Traveling Improves Your Brain Health

Traveling improves your brain health, because moving away from our daily maps to discover other lands, new winds and suggestive scenarios has incredible benefits. Our cognitive structures “light up” when we reactivate the reward circuits, we break with the routine and the knot of stress and anxiety lose strength to free the mind and awaken our emotions.

Everybody needs a vacation. However, and as curious as it may be, there are a good number of workers who cannot or do not want to take those days of needed rest. Others, on the other hand, do not know how to really “disconnect”, reduce the pace and remove responsibilities.

This explains, for example, how the rate of cardiovascular accidents continues to increase every year: we have become an exhausted society that does not know how to rest.

The solution to that problem is simple: take a trip. Now, it is not necessary to stray too far from our own latitude, it is not necessary to leave kilometers behind us until we find another language and other time zones.

There are towns and cities nearby that we do not know and that will also give us the same result. They will allow us to get away from the everyday, offer the brain new stimuli and break those thought patterns in which we remain trapped throughout the year.

Traveling improves your brain health: 5 ways it does it

Sometimes you have to: leave to be able to return. Leaving our ordinary universes to return to them with renewed strength. Because a trip leaves no one indifferent, it always rewards, always offers something in return that benefits us and allows us to be a little better in every way. Likewise, the act of daring to breathe in another latitude, in another hemisphere or even in the next town, is an adventure that has no age.

Because traveling is not just for young hearts and feet. There are multiple studies that support the fact that taking regular getaways during middle age and later in life significantly improves our health. As we get older and older, nothing can be more positive than breaking routines and allowing our minds to open up to new experiences and stimuli . So let’s see why traveling improves your brain health.

1. Activate and optimize our cognitive processes

• Arriving at a new stage forces us to use more brain resources. We have to look at maps, make use of our spatial intelligence to orient ourselves, to remember certain routes, streets, meeting points, organize routes …
• Traveling also improves our attention, we are more motivated and this helps us to settle memories and data more easily and in a more meaningful way.

2. Greater neural connections

Every trip in one way or another forces us to do something new, to leave even certain fears behind. Get on a plane, travel by boat, ride a cable car, ride a horse or a camel, break the ice to speak other languages ​​or even why not, give us the opportunity to take a solo trip.

All these experiences generate new connections in our brain. Dopamine and serotonin levels rise, blood circulation improves, we oxygenate the brain … All these new and positive stimuli “turn on and illuminate” our neurons and brain tissues. It is, so to speak, the best energy we can give you, is to exercise this organ to the maximum to gain agility and cognitive reserve.

3. Improve our empathy

Traveling is good for your brain because what we put the most to work is connection. We connect with the environment, we connect with new sensations, flavors and experiences … And we also connect with the people who surround us and whom we meet in each of these getaways. Something as essential as undressing ourselves from our customs to introduce ourselves to new ones allows us the world with greater humility and closeness.

Traveling makes us more tolerant, reveals other personal perspectives different from our own and also forces us to apply a much more flexible thinking. All these dynamics also shape empathy, stimulate the ability to put ourselves in other people’s skin and see other realities just as special as ours.

4. Traveling stimulates creativity

Creativity has no age. That potential always resides within us, as does the ability to learn. However, our jobs and routines place us in repetitive circles where little or nothing new happens. Where the everyday ends up rusting us, where the lack of incentives and novelties reduces our ability to generate innovative ideas, inspiring thoughts.

If traveling improves your brain health, it is because it awakens your mind. Because it challenges your senses. Because it places you in landscapes never seen before with new faces, with unheard stories, untested foods, alleys that keep secrets, hidden shops with strange smells and nurtured by books and amazing objects.

Traveling is culture, we know, but it also favors an inner awakening, where we find inspiration and relativize concepts, ideas, old schemes. It is finding inspiration and allowing ourselves to learn new things that are rarely forgotten.

5. Improves mood and reduces stress

Traveling and enjoying each experience and that calm time, reduces the level of cortisol in our body to the maximum. The stress hormone returns to normal and we gain in well-being. There are no external pressures, just the opportunity to enjoy an environment and every stimulus inscribed in it: nature, effervescent cities, culture on every street or in every gallery, good food, beaches, museums or musical events …

Every getaway is a way to get the best out of ourselves, to meet again and also to transform ourselves. And we will do so through a more open, receptive and optimistic frame of mind.

Traveling improves your brain health because it pushes you to see the world in a broader and brighter perspective. So do not hesitate, sometimes it is worth having a passport full of stamps to a house full of interesting stories that we are able to narrate, alone and simply because we have lived them.