Travel makes you a better person by having you deal with challenges, anxieties, new ideas, and more.
Travel offers many well-known benefits, from meeting new people who might even become friends to teaching you about different cultures and ecosystems in ways that truly stay with you. But one of the greatest benefits, perhaps, is that it has the power to make you a better person. This is especially true when you travel somewhere very far and different from your home.
Here are just five of the ways I believe travel can make you a better person.
1. Travel helps you learn to let go
If you’ve ever travelled before, you know how even the best laid plans can go awry. You simply cannot control everything.
The canyon can’t be seen thanks to fog. A delayed train means you’re late for the concert. The wildlife migration or superbloom you’ve travelled so far to see is late this year. You reach the beautiful mountainside village and discover noisy scooters keep you awake at night. Something is lost in translation, and you have an unpleasant interaction. The tour bus you’re on breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
You couldn’t predict or plan around such things. Not really. So you’re forced to pivot and embrace the unexpected. You look for the adventure, the silver lining, or the life lesson in it all. And you come to a greater understanding of yourself.
Happily, sometimes, a derailed plan actually prompts something else that turns out to be incredible, or serendipitous. And this reminds us that not being in control isn’t always a bad thing.
2. Travel expands your outlook on life
Most adults have a good deal of routine in their life. Routine is important for health and responsible living, but it can also hem us in in terms of our thinking and vision.
When we travel, especially to very far-off or different places, the experience opens up our minds and hearts in various ways. For starters, we see how other cultures approach and experience daily life as well as its big questions. This helps us consider different ways of seeing or doing things, from how we cook to how we handle grief.
Travel can also validate or unlock something in us that wasn’t finding space or resonance at home, but does in the new place. That might mean discovering a new art form you like or seeing how another society provides wheelchair access in public spaces.
What’s more, different landscapes can impact our thoughts and vision for life. For instance, beautiful, wide-open natural spaces prompt a sense of wonder and freedom, and this is mirrored in our thinking; we become more expansive and imaginative, able to envision ways forward where perhaps before we felt stuck.
So while we all know that having a break from routine and responsibilities is valuable in and of itself, the change that comes with travel is often bigger and more profound than what a staycation can offer.
Nature & Wildlife, Waterways & Wetlands, Beach & Safari, Wilderness Walks, Big 5 Safari, Migration Safaris, Desert Adventurer, Top Beaches
Nature & Wildlife, Waterways & Wetlands, Wilderness Walks, Cultural Immersion, Big 5 Safari, Desert Adventurer
3. Travel makes you a more grateful person
To travel is to better appreciate what you already have and what you like about home.
When we travel, we see and experience things that make us more appreciative of what we have where we live. This usually ranges from the small to the large, like access to affordable berries to greater rights for women.
In addition, travel sometimes shows us things we hadn’t ever thought to be grateful for. This might be a steady electricity supply or access to more of the internet. Sometimes it’s not that what you have at home is better, it’s just different, and you realise that it has come to hold a deep place in your heart. Like pronounced seasonal changes.
Learning to better appreciate your home and its blessings is almost guaranteed if you do the likes of an overlanding tour in Africa or another part of the world with many third-world countries. Africa, for instance, is full of incredible natural beauty, wildlife wonders, and cultural riches. You’re going to find lots to love here. But we also have many very big challenges. Consequently, travellers who live in first-world nations invariably return from such adventures with a deeper appreciation for the many blessings that come from living in a more developed economy.
4. Travel can make you less materialistic
When living out of a suitcase for a long time or even just a week, we quite quickly realise which things we really value and need to get by, and how many things we can manage without – often quite easily. This is especially true of adventure travel, where we strip back how we live quite dramatically.
What’s more, we often realise we’re happier with less. It takes less energy to monitor and care for fewer possessions. So people often come away from travel being less materialistic or consumerist. Some even adopt a more minimalistic lifestyle.
5. Travel makes us more courageous
Travel asks many things of us that can be uncomfortable, nerve-wracking, and occasionally even downright scary.
Sometimes, these are visceral fears that affect only portions of the trip. For instance, you’re a nervous flyer or struggle with seasickness, but in order to visit that special place, you summon the courage to endure the flight or boat ride anyway. Perhaps you don’t like heights, but the middle of that high suspension bridge is the only spot where you can see an incredible waterfall, so you muster the courage to walk it. When we travel, the sense of ‘it’s now or never’ if we want to experience something can also help us be braver than usual.
For others, the logistical, physical rigours, or social aspects of travel can cause anxiety. Perhaps it’s dealing with an unknown train or subway system that has you nervous, or wondering if you’ll manage to complete a hard trek. Or if you’re joining a tour group, maybe you’re nervous about connecting with your fellow travellers. But again, the rewards inherent in travel prompt us to push past our fears.
Courage is a muscle. The more we show ourselves that we can do hard or scary things and come out the other side in one piece, the more we believe in ourselves. So travel helps us to practise courage, and so create bolder, more open lives.
So if you want to travel and have the means, but are scared to take the plunge, I’d encourage you to start small, but still do it. Know that travel makes you a better person in many ways beyond those discussed here. And of course, as you’re becoming a better person through your travels, you’re usually going to have loads of fun too!
Note: This blog post was created by Bronwyn Paxton in January 2016 and was titled “How travel makes you awesome”. It was rewritten in June 2026 by Megan Abigail White under the current title.
