At first, the thought of traveling alone may seem too far out of your comfort zone to attempt. While it’s very important to be careful and attentive when traveling by yourself, the act of traveling solo can teach you important lessons that may just change the way you think forever.
In this article, we’ll explore 7 of the most important life lessons you can gain from traveling alone. By opening your mind and heart, traveling alone can be a powerful way to level up your life.
1. Taking Care of Yourself Should Be Priority Number One
Traveling can take it out of you. In order to keep your energy and strength up, you’re forced to put priority on your mental and physical health. This is something it’s easy to overlook in our normal day-to-day lives but hard to ignore when you’re traveling alone.
Making sure you have enough sleep, eating well, and staying hydrated will allow you to go on any adventure you choose. While you’re traveling, online therapy is a way to stay on top of your mental health from wherever you are.
2. You Are More Capable Than You Think
Traveling alone is great for restoring self-confidence. It pushes you to adapt to tough situations, think on your feet, and resolve problems without leaning on anyone else for support. You likely don’t give yourself enough credit for your natural capabilities, but traveling solo can give you a look at what a strong person you really are.
Missed your flight? You’ll need to figure out what to do next without panicking. Lost your luggage? That might take some inventive communication using only gestures. After a while, you’ll start to form a new idea of yourself as an independent and powerful human being.
3. Amazing Adventures Begin Outside Your Comfort Zone
When we’re going about our lives at home, we tend to get stuck in patterns that may not be good for us, simply because we’re uncomfortable with facing the unknown. When you’re on a solo adventure, the unknown becomes completely unavoidable.
Traveling alone will open you up to trying things you may never have had the courage to try before. You’ll probably eat new foods, hang out with different people than you normally would, and try new experiences. Soon, you’ll come to learn that magic happens once you leave your comfort zone.
4. You Have Something in Common with Everyone
Everyday life often doesn’t push us to connect with people other than our family, friends, and coworkers. Because of this, we may miss the big lesson that human connection can show us: we’re all similar in many ways.
Even though a person doesn’t speak the same language as you or have the same political views as you, you’ll find ways you can relate to each other. Empathy is an important part of how humans evolved, and it helps remind us that we’re all in this together.
5. The Little Things Are Often the Most Precious
When you’re traveling alone, you tend to be living in the moment and taking every detail in. This type of mindfulness can be very beneficial to our mental wellbeing. Mindfulness can help us see the little things we may have missed if we were traveling with someone else.
The small details are often what make life magical. Living in a state of wonder and awe can open up your mind to the preciousness of life and foster gratitude in your heart. With repetition, gratitude can actually change the way our brains work so that we see more good in everything around us.
6. It’s Not That Hard To Make New Friends
Traveling alone forces us to reach out to others and make friends. When we’re children, making friends comes naturally: we just go up to someone we like the look of and ask if they’d like to be our friend. As adults, making friends with strangers is a skill we are too afraid to put to the test.
In reality, making friends is as simple as when we were kids – we’re just out of practice. Traveling alone will teach you that you can literally go up to someone you like the look of and ask them to be your friend. The chances are, they’ll say yes.
7. Being Alone is Okay
When we’re involved in our everyday lives, the focus often gets put on others rather than ourselves. Spending significant amounts of time alone can seem very uncomfortable because it’s not something we’re used to doing.
In actuality, traveling by yourself can teach you that being alone can be a wonderfully rewarding experience. It can help you to search inside yourself for answers and keep yourself company, ultimately increasing your levels of self-love.
Takeaway
Traveling alone has many valuable life lessons to bestow on us, and they’re lessons we can apply in our lives long after we’ve arrived back from our adventures. Traveling lets us see things through a different lens: one that shows us who we really are and how we relate to the world around us.
This post is developed in partnership with BetterHelp.
