Traveling is exciting, inspiring, and entertaining. It’s our honor to stay in one world where travel is more comfortable and more affordable than ever and where globetrotters are more and more numerous – an estimated 1.18 billion people remain abroad each year.

While a beach vacation can be an excellent remedy, now and then, studies show that the most profitable trips – immersive, mildly ambitious, and long-lasting – can reconnect your brain and change the way you see the world. And they can make you a better person. Travelling Improve Our Overall Health & Creativity.

1. They Promote Empathy

Human beings are born to be empathic-the ability to feel other people’s pain, deeply embedded in our brains, is the foundation of any healthy relationship. But as with so many other issues, constant practice is needed.

Over the past two centuries, they had widened this “circle of empathy,” thus allowing individuals to have access to distant lives – and to open up to others – in a completely new way.

Yet, although we now have near-instant access to the world through our smartphones, we are too overwhelmed and distracted to care.

Because travel forces us to “leave the protection of our comfort zone,” as Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times pointed out, and meet new people and situations in the real world, it strengthens our capacity for empathy with others. of a broader range of individuals, much more significantly.

And empathy is related to travel and discovery in another way. Indeed, it has been shown that learning a new language and becoming bilingual, especially at the beginning of life, increases our capacity for empathy, allowing our brain to switch from one perspective to another naturally.

2. They Deepen Your Understanding Of The World

Travel helps make the unknown familiar, challenging the assumptions and stereotypes that often color our view of the world.

My own experience with street children in Tanzania has helped me understand both the Tanzanian working culture (the reasons why consensus is essential to all decision making, for example), as well as the resilience of children, confronted with rejection and violence daily.

This immersive experience, sometimes uncomfortable, allowed me to deepen my understanding of a culture and a reality barely glimpsed before, through a report distractedly traveled on the way to work or a safari story. A friend told me. This gave me more convenient access to Tanzanian and African culture.

Meeting and understanding others – without necessarily accepting everything from them – always leads to interacting with the world in a more benevolent way, without passing judgment.

3. They Increase Self-Awareness

Being more open to others also makes us more open to ourselves. A recent study has shown that living abroad – and questioning your values, encountering new situations and people daily – increases self-awareness. While this study focuses on life abroad, not travel, any long-term immersive trip would likely have the same effect.

The ability to juggle from idea to idea, which psychologists call “cognitive flexibility,” is a related concept, related to self-awareness and greater exposure to different perspectives. Travel allows us to keep a certain “flexibility” of mind by questioning our ways of doing and seeing things. Besides, in doing so, they will enable us to develop the most valuable skill of all: creativity.

4. It Makes You More Creative

In the age of automation and a world of work set to transform beyond recognition in the coming decades, creativity will become the defining feature of those who continue to thrive. It will also be essential to solve complex global issues and pursue business and scientific innovation.

Studies by Adam Galinsky, professor at Columbia University, have shown that executives who have lived in several foreign countries – and therefore have been heavily exposed to diverse languages ​​and cultures – were more creative and daring in their approach to the workplace. Work.

5. They Root You More

There is another reason to celebrate travel.

Journeys are filled with moments that take root in us. It is very uncomfortable arriving at a new airport, without being able to read the signs or find our way back, as well as trying to use our language skills (still in their infancy) with a Parisian taxi driver who is struggling to understand our pronunciation of But they force us to accept that too. Discomfort and overcome it.