Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
1) Traveling makes you a better learner. Traveling empowers the learner inside of us. Increases our curiosity and humility. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that kids who study abroad were more humble than those who didn’t travel.
2) Traveling makes you sharper. Being in the outdoors refreshes your senses in a way no office air ever could. The latest evidence in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, researchers found that people who simply looked at the photo of nature for only 40 seconds had improved focus and performance on their next task.
3) Traveling increases your faith in humanity. Maddox found in his research that traveling the world increases your faith in humanity. The more foreign countries people travel to the more their sense of generalized trust increases. Seeing all of the good that exists in the world, makes it easier to trust that most people, for the most part, are just trying to do the right thing.
4) Traveling makes you more creative. A recent study from the Academy of Management Journal found that people who worked overseas were more imaginative and inspired than those who stayed in their home country. People who integrate a new culture into their identities are more creative in their long run. Doing as the locals do for an extended period of time, opens up your mind forcing you to think in different ways, and bounce around between different ideas. It’s a concept scientist called, COGNITIVE FLEXIBILITY. And the more cognitive flexible you are, the more creative you will be.
5) Traveling gives you a wider perspective. Travel gives you a bird’s eye view. Traveling helps us look at our lives from a distance both physically and metaphorically. And when you do that, you’re able to see things a lot more clearly.
6) Traveling makes us happier. A new study from the Psychological Science found that anticipating an experience before it even happened, makes you happier than if you’re waiting for something tangible like a new smartphone.
7) Traveling makes you more patient. Dealing with delays, mishaps, and different cultures doing travels makes you much more patient and understanding person overall.
And this is my favorite thought, at first travel leaves you speechless, and then it turns you into a storyteller.
