Is Your Routine Working Against You? Travel Can Rewire Your Habits Fast
You wake up, start coffee, scroll through the timeline, take a shower, step outside and head to work. Day in, day out — it all seems the same. Sure, you have big dreams (don’t we all), but today isn’t a good time for it. You just don’t have time in your routine.
But what if you could snap out of the rut? What if you could lay down different habits quickly? How much money would you spend to replace scrolling time with hustle time?
Well, if you make travel a priority, it turns out that you can do this. And the money you might spend on lodging and plane tickets is well worth the long term gains of building the career you actually want and the personal life you’ve always dreamed of.
How Travel Breaks Old Habits
When it comes to habits, context is king. Habits are built on a chain of triggers:
Cue
Craving
Response
Reward
The cue sets the entire thing in motion. The push notification on your phone cues you to pick it up. It gets you craving to check your phone. Your response is to pick it up and start scrolling. The reward is the tiny drip of dopamine that each new meme and status update give you.
It all begins with the cue, and the cue is all about your context. Travelling gives us an entirely new context. That means all the old routines we have don’t have their cues to get things started.
This new situation promotes something called neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to update its structure. See, when two neurons fire together frequently, firing one begins to fire the other. That’s how cues start to trigger habits. But when we have high neuroplasticity, we can create new connections easily.
Neuroplasticity is supercharged by hormones and proteins like Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) and Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). When you travel, your brain gets higher levels of these because it has to build new connections all the time. Those new experiences are hacking your brain to be more plastic. Pretty cool, huh?
How to Make the Most of It
Of course, if you want to, you can travel all you want and keep your same routines. As soon as you get back home, if you don’t have a plan for your new routine, you can easily slip back into the old one.
So it isn’t as simple as buying a round trip ticket and letting nature take its course.
There are a few ways you can maximize the benefits of travel for building better routines:
● When travelling, be mindful to avoid bringing the cues for bad habits you want to break.
● Have a plan in place for your new routines when you get back home.
● Connect the activities you want to do with helpful cues.
These tactics will help you quickly break old habits and build new, better ones in their place.
Travelling can help you take control of your life. As long as you approach it the right way, you can use it to radically improve your life. And hey, you get to see the world while you do it.