Why Traveling makes you Happier, than Material Wealth

People always ask how travel has changed me.

Before I began traveling I would have to say that not knowing something or beeing unsure how to handle a sertain situation whould have scared me, quite a bit.
Travel has made me a better and more well-rounded person, than can react in a calm and somewhat diligent way.

Simply put, I’m a lot more selfsecure now than I used to be.

In fact, I think travel makes everybody a more awesome person. We end our journeys way better off than when we started. The further down the road you go the better it is going to end up for yourself in developing character.
The kind of person people gravitate toward and want to be around, is the one telling Storys of far away places and strange people. This hasn´t changed much in the last 200 years.

 

But there is another big factor why it is healthy to travel, other than personal development.

In short, Consumer behavior. It is more like the upbringing and schools that make you become someone that heads down for the shops with such determination as soon as you have money in our wallets.

 

With every new purchase you feel a little happier, but a few days later that satisfaction is often gone without a trace. So why is that ?

It turns out that the main key to happiness is adaptation. As soon as something we’ve bought becomes ordinary and unexciting, the level of life satisfaction we feel falls off.
We’re forced to search around for the next purchase. This process is repeated again and again.

However, research carried out at Cornell University has found a way to break this damaging cycle.

Psychology professor Thomas Gilovich has shown that we experience the same increase in happiness when we buy something we want and when we go traveling.

But - and here’s the most important point - the amount of happiness we get from our purchase falls over time, whereas the memories of our traveling experience continue to supply us with happiness hormones for much longer.

And this basicly makes a lot of sense, for travel you put yourself into an new and unknown teritorry with new people and different socially exapted norms.

Under Construction

Putting yourself into new and sometimes scary Situations, seems to stimulate the human mind to be happy and fullfilled.


Short you have to adapt, and in most cases this will force you to get well out of your comfort zone.

Going to various kinds of unusual events, going on trips, learning new skills, even extreme sport, all of these are an ideal source of happiness for each and every one of us.

A new device or even a new car will eventually become just another ordinary object we know and own, or will otherwise become old and outdated. Every new memory, on the other hand, becomes a real source of joy that stays with us for our whole lives.

 

The more you think about this, the more sense it makes. Not that anybody of use whould have needed yet another excuse to get on the next trip. But especially for everybody who is having "wanderlust" now for a long time and is looking back be gratefull, this is what has made you a wellrounded and experienced person at the end of the day.


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