So maybe you’re traveling for the holidays maybe for work, maybe you’re in the growing number of people who are buying RVs and taking this time to tour our nation, but let’s talk travel.
A Cornell study shows that the anticipation of a trip leads to longer-lasting happiness. Planning the trip can do as much to boost your mood as the trip itself and the anticipation of a trip can increase your happiness substantially, even more than the anticipation of acquiring something tangible, like a shopping spree or a new car. Traveling promotes activity that in turn produces mood-boosting endorphins. Traveling reduces long-term stress and anxiety.
If you have experienced that feel good buzz after having a satisfying or relaxing holiday, you are not alone.
The Findings Of The Survey
A new study conducted by Wakefield Research reveals that traveling boosts your mood. The “Traveler’s Sweet Spot” The survey consisted of 1,005 U.S. adults and looked at different types of trips that most successfully boosted people’s moods. It was found that 38 percent of men and 34 percent of women preferred romantic getaways as their choice vacations. Family escapes (33 percent of all participants) came in a close second and holidays with good friends (23 percent) were also found to be favored by many.
A Short Trip Can Do The Trick
The survey also found that the trip needn’t be extensive in order to provide that good buzz. Four out of five Americans said that they would prefer to take a few short trips than one long getaway. According to a 2013 study, more than 80% of Americans, who were surveyed, noticed significant drops in stress just after a day or two of traveling.
Healthy Activity While Traveling Can Also Help Your Mood. Getting out and about also contributes to that good feeling. Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, a psychologist who worked with Expedia on a study, says “Exposure to a healthy amount of sunshine is also believed to increase the brain’s release of the hormone serotonin which is associated with boosting mood and helping a person feel calm and focused.”
Travel Can Also Boost Your Sex Life. The benefits of travel are more than just mood boosting. According to the study, travel was found to help people improve their health, lose weight, gain confidence and increase their sex drive. Getting out and about helps improve your libido and can make you feel more positive about being intimate with others.
Travel Can Help You Lose Weight. When people travel they tend to undertake spurts of healthy activity. They seem to ditch their old bad habits and take up new routines. When you start to be more active, you not only benefit from the weight loss, you can also reduce anxiety and improve your mood. Traveling actually helps reduce the levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. As stress and anxiety decreases, mood increases, bringing many unexpected positive benefits in how we perceive ourselves, motivation, productivity, and our general outlook on life.”
Travel Can Make You More Creative. In addition to gaining a better sex life, body image and an increased sense of overall happiness, more than two million respondents in the study, said that traveling made them more creative. Seeing things in a different way and having many first time experiences may be the reason that travel aids creativity.
Actively aim to hold on to the travel high! "As a clinician, I encourage people to hold on to aspects of a travel experience or vacation that was pleasurable," says Dr. Tamara McClintock Greenberg, a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist. For example, "if you liked the food in Paris, learn how to cook French food in order to re-create some of the feelings you had while you were on vacation," she explains. "Another behavioral intervention is to remember peaceful moments you had on vacation and try to remember what was different from your present life. Maybe you took the time to eat breakfast, maybe you exercised. Those things are crucial reminders of what we should do every day," adds the clinical psychologist.
So with all this information, we know that travel can be good for us…but let’s be honest, can you think of a time when a trip didn’t have at least some stress related with it? For a lot of people, and specifically a lot of women, because studies show that typically it is women who are planning iteneraries, packing bags, trying to think through every possible need while also not overpacking, and who are primarily responsible for unpacking and laundry and returning the house to normal AFTER a trip, there can also be some heavy-duty work and stress that comes with travel. So today I want to share some ways that organization can take some of the stress out of travel, so that we can more fully enjoy the benefits.
1. Start planning early when possible. The earlier you start to look for accommodations, the more options you’ll have and available the better you’ll be able to pick and choose things like layout, amenities, and rates. Having a longer time to plan ensures that you can break all the pre-trip work up into smaller chunks to do over time, which will make it feel much less stressful. Another benefit of planning early is being able to tap into that anticipation of travel that the Cornell study talks about, enabling you to get the maximum amount of joy and satisfaction out of your travel.
2. Be realistic about travel time management. Maybe you’re someone who loves to just go with no agenda whatsoever, and that’s great, but if you have an itinerary – maybe you’re trying to get a lot of sight seeing done, or maybe you’re traveling for an event like a wedding with a set start time – this isn’t the time to be an optimist about travel time. Be a realist and do the worst-case scenario math. If MapQuest tells you your drive should take 11 hours, ask yourself how many stops you might need to make between point A and point B. Especially if you’re driving with young kids, how many bathroom or diaper change stops might you need? Will you need to stop to change a diaper or breastfeed? Will you need to stop to let the kids run and play and get some energy out? Or maybe where do you just WANT to stop along the way? If you’re driving right past the world’s largest ball of twine, maybe it’s worth calculating a little trip off the beaten path into your travel time to make that memory. Another thing to think about is the time of day that you’ll be coming through heavy traffic areas or highway construction zones. If you open your maps app while you’re researching trips at 10pm, and you put in a location, it gives you the time it would take to travel to your destination if you leave right now. It’s not calculating for a drive time that includes everyone’s morning commute or the lunch rush. Be aware of these issues and any stops you will need or just want to make in order to make your travel as stress free as possible.
3. Research bag limitations early on. If you’re going to have a limit on the amount or size of bags that you’ll be able to bring with you – and this can be the case because of the limited trunk or cargo space, or because of train or especially airline restrictions, find this out as early as possible and plan around it. Individual airlines may have different maximum weights and bag sizes allowed for carry on, and going over those weights and sizes can add incredible stress AND cost to your trip. If you’re aiming to be able to get away with not checking a bag, this is the perfect time to create a capsule wardrobe for your travel. Look for a few items that can all easily mix and match and layer so that you can do more with less. Consider choosing one or maybe even two pair of shoes that can work with every outfit you’re bringing, and consider layering as you travel. You can wear a light jacket over a long-sleeved shirt over a tee shirt, for instance, and those items are traveling with you, but don’t have to be packed in your bag.
4. Create detailed packing lists. If we’re going away for more than just a few days, when I pack for my family of 6, I always start with a chart or a table. I put each family member’s name on the left side of the paper running from oldest at the top to youngest at the bottom, and then I put the days that we will be gone at the top of the paper, going in chronological order. This allows me to think about the needs of each individual person on each individual day. I go one person at a time and think, okay, what will Ryan need on Monday? Ok let’s see we’re driving for 7 hours that day, so he needs an outfit of comfy clothes, and then he’ll also want a swimsuit because there will be a pool at the hotel. He will need his allergy medicine, his book, and his Pillow Pet. Then I move to Tuesday. Ok, Tuesday is the wedding so he will need his little tuxedo, as well as his dress socks and shoes. After that, we’ll be going to hike, so he’ll need outdoor clothes and shoes, as well as a hoodie. And so on. Thinking through the needs of each person on the different events of each day helps me make sure I’m not overlooking anything. I try to get super detailed: In the car, I will want my USB phone charger plugged in, but that night, I’ll want the box to plug it in at the hotel, and I’ll want my apple watch charger and my sleep mask as well. Once I have all the details down in this chart, I just cross things off one by one as I pack them. Using this chart also helps me if I decide I want to use tip #5, which is
5. Pack a one-night bag. If our trip is fairly short and uncomplicated, I pack by groupings. My husband and I in one bag, the big boys in another, and our youngest two in another. If the bag is super short, everything just goes in one suitcase. But…if we have multiple stopovers and are going to be gone for several days, I do not want to have to drag everything we’ve packed into a hotel at our halfway stopover just for one night, so I pack a “one night bag.’ This bag includes all the things we’d need for an overnight, from chargers to nighttime books to morning medicines and toiletries, but it only includes one outfit per person in order to keep the bag small and hotel check in and out simple. In instances where a few of the kids may be staying the night with a local aunt, for instance, their one-night bag might be an individual gallon size zip lock baggie with their toothbrush, tee shirt and shorts, clean socks and undies, and their name on the outside. Keeping it simple is what it’s all about. No one wants to have to spend their travel time packing and unpacking suitcases, rifling through things to determine what goes with who, so the more prep work you can do on the front end, the better.
6. To that end, tip #5 is to pack for simplicity. I determine outfits ahead of time and then roll them up together into little sushi rolls for the day. I lay out bottoms, then tops, then socks and undies, and create little burrito outfits of them. Rolled clothing takes up less space and is less likely to wrinkle and being able to hand out everyone’s outfit roll quickly is a gift when you’re trying to get everyone funneled down to that complimentary breakfast before they close for the morning. If you’re using a “family bag” method, don’t shy away from having separate compartments for different family members, or from creating the divisions you need by packing smaller bags inside larger bags.
7. Don’t be afraid to unpack. So many people report being really stressed out by living out of a suitcase, and I fully agree that that is no fun. My rule of thumb is that if I’m going to be somewhere for more than just one night, I unpack, and that’s if I’m traveling alone or with my husband and our 4 kids. Even if you don’t want to hang much up, you can put your outfit burritos into drawers and let the kids know they each have half of a drawer to get dressed from. Lay all toiletries out for easy use each morning.
8. Designate space. Be sure to pack a laundry bag or pop-up hamper with you and put it in a prominent place, and show the kids where it’s at so that dirty clothes don’t get thrown all over your cabin/condo/room. Similarly, make sure everyone knows where things like shoes and coats are supposed to go, and create one space for them. There’s nothing worse than a frantic search before you’re supposed to be leaving for the airport.
9. Schedule laundry. One of the number 1 complaints I hear from women who are overwhelmed with returning to normal life after a trip is the overwhelming amount of laundry. Let’s face it, if your family has been gone for a week and everything they’ve worn to play in, travel in, attend an event in, swim in, comes home dirty…that’s a lot of laundry catch up waiting for you, which kills your travel buzz pretty quickly. One of the great reasons to try to book your travel early is so that you can find accommodations that have on-site laundry, but if this isn’t possible, it may still be worth a run to the nearest laundromat near the end of your trip. This will be a huge help as you work toward our 10th and final tip:
10. Unpack immediately. Ok, if you don’t arrive home until 10pm…go to bed, friend, but if you get home and there’s still some of the day left, unpack right away. We dread what we procrastinate, and the longer we put something off, the more it builds up in our minds as this big, unconquerable monster that stresses us out. Have you had this experience before, where you had so dreaded doing something and then when you finally MADE yourself do it, you had the realization that…oh…that actually wasn’t so bad! Most of us have had that experience and it’s certainly the same with unpacking. Make it a family affair – everyone grab their own bag and pillowpet and let’s all work together to unpack and then we can laze around the house and watch Star Wars! Or, as you unpack the family bag, have your kids come and get their items and put them away. Get this monkey off your back by getting unpacked as quickly as possible so that the task doesn’t have time to build up into something dreaded, which will start to steal the joy that you just built up by traveling.
So that’s it- those are my 10 tips! I hope they’ve been helpful! As soon as I finish one trip, I start mentally planning the next, and it’s not because I don’t love my life and my home – I do! But it’s because I know that part of what lights me up and brings me joy is having experiences – seeing and doing and going with my favorite people. Wherever you’re planning to go and whatever you’re planning to do, I wish you safe, healthy, fun, and stress free travel.
XOXO, ~Amber
