Vacation or traveling can be the right choice to refresh your mind when stress and boredom hit. Traveling is not even effective in reducing stress, but also brings benefits to your mental health. Anything?
Benefits of traveling for mental health
For those of you who spend dozens of hours to work every day, try to take the time to enjoy a short vacation.Vacationing gives you the opportunity to do what you enjoy doing. In addition, traveling can bring benefits that benefit your mental state because you do it free from burdens.
Here are some of the benefits you can get.
1. Give satisfaction and happiness
Vacationing can provide satisfaction in terms of physical and psychological. With holidays, you get a balance between work and daily life. You are also not faced with routine pressures while enjoying vacation time.All of these things make you feel satisfaction and happiness.
In fact, not only during the holidays, these positive emotions can also last for weeks later. As a result, your mental health is much better.
2. Become more productive
Prolonged stress that comes from work and daily life can hamper brain performance. As a result, productivity decreases and you have difficulty focusing.Traveling can reduce stress. In addition, the feeling of happiness from traveling will also improve brain performance and certainly have a positive impact on your work.
This is evidenced in the Surevi published in Harvard Business Review. The study said employees who were on vacation were able to complete their work more easily.
They also work more productively than their colleagues who are not on vacation.
3. Reducing the risk of psychological disorders
One of the benefits of traveling for mental health is reducing the risk of depression and anxiety disorders. The reason is, these activities keep you away from people and activities that trigger the production of the stress-causing hormone cortisol.You don't even have to take a long vacation to be able to get these benefits. A short vacation for just three days can reduce stress hormones and make your mind feel clear again.
4. Increase creativity
During the holidays, you will meet new people, different cultures, even new foods that you have never met before. All of these experiences make your insights broader and more diverse.The broad insights derived from the holiday experience can finally bring new inspiration. This is the forerunner of creativity in people who love to go on vacation.
5. Make you more excited
One study found that three days after a vacation, respondents experienced an increase in sleep quality and mood.They also become more excited, complain less, and experience increased thinking skills.
This effect lasts up to 5 weeks later, especially for respondents who spend a lot of time on themselves during holidays.
6. Strengthening relationships with others
Going on a vacation together or sharing vacation experiences can strengthen your relationship with others. Even a unique or bad experience can even be an interesting topic of conversation with others.This activity also makes you increasingly understand other people and strengthen the emotional ties that have been established. Even more so if you are on vacation with someone close to you, like your spouse or family.
Holidays are in fact more than just fun activities in the midst of busy work. Traveling at least once every year will provide so many benefits for your mental health and productivity.
So that the benefits become more optimal, make sure you prepare all your vacation needs properly. That way, your vacation will not be disturbed by various things that are not planned.