Why Traveling Helps Us As We Age

Overall Health Benefits of Travel

Travel can be great for your health, both for your body and your mind. When older people travel, they sometimes face health risks, like heart problems, but there are also benefits. Eating a Mediterranean diet, for example, is known to be good for your heart. If travelers switch to a healthier diet while traveling, it can do wonders for their health.

Physical Health Activities

Being in the mountains at a moderate altitude can also be good for people with metabolic issues, helping to improve blood sugar and cholesterol. High-altitude climates have been known to help people with asthma breathe better.

Activity-driven destinations, such as visiting saunas in colder climates, offer a range of health benefits, from improving heart function to helping with sleep and pain relief.

Yoga, another activity-driven factor is deciding where to travel, and part of many people’s travel experiences, can help lower blood pressure and make your arteries healthier.

Travel Helps Your Mental Health

For mental health, travel is a great way to reduce stress and improve overall well-being. Being present in the moment during travel, away from the constant noise of phones and social media, can be really refreshing. Travel can help regulate sleep patterns, giving people who are usually sleep-deprived a chance to catch up, and those who oversleep a chance to reset.

A rule of thumb we have found around here: it takes about three days to fully unwind enough to start enjoying the vacation. So plan on at least four days when the goal is stress relief. We love our week stay offers, so we may be a little biased, but this is our experience and common feedback.

Families Thrive on Vacation

Family travel is also beneficial, strengthening bonds and improving communication. It’s a great way to bring families closer, especially in a world where family structures are changing rapidly.

Some of us rely on our closest friends to build a family structure. As we age, we often have the freedom to travel with like-minded crowds, often in the same stages of life. As is the case with the quieter river cruises, it isn’t uncommon to experience family-like bonds form on long excursions.

For those of us lucky to travel with our children and grandchildren, the bonds formed during travel experiences will outlive the daily memories and the normal settings. How much more meaningful will those memories be in the extraordinary settings our vacations inspire us to place ourselves in?

Weighing the Benefits of Travel and Your Personal Health

It makes sense to talk about these health benefits with your medical practitioners. Know your personal risks, but weigh the benefits of your health as you decide to adopt healthier lifestyle choices in the best settings vacations have to offer. This could be especially helpful for those with chronic illnesses or mental health issues. As the world of science learns more about how travel can be therapeutic, it’s important to consider how this fits with our responsibilities to our own health. There’s a lot of potential here, and future research will likely shed more light on these benefits.

The moral? Be intentional when you travel, but also responsible wherever you are. It may be that the lifestyle that brought so much value to your health while traveling will make its way to your everyday at home.