As a change to my normal travel blogs and vlogs, I've collaborated with www.fitwelltraveler.com who has kindly written a guest blog below on the difficult subject of Addiction and how travelling can benefit those people who are struggling from any type of addiction and the mental health benefits travelling can bring.
How Traveling Can Help You Find Yourself on the Road to Recovery
Break your routine for self-discovery and healing
Revealing the reasons for your addiction is probably one of the most difficult things you will ever do. It’s also one of the most important things you will ever do. It’s crucial to uncover hidden causes for the choices you have made. Traveling can help you on that journey by providing a change in environment and by offering many other mental health benefits
A Fresh Perspective
Changing your environment can be a vital step in healing your addiction. Studies have shown that having stimulating, positive surroundings can reduce the chances of relapse. It’s also been suggested that to overcome a deeply rooted habit, it is necessary to give addicts a change of scenery. By altering your environment the tendency to go on “autopilot” is removed. Experts compare it with driving home from work and not recalling several miles of the trip, but having been able to make the drive safely. You aren’t thinking through the process because you know it by heart. A different environment provides a new perspective and interrupts routine, forcing you to process the steps you are taking and removing the autopilot mode. You can do that by going new places and doing different things.
Overall Mental Well-Being
Traveling offers many mental health benefits in addition to simply breaking the routine. Traveling can help you feel physically and emotionally better, lift the health of your relationships, make you feel thankful, enhance your creativity, and can even change your personality and how you see yourself:
You feel better. Travel is shown to make you feel more relaxed and happy. It improves your sleep, lowers your stress, and puts you in a better mood. Having a break and getting away can also make you feel better about your job. Travel even makes these feelings of well-being last several weeks after you return home
Travel improves relationships. Leaving behind the daily grind and escaping with your significant other or a good friend can increase your satisfaction with the relationship. Additionally, excursions not only strengthen existing relationships but also help you make new connections. When traveling, you will feel more open and more inclined to engage with locals and fellow travellers
Helps you feel thankful. Traveling helps us value what we have. Realizing how fortunate you are can help you be happier and healthier. Seeing the differences in where you visit compared with your home can help you feel grateful and content
Enhances creativity. By traveling and exposing yourself to other cultures, you actually might become more creative. Some experts believe that traveling, especially abroad, changes how the brain is wired. Experiencing different sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations triggers fresh neural connections, which might make you more creative
Affects your personality. Traveling can help you be more open-minded, warm, giving, and emotionally stable. The experiences of meeting different people in different places influences how you perceive others. It can help you be more compassionate and appreciate diversity, especially when interacting with people from another culture
Improves self-perception. Travel changes how you see yourself and your struggles, which helps reduce depression and anxiety. It alters your behavior patterns and helps you redefine who you are. This transition is an opportunity to see the world, and yourself, in a fresh way
Tools for Recovery
Traveling can give you vital tools in the recovery from addiction. It breaks your routine to help you uncover your behavior patterns, providing self-discovery for lifelong healing. You will also reap the many health benefits that come with traveling, such as feeling better, healthier relationships, gratitude, creativity, and a change in your personality and self-perception. Find yourself on the road to recovery by making travel part of the process.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay
