters the W.N.B.A. next week. You may already know their names: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink, Kamilla Cardoso. Their college matchups shattered viewership records, and their pro draft last month did the same. The W.N.B.A. is trying to seize the moment: Nearly all of Clark’s games with the Indiana Fever will be national broadcasts , and some of her games are moving to bigger arenas to meet fan demand.

The season begins Tuesday, as Clark and the Fever face the Connecticut Sun and M.V.P. contender Alyssa Thomas. After that, the two-time defending champion Las Vegas Aces play Brittney Griner and the Phoenix Mercury. 7:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern on ESPN2

More coverage

Clark and Cardoso are featured in a documentary series , “Full Court Press,” airing on ABC this weekend, which follows them through their final season of college.

The W.N.B.A. is expanding : The league plans to add a 13th team, in the San Francisco area, next season, and a 14th, in Toronto, the year after.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was uncloak .

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed this week’s headlines.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku , Connections and Strands .

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times. — Melissa

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox . Reach our team at [email protected] .

Melissa Kirsch is the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle at The Times and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays. More about Melissa Kirsch

Self-Esteem

Mental time travel boosts sense of control and self-esteem, imagining oneself in the future or recalling a nostalgic past can be beneficial..

Posted May 12, 2024 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• What Is Self-Esteem?
• Find a therapist near me
• “Mental time travel” may increase self-esteem and a sense of coherence and control.
• One aspect of mental time travel is reliving nostalgic events from the past (called retrospection).
• Another aspect involves imagining oneself in the future (called prospection).

Published in Personality and Social Psychology Review , a recent study by Stephan and Sedikides suggests mental time travel can increase self-esteem , coherence, and sense of control.

But what is mental time travel? Let me use an example.

A friend of mine who is in a committed romantic relationship and very much in love tells me that he often relives the day he and his partner first met. He also imagines what their future would be like (e.g., their wedding day, their life as parents).

In both cases, my friend is engaging in mental time travel .

Simply put, mental time travel involves projecting oneself either forward or backward in time. As illustrated, reliving a past event requires reconstructing it from memory , whereas pre-living a potential future event requires imagination .

Benefits of Imagining the Future

Imagining yourself in the distant future (called prospection) allows you to step back and see the bigger picture—to focus on living according to your core values, achieving long-term goals , and living a satisfying and meaningful life.

It also enhances the feeling that future outcomes are under your control. It promotes the belief that your intentions, determination, and commitment will make goal pursuit possible no matter what challenges come your way. Finally, prospection may even increase self-esteem.

Benefits of Nostalgia and Recalling the Past

The same is true of moving backward in time and nostalgizing.

Nostalgia refers to longing and affection for valued past events and a desire to re-experience them. Previous research shows nostalgia can be an important psychological and relationship resource.

For instance, it can help people cope with boredom and meaninglessness . Romantic nostalgia may enhance passion, intimacy, commitment, and relationship satisfaction. Even nostalgic memories of an ex-romantic partner may have benefits and influence perceptions of self-growth .

Self-Affirmation

Mental time travel emphasizes aspects of the self that are positive, abstract, and central to one’s identity , as opposed to aspects that are negative or situation-specific. In other words, it stresses long-term goals, personal values, and positive personality traits, instead of current behaviors and more immediate plans and goals.

Therefore, mental time travel serves as self-affirmation . The core facets of self-affirmation include:

• Control: Feeling empowered to pursue desired goals; believing one can influence valued outcomes.
• Self-esteem: Having a positive subjective evaluation of one’s worth (i.e., liking yourself).
• Coherence: Being able to make sense of one’s experiences and to see life as meaningful.

How Does Mental Time Travel Foster Self-Validation?

To explain how mental time travel can promote self-validation and self-affirmation, let's look at another example, this one courtesy of an old classmate (let’s call her Emma).

Emma told me that before applying to nursing school, she failed a genetics course, which really affected her self-confidence . She felt stupid, incompetent, and worthless.

Eventually, Emma decided to engage in mental time travel—both recalling nostalgic events and imagining herself in the future. Doing so facilitated perspective-taking and seeing the bigger picture: She became more deeply aware of her core values (e.g., authenticity , social justice, making a difference) and positive personality traits (e.g., creativity , compassion , sensitivity, and gratitude ).

And failing genetics no longer defined her.

Additionally, Emma found that by engaging in prospection and retrospection regularly, subsequent challenges became increasingly manageable, including those she faces now in her teaching career as a nursing professor. Consistent with this, Stephan and Sedikides propose that “self-affirmation might serve to strengthen the psychological immune system in non-threatening situations, thus protecting against potential future threats.”

Threats to the adequacy and integrity of one’s sense of self come in many shapes and forms: getting fired, being rejected romantically by a desired mate, receiving negative health news, failing a course or getting a bad grade, etc.

The research discussed suggests that by imagining one’s future self or recalling nostalgic memories, one could get in touch with who they truly are—as defined by their positive personality traits, core values, and long-term goals.

Several positive psychology interventions could be helpful for this purpose, such as nostalgia interventions .

Or, consider the Best Possible Self exercise. Take some time to picture a future where everything in your life has gone as well as possible. Imagine living life in full accordance with your values, having accomplished all your most important goals and realized all your dreams .

What does such a happy, successful life look like? Write about it. This exercise has been shown to improve mood, optimism , and well-being.

Arash Emamzadeh attended the University of British Columbia in Canada, where he studied genetics and psychology. He has also done graduate work in clinical psychology and neuropsychology in U.S.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

This Slide-Open Prefab Was Designed to Set Your Brain on "Default Mode"

The ANNA cabin splits in half to open the interior and, the creator says, your mind to nature.

Welcome to Prefab Profiles , an ongoing series of interviews with people transforming how we build houses. From prefab tiny houses and modular cabin kits to entire homes ready to ship, their projects represent some of the best ideas in the industry. Do you know a prefab brand that should be on our radar? Get in touch!

Cabin ANNA  began in 2016  as a way for Caspar Schols and his family to cope with a personal tragedy. At his mother’s request, he built a refuge on her rural forested property where the family "would feel connected and feel one," says Schols. "I started dreaming of how we could be surrounded by life instead of shielded from it." In ten months, the once physicist completed the Garden House: a prototype of what would, to his own surprise, turn into a much larger project oriented toward a deeper connection with the planet. We asked Schols about to tell us more about ANNA , what he looks for in a potential client, and his plans for a more affordable model.

What’s the most exciting project you’ve realized to date?

This cabin in De Biesbosch in the Netherlands, a wildlife reserve. For next year, we’re looking forward to working with ten unique clients and locations in both E.U. and U.S.

Who are your clients?

They range from nature reserves, to people that want to add a cabin to their estate as a place for friends and family to stay, to beautiful eco-resorts. They are all uniquely different. We select our clients based on their story and location, and whether we share a similar vision of the world, a world in which people live close to nature and in balance with it. One client has an estate meant for anyone who’s feeling burnt out and needs to reconnect to the essentials. What all of our clients have in common is that they’re all extremely conscious of mental health and the planet.

How does the cabin align with this vision?

ANNA is a tool to reconnect to nature. All of our projects revolve in one way or the other around that. When I returned home to the Netherlands after my studies, I met Margriet Sitskoorn, professor of clinical neuropsychology at Tilburg University. She was able to explain why ANNA’s sliding layers, operated by muscle power, are so important to the design. Her reasoning goes like this: The brain is wired to understand what we can do with an object, based on the interaction between the properties of the object and the motor system of the human body. Therefore, the brain gets "confused" when the act or movement of the body is not aligned with the action that was set in motion. This is often the case when we interact with electronic devices like computers and iPhones.

So, let’s say, if ANNA’s layers were operated electronically, you would press a button with one finger and as a result a whole 2,500-kilogram section would start to slide. Your mind has set about the movement of an object, but your body was barely involved. The body and mind are, therefore, not aligned.

When your mind and body are aligned, however, it strengthens the experience. When you push the layers of ANNA by hand, the body prepares the mind to open up and connect to the natural environment. It’s not just the physical boundaries that disappear, psychological boundaries simultaneously dissolve too. Your inner and outer world become one. You are fully immersed in the moment.

In professor Sitskoorn’s terms, our thinking and feeling determine our actions but our actions also determine our thinking and feeling. This is called embodied cognition. And then, when you are fully immersed in a natural environment, your brain can relax and go into "default mode." In this state of reflection, transcendent experiences and recovery processes can get going, both being essential for our mental health.

See the full story on Dwell.com: This Slide-Open Prefab Was Designed to Set Your Brain on "Default Mode"

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