Travel!
Forget the staycation. Get a doctor’s prescription for a week in, say, Greece. And go!
Essayist, Heidi Mitchell, recently declared in the Wall Street Journal:
Research reveals that travel can build stress resilience, sharpen cognitive health and ward off depression far better than staying home. Apparently it has got to do with exposing the brain to new experiencing forcing greater mental engagement than do those usual routines at home.”
She explained:
At home, the brain is essentially on cruise control: We passively pick out something to wear, we follow the same commute, we work alongside the same people in the same office and make relatively few new decisions. Travel forces the opposite—new food, new streets, new people, new decisions—and that friction is what builds confidence, sharpens memory and gives us a sense of satisfaction that enhances cognitive well-being.”
“Towards Travel Therapy,” published last year in Journal of Travel Medicine, suggested that the benefits don’t disappear the moment you set foot back in your house. They last at least up to 5–6 weeks! For that matter, even anticipating upcoming travel improves one’s attitude and sharpens one’s mind.
And the farther you go the better, it seems. Authors of “Exploring the Relationship of Leisure Travel with Loneliness, Depression, and Cognitive Function” (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health) sorted participants into four groups based on how far they’d traveled. International travelers reported the fewest symptoms of depression and the lowest levels of loneliness, while domestic travelers came in second, day-trippers came in third and people who didn’t travel at all scored the lowest on both fronts.
Concluded the researchers:
Long-distance travel, particularly to unfamiliar destinations, often requires planning, navigation and adapting to new environments, all of which involve greater decision-making and problem-solving than traveling to familiar or nearby places.”
And travelers who tried activities unavailable to them at home reported more emotional balance than those who stuck to routine. (I tried bungee jumping in New Zealand; I must be emotionally balanced!)
The Bible advises travel, too. Psalm 84 is an example.
There is the aspiration of traveling to place where God’s presence is:
How beloved are Your abodes, Yahweh of Armies.
It craved and also yearned—my soul—for the courts of Yahweh;
my heart and my flesh shout for joy to the living God.
Psalm 84:1–2
Even the birds in its rafters are envied by the psalmist.
The bird also has found a house,
and the pigeon a nest for itself, where she may lay her young,
at Your altars, Yahweh of Armies, my King and my God.
Psalm 84:3
And there is approach, the road, the journey:
Blessing [upon] the person whose strength is in You,
the highways [to Zion] are in their heart—
the ones passing through the valley of weeping.
He makes it a spring; the early rain also covers it with water pools.
They walk from power to [more] power;
[each] one appears before God in Zion.
Psalm 84:5–7
And then finally, the arrival:
For better is a day in Your courts than a thousand [elsewhere].
I would prefer to stand at the threshold of the house of my God
than live in the tents of wickedness.
For a sun and shield is Yahweh God; grace and glory Yahweh gives;
He does not withhold good from those who walk uprightly.
Psalm 84:10–11
Yup, best place to travel to—to the presence of God!
SOURCES (of ideas, numbers, and words): Wall Street Journal; Journal of Travel Medicine; International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching. 