As the headline states, travel can transform one’s life, both personally and professionally. In the work-from-home (WFH) age, a remote worker can embark on leisure, business, and bleisure (business and leisure) trips with little to no concern about taking time off work. Any remote worker’s work can become dull in the same home office, but a leisure, business, or bleisure trip can work wonders on physical and mental health and well-being alike. Read on for all the ways travel can transform one’s life for the better.

For starters, travel can improve one's life in more ways than one, starting with stress relief through the de-stress from the usual environment and activities. Travel's other effects include an improved mood, increased creativity, increased happiness, increased self-awareness, and increased confidence due to a trip's ability to impact a person's overall mood, cognition, and even outlook on life. Furthermore, a person can develop a broadened perspective, a smoothened transition in life, and an added teaching responsibility, also known as an additional way to learn responsibility.

Whether a traveler is a veteran or a newbie shouldn't matter. A traveler's mindset can change for the short- and long-term throughout different trips that range from three days to three months. A traveler's perspectives can broaden, creativity can increase, confidence can build up, self-awareness can develop, patience can grow, problem-solving skills can rise, appreciation for differences can spike, and helping others with transition can skyrocket. In short, a traveler's brain, cognition, and mental health can improve trip after trip, especially as a solo traveler.

If a traveler struggles with personal and professional relationships, a traveler's perspective can change as a result of travel, as one's relationships can head in the right direction with an improved mindset that includes open-mindedness. According to a study in the Los Angeles Times, people who travel regularly are at less risk of heart disease, and stated that people who don't take an annual vacation have a 30% higher risk of death from heart disease. And, according to another study by the American Psychological Association (APA), travel can change a person's brain with its exposure to new languages, tastes, smells, and sights. If a person lives abroad, a person's creativity level can rise.

When it comes to stress levels, a traveler's stress level can decrease over time. A minimum of a two-day vacation can help an atypical traveler feel less stressed than in the everyday grind at home and in the workplace. Travelers who embark on four-plus day vacations will likely experience lower overall stress for up to 45 days. Travel can help a traveler feel excited about the immediate future, along with the long-term financial future, as around 50% of Americans reported experiencing significant stress related to savings. However, most, if not all, travelers can cover current experiences and have money left over for a trip or two.

If a traveler appreciates downtime to reflect, a trip can assist a traveler in the personal reflection department. By definition, reflection is a serious thought or consideration. As soon as a traveler spends spent away from home, a traveler’s overall introspection and understanding of the priorities, goals, etc., can develop. Travel isn’t a life coach, but travel’s benefits include mindset shifts, grief and bereavement, and vacation time maximizations, just to name a few.

Travel can broaden a traveler for the better, but a path to a better version of oneself is an immediate benefit. Travel’s ability to help a traveler experience new cultures, taste new foods, and visit new places, and while these three benefits would lead any media outlet’s top ten list, there’s a fourth benefit in the connection between travel and a traveler’s self-identity. Individuals, such as travelers, define a wide variety of self-identities using a combination of beliefs, experiences, preferences, and values.

Social psychologist Adam Galinsky once wrote that travel has a positive effect on the brain. Galinsky added that travel can change the way we approach the world, leaving us more flexible, open, and tolerant. Galinsky’s wise words still resonate with travelers today. Take, for example, a teenage daughter’s self-identity was wrapped around the fact that she knew she would be moving away again after moving to a new city or country every other year in her childhood years. As a result, she opted to pay attention to her past experiences and apply her life lessons to make friends easier, fit in better, and be healthier alone.

In a teenager’s adolescence and subsequent adulthood, a teenager would develop into an adult and potentially an empty nester. That being said, he, she, or they would take time off to figure out life’s next steps — both professionally and personally — and witness a potential transition into an empty nester with bouts of sadness and emptiness, if children enter the picture. Travel could boost one’s clarity, confidence, and resilience.