Traveling with your partner can be one of the most uplifting and enjoyable experiences in your life, assuming that you and your partner are able to get along reasonably well, when in each other’s presence for an extended period of time.
Travel in and of itself is an amazing experience, and has the potential to radically alter the way you perceive the world around you, not to mention giving you a tremendous degree of insight into your own mind, desires, and enhancing your sense of centeredness in the process.
But many of the benefits that apply to solo travel are the exact same benefits that apply to travelling with your significant other, and travelling with your partner has a few unique benefits all of its own that puts it in a different category from lone-globetrotting.
This is Why You Should Travel With Your Partner – For Your Health
As it so happens, many of these travel benefits relate directly to health, and tangentially to beauty. After all, when you’re in peak health, you’re likely to give off an aura of vitality that you’re unlikely to express if you’re feeling chronically unwell and are distracted by various medical conditions.
So, whether you’re wondering about how to rid yourself of chronic stress, or how to get rid of wrinkles under your eyes, here are a few reasons why travelling with your partner can improve your health.
By forcing you to get a decent amount of low-intensity exercise
Low-intensity exercise isn’t exactly the “sexy” kind of training that you read about in all the fitness magazines. There are no pictures of ripped guys or washboard-ab girls, going for a stroll, on the covers of Men’s or Women’s Fitness.
This is a shame, because research consistently finds that regular, low-intensity exercise, such as walking, can play a tremendous role in reducing stress, improving cardiovascular health, improving joint health, and any number of other benefits.
In fact, there is research that suggests that frequent, low-intensity movement during the day is so critical to health, that sitting all day might be described as “the new smoking”. According to research, it seems like sitting around all day makes it all but impossible for you to experience peak health, even if you go to the gym for an hour after work.
Most forms of travel will have you walking around a lot more than you would during your normal routine, as you stroll from place to place to see the most acclaimed art galleries and museums in town, or hike through woods and over hills in order to experience scenes of natural beauty, directly.
Go travelling and walk a lot. You may also consider cycling, paddling a canoe, or whatever other physically active pastime takes your fancy.
By exposing you to natural sunlight
People are often very scared of being exposed to natural light, not least of all because repeated sunburn and sun damage can cause skin cancer, and can have an ageing effect on the skin.
The issue is that deciding to avoid the sun altogether is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. People do, in fact, need a certain amount of sun exposure in order to be healthy. You simply cannot deprive yourself of sunlight indefinitely and expect that your body will function properly, or that your mindset will be unaffected.
Your body needs vitamin D to function, and it gets this primarily from the rays of the sun making contact with uncovered skin. There may be other mechanisms, as well, for why sun exposure is essential to good health.
With a huge proportion of the populations of the Western world being chronically deficient in vitamin D these days, and with the effectiveness of vitamin D supplements being drawn into question, going on vacation somewhere warm and getting a bit of sun each day is a really good idea.
Just don’t let yourself burn, and keep a wide-brimmed hat in your bag if you’re worried about your face.
By mixing up your diet
People need a remarkable number of different vitamins, minerals, and other assorted nutrients in order to perform at their peak, and to enjoy peak health.
The issue is that many of us settle into quite clearly defined routines, surrounding what we will or won’t eat on a daily basis. We typically eat the same few foods, in rotation, day in and day out, and don’t regularly read up on new recipes.
Often, this can lead to deficiencies in core micronutrients, and it can also become emotionally and psychologically stressful and tiring, which can be harmful in and of itself.
When you travel, you all but inevitably need to shake up your diet. Instead of your usual fare from back home being easily available each day, you have to expose yourself to the local cuisine, and whatever tasty morsels you can find en route.
While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be addressing all of your potential nutritional imbalances, it does suggest that you’ll at least be opening yourself up to new tastes, and expanding your culinary horizons. If you and your partner take this approach back home with you, and begin eating a more varied diet, that’s a serious benefit to you both.
By giving you ample opportunities for laughter and joy
Life back home can be stressful. There’s not likely to be anything too wildly controversial about that statement. We fall into periods where our health is rattled, where we’re not getting all the sleep we so desperately need, and when we’re stressed by the demands of work — which seem unreasonable by any sensible standards.
In times like these, we often let the laughter and joy drop out of our lives for a time, and we may even find ourselves snapping at our loved ones, being irrationally annoyed by their playful jokes, and falling into an emotional routine which is, simply, not in any way healthy.
When you’re away travelling, you leave all, or at least most of that stress behind — if you’re doing things right, anyway.
This opens up opportunities for you to have novel experiences, and find the joy and laughter which might have been absent from your life in recent times. When you and your partner are experiencing a whole new location together, you can share interesting observations, quips, jokes, and you can just be happy together.
Happiness and laughter have a profound anti-stress effect and, although they may seem like fairly abstract phenomena, can dramatically impact your health.
By giving you the perspective to reconsider your habits back at home
Our health isn’t just determined by the big, flashy decisions we make here and there, although it is, of course, partly determined by those decisions.
If, for example, you were to go on a massive drugs binge, it would be reasonable to assume that your health would suffer dramatically.
Aside from those dramatic cases, however, it’s our small, daily routines and habits that have perhaps the largest effect on our health.
When you are away traveling with your partner, both of you are removed from your normal environment and context, and so you are able to review your standard habits and routines from a somewhat more objective position than you otherwise were, before.
This “shaking up” effect can be just the motivation you both need in order to consider going on more regular walks when you return home, or making permanent dietary changes, or even just airing out the house more often so that you can benefit from actual fresh air.
Whatever the particular case may be, we are all prone to fall into self-destructive routines, and anything that helps us to take a step back and analyse those routines, is of benefit.
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