30 Reasons Why Traveling Is Important To Your Overall Wellness
I am preparing to travel with my family for eight days soon. Traveling is an essential component of personal growth, health, and wellness. It is also one of 12 important aspects of a balanced life. So in this post, you’ll learn 30 reasons why traveling is important to your overall wellness. I hope you’ll be able to plan some fun travel time soon, too!
The Importance of Traveling for Your Wellness
Before we learn the 30 reasons why traveling is important to your overall wellness, let’s be sure to understand the meaning of health and wellness.
What is Wellness?
Wellness is the act of practicing healthy habits to attain better outcomes for yourself, so instead of just surviving, you’re thriving in life. Each decision you make potentially has an impact on an important dimension of your wellness.
We view wellness as the active process of learning and increasing awareness about strategies that will enrich some component of your life and help you live a happier, healthier, longer life.
Wellness is multidimensional and encompasses your physical, emotional, intellectual, social, spiritual, environmental and occupational wellbeing. These are knowns as the 7 Dimensions of Wellness.
Basically, it is considered a positive approach to living.
Some examples of wellness habits include, but are not limited to:
- developing positive relationships with people
- being physically active and engaging in activities that you enjoy
- learning new skills and hobbies
- contributing to your community is some way
- paying attention to what’s going on around you and being mindful
- exploring the world around you in a curious way
- understanding and implementing strategies to treat yourself well
- traveling and exploring to enrich your life
The Difference Between Health and Wellness
Some people use these terms interchangeably. However, there is a slight difference. While they are closely connected, they also have differences.
Simply put, health is a state of being. Whereas wellness is a state of living a healthy lifestyle. Health refers to your physical, mental and social wellbeing. While wellness aims to enhance your life and wellbeing.
Health is that which you discuss with your doctor. How is your heart? How is your knee? What exercises can you do to help strengthen your back muscles? What medications should you take to help improve your health?
Wellness are the habits you develop to help achieve better health and wellbeing. Wellness habits may include growth mindset, adventurous travel, social outings with friends, developing an attitude of gratitude, and practicing empathy toward others.
What is Personal Growth?
Personal growth refers to various techniques and strategies that you implement to improve your habits, behavior, actions, thoughts, and reactions to circumstances in life.
Here are a few examples of personal growth:
- Learning to control your anger
- Overcoming the practice of procrastination
- Developing skills to be more polite and considerate toward others
- Becoming a more responsible person
- Learning new things and developing new skills
- Changing your mindset and becoming a more positive person
Motivation is a major component of success personal growth. You must have a desire to improve areas of weakness and the willingness to want to make changes.
You’ll see in other articles I’ve written that the terms self-improvement and personal growth are sometimes used interchangeably. Both refer to improving your skills, knowledge, character traits, personal values, life goals, and outlook.
When you seek to better yourself in some manner, you are demonstrating personal growth. It may be your temperament, your formal education, or your maturity. You are seeking personal growth.
So as you can see, all three of these terms are closely connected in several ways, but they are also slightly different.
As you read the rest of this article, you will see that traveling impacts all of them in many ways – it’s a life activity – something you choose to do to enhance your life and overall wellness. Thus, we have the title, “30 Reasons Why Traveling Is Important to Your Overall Wellness.” ENJOY!
30 Reasons Why Traveling Is Important to Your Overall Wellness
I’m going to keep this short and simple. I’m sure you will be able to relate to these 30 reasons to travel. I compiled these reasons from a variety of sources on the Internet and could relate to them based on my own personal experiences with travel. Hopefully you can, too!
I love traveling and it’s even better knowing so many reasons why travel is important!
Why Travel??? #1-15
#1. Traveling helps you manage stress, anxiety, and negative emotions.
#2. The process of planning a trip increases a sense of happiness and positivity.
#3. Traveling reduces the risk of depression.
#4. Vacationing improves your mood and helps boost happiness.
#5. It can also promote productivity and creativity.
#6. Science indicates that traveling reduces your risk of heart disease.
#7. Traveling enriches your life experiences and helps you understand the true essence of life.
#8. People who travel regularly are more satisfied with their health and overall well-being.
#9. Women who travel tend to be happier in their marriages and less tired in their day-to-day lives.
#10. Travel experiences help increase mindfulness and presence.
#11. There is a high correlation between travel experiences and and an increase in feelings of empathy because it helps you emotionally recharge.
#12. Travel boosts your immune system and helps create stronger antibodies because you are exposed to new and different environments.
#13. Traveling improves your brain health by expanding your knowledge-base and exercising your brain. You meet new people, adapt to new situations, and have new experiences that increase cognitive flexibility. This keeps your mind sharp!
#14. You develop a deeper sense of cultural awareness and personal growth through travel.
#15. Those who travel tend to be more open-minded and emotionally stable.
#16. You become more globally aware of life outside your usual circumstances when you travel. You become more enlightened about the ways of the world and different cultures.
#17. Traveling can actually help you get back in shape. Often, you are more physically active and have less time to eat the wrong foods. When you return home, you are more motivated to keep working on your health.
Why Travel Is Important #18-30
#18. Research indicates travel will help you live longer!
#19. Upon return from your vacation, you experience the nourishing effect of travel with a refreshed attitude and sense of relaxation.
#20. Travel gives your mind and body a complete reset by taking you out of your daily routine and into new surroundings. It’s like a reward that promotes celebratory feeling about life.
#21. Traveling with loved ones and friends promotes social health and opportunities to make happy memories together. Plus, you have opportunities to meet new people and develop new friendships.
#22. Travel often ignites a desire to see more, experience more, and not want to miss anything. This helps promote a desire to live a longer, healthier life.
#23. You sleep better when you’re traveling so it promotes improved sleep hygiene.
#24. Opportunities to travel help promote a sense of gratitude and positive mindset.
#25. Travel experiences give you great stories to share forever.
#26. Travel helps enhance your quality and quantity of life.
#27. Traveling helps you develop a deeper appreciation for different faiths and spirituality. You’ll discover different perspectives and ways of dealing with life within new cultures.
#28. You are more likely to do things on vacation that you would not do at home. Thus, traveling opens your world to new experiences and gets you out of your comfort zone.
#29. Travel can help shape you into a better and more well-rounded person because you learn new things from new places and different people. This gives you greater opportunities to explore your potential and who you want to be in life.
#30. Traveling can help you learn to be spontaneous and live without fear of the unknown.
Related Article: Adventure Quotes to Inspire Your Youthful Spirit
Why is Traveling Important?
There are more comprehensive or scientific articles on the Internet about why traveling is important. You can find them under searches for 1) Benefits of Traveling, 2) Importance of Travel, 3) Scientific Health Reasons for Travel, 4) Reasons to Travel, and many more.
But I wanted to keep my article short and simple for you and me.
We know travel is important for many reasons and there are many benefits. Even planning travel is exciting and gives us hope for fun times and making happy memories.
Today, it is even more important as we begin to come out of the pandemic and move forward with life as usual.
So I sincerely hope you will take these reasons to travel into consideration and plan something special to promote your health and wellness.
Related Article: Off On Our Next Adventure: Travel In America
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Traveling or Travelling Spelling?
Before I conclude, I thought you might be wondering (like me) why there are two ways to spell traveling – or travelling?
While I was researching, I kept seeing it spelled two different ways. In fact, while doing Search Engine Optimization research, I wondered how I should decide to spell it because it was spelled both ways.
As it turns out, traveling is the preferred way to spell it in the United States and travelling is the preferred way to spell it in England and Canada. The same applies to traveled and travelled, as well as traveler and traveller.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary considers the spelling with one /l/ to be correct but both forms of the word are acceptable spellings.
For the purpose of this article, since my target audience is primarily in the United States, I chose to spelling it with one /l/. Maybe I should consider rewriting the article someday with /ll/ for the rest of the English population!
But not today because I have travel to get to!
For more information about why travel is important, check out this New York University article, Traveling is Important for Mental Growth and Human Happiness.
In Conclusion: Why Is It Important to Travel?
You should never have to wonder why traveling is important again. You should have clarity about why traveling is good for you! It is important to your physical health, mental health, social health, emotional health, and spiritual growth.
You do not have to go abroad to benefit from travel. You don’t have to spend a small fortune. Traveling helps grow your mind and spirit wherever you go.
Just plan a short trip, or a vacation where you spend time outside in nature. Any kind of travel will help you enhance your personal growth and wellness.
Good luck and thank you for hanging with me! I am heading to Nashville next week with my family and hope to return refreshed, rejuvenated, more culturally aware, and filled with many happy memories!
Love to All! ~Susan
P.S. This is a particularly good time to share this article with your friends and family as they plan their summer vacations. If you found it helpful, please share it. I appreciate your support!
P.S.S. If you are interested in travel adventures related to ANIMALS, check out this article about my FAVORITE ANIMAL PARK!
Very nice article. I love that you were thorough enough to address the question of spelling.
Thanks!
Thanks Kyle! That was driving me crazy! I couldn’t figure out why it is spelled two different ways until I looked it up! xoxo