Travel Therapy: Why You May Need a Vacation

Do the humdrum of routinary daily activities bore you?  Your blood seems to flow sluggishly through your veins, and instead of singing, humming, or whistling a merry tune as you shower, you find yourself sighing, complaining, criticizing, and preparing for the worst part of the day.   As you look in the mirror, you don’t see a happy reflection gazing back at you. 

Languor, apathy, discouragement, and even mental depression every now and then may be normal for some of us (especially noticeable on some women during the menstrual cycle or at the onset of menopause), but when you find yourself indulging in them in at too frequent intervals, it probably is a danger signal that you need to do something about it.

Drug medication, which some invariably think is a panacea for every imaginable sickness may not be the treatment of choice for your ailment.  Perhaps a change of environment is all you need in order to lift up your sagging spirits.  If your doctor assures you that there is nothing physically wrong with you, to get away from it all and regain your bearings, why not give travel therapy a try?

When you go on a vacation trip, be sure you do not take your problems along with you.  Remember that it is not so much your distance from home as it is your distance from your problems and your engaging in a new and novel form of activity which will help restore your lost mental health back to you.  Of course, this is not to suggest that you run away from your problems and, ostrich-like, bury your head in the sand.  No, that would be a cowardly thing to do and it will not do you any good.  One purpose of a meaningful vacation trip is so that you can look at your problems from a different perspective with a certain degree of objectivity, and thus enable you to plan, when you come back, a strategy which will effectively solve your dilemma, rather than for you to simply run around in futile circles.

Your depression is not merely caused by fatigue.  If this were so, then a far simple approach, such as prescribing a period of rest, would be sufficient.  Taking a trip would be unnecessary, if not downright unreasonable, as it would only add to your fatigue.  The idea is to get your mind out of the old and negative rut and set it moving along a new and positive groove.

So, enjoy the exhilarating adventure as you travel around.  In the process of doing so, you will blaze a new trail of optimism in your mental setup. 

Now, if the rather big expense of financing a travel will only cause you greater mental anguish than what you are trying to cure, then maybe you would like to visit just a nearby town or city you haven’t gone to before, and rediscover the beauty in it.  Sample its local delicacies and visit its historic sites, or meet interesting people.  But if even that would strain your budget to the breaking point, perhaps armchair traveling through reading or video marathon will do.  It’s the most inexpensive way to experience the breathtaking places, including its sights and sounds.  It can also serve as a mental preparation to plan for your future travel when the time comes that your budget allows it.   Make a goal for yourself and plan for it, and don’t be tempted to sulk in misery thinking that you can’t afford it right now. 

When you come back from travel therapy and look again in the mirror, the gloom will have been gone from your face, and hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised.