Why Travel? A Psychologist Weighs In

Author with husband at Giza Pyramids, Cairo, Egypt 2010

By profession, for many years, I was a clinical psychologist. Whether or not I want it, from time to time, this does color the way I see things and travel is no exception.  Our culture tells us that traveling is a good thing.  Media bombard us with travel ads and aspirational travel stories.  I too share in this mentality and love to travel, but suddenly the psychologist in me stops and asks why? 

The urge to explore new places seems built into human beings but, until recently, long-distance leisure travel was mostly reserved for the wealthy.  True some people had always undertaken long-distance journeys like pilgrimages, but these also were costly and fraught with danger and hardship.  The idea of safe, affordable travel is a relatively new one.

Travel has meant many things to me in the course of my life.  At times travel has been therapeutic.  After my senior year of college, a month in Europe was a time-out to sort through my life and relationships, which at the time were challenging.  

Now that I'm older, travel means something else; it is an extension of my basic curiosity 
and desire for new experiences.  These, themselves, as Classical Conditioning Psychology tells us, stem from the basic human tendency to extinguish to stimuli over time. Practically speaking, things that once gave us pleasure, can become common-place and no longer  are reinforcing for us. A desire for novelty is built into all of us.

People vary in their need for novelty,  it's a matter of personality. Some people just prefer the security of familiar situations.  Others seek new experiences.  Neither one is "correct", it's just a matter of who you are.  For me, my curiosity has always been a primary drive impelling me into new situations, since I was very young.

So, what does novelty do for me?  
It's not that I don't appreciate my usual surroundings; the places that I "live in" are considered interesting by most people.  But, I see them every day and have become used to them or, in  psychological terms, extinguished to them. I don't experience them with the intensity  that I once did and seem to need. True there are many ways to bring novelty into your life, but travel is one of the big ways to do this. 

Learning experiences and personal transformation
When I travel, I experience a whole new set of stimuli, of circumstances and they wake me up, shake up my perceptions. There are new sights, sounds, people, experiences and foods, really a new reality.  New situations call up new responses and I grow, sometimes in ways that I never expected, such as the time I became lost on a country road in China. https://69yearoldbackpacker1.blogspot.com/2019/01/lost-on-chinese-tea-plantation.html 
In my everyday frame of mind, I would have panicked in this situation, but these new circumstances called-up a new frame of mind and I just stayed calm.  This was a transformative moment for me, and there have been many others like it in my travels.


What does travel mean to you?
Each person is unique and what you get out of travel is as unique as you are.  Why don't you ask yourself what travel means to you.  Your answers may be surprising and you will end up learning a lot about yourself.  Feel free to share them in the "Comments" section of this blog.  I'd love to hear them and other readers can learn from you, too.