Sixty ?older ?people ?in San Francisco received one small instruction: once a week, for eight weeks, they should take a 15-minute walk and find something that amazed them - a giant tree, maybe, or a shaft of sunlight piercing clouds, or a skyline at sunset. And at the end, a neuropsychologist and her team could track the change in the participants' own selfies: they had shrunk themselves in the picture to make way for the world around them, and their smiles had expanded visibly. Reports of daily distress had declined too. It's an important finding: loneliness and low mood are among the most stubborn health hazards of old age, and this intervention cost nothing. But it is also, in some ways, beside the point. Scientists are starting to rethink leaving town, it seems, and travel - long relegated to indulgence - is increasingly being seen as close to mind's preventive medicine, with mood and memory and resilience becoming measurable outcomes rather than promises made in holiday brochures. Rory Mulcahy, at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, describes the benefit as a chain reaction. A trip first delivers a burst of happiness, and that happiness then goes on to build psychological resilience, the capacity to absorb stress, adapt to setbacks and recover from them. The glow fades once the suitcase is unpacked. The resilience lingers, in some studies for as long as four months. Even One Night Away Can Give Travellers A Lasting Boost (Picture Credit - Pexels) What's striking is how little seems to be required: Mulcahy's research suggests that just one night away from home is needed to kickstart the process, while a similar study found that travellers scored about 15 points higher on a standard wellbeing measure on their return compared with those who had stayed put. Travellers under real stress stand to gain most, he says, but even people merely worn down by everyday work stress or family tension can benefit from treating a small getaway as important rather than as a reward. It may be no coincidence that distance matters. Shu Cole at Indiana University's School of Public Health has repeatedly found that the greater the distance people travel, the less likely they are to report depression or loneliness. In her 2024 analysis of a national survey of adults over 50, she categorised respondents by distance: those who hadn't taken any leisure trips, those who had taken local day trips, those who had travelled domestically, and those who had travelled internationally. International travellers reported the least depressive symptoms and the least loneliness, followed by those who had travelled domestically, then those who had taken day trips, and those who hadn't travelled at all reported the worst on both measures. The finding held firm in a six-year follow-up. Longer Journeys May Offer Greater Protection Against Loneliness and Depression (Picture Credit - Pexels) Long-distance travel to unfamiliar places, Cole notes, forces planning, navigation and a steady stream of small adaptations, the kind of mental stimulation that guards against the isolation that so often hardens into depression in later life. For anyone who works in imagination, there is a sharper finding still. The social psychologist Adam Galinsky and his colleague William Maddux showed across five studies that living abroad, though not merely holidaying there, predicted greater creativity, with cultural adaptation as the underlying mechanism. Foreign experience, in Galinsky's phrasing, deepens cognitive flexibility and the ability to connect distant ideas. The holiday industry has spent decades encouraging us to make life easy, but the evidence keeps pointing in the opposite direction. Nanxi Yan at the University of Amsterdam reviewed 125 studies with colleagues and found that mastery - the feeling of successfully meeting a real challenge with skill - cropped up repeatedly as a precursor to meaningful improvements in mental health. One study followed mountain climbers, for instance, and how they were absorbed by a difficult task correlated directly with their happiness score. Travellers who did something unavailable to them at home reported more emotional balance than those who stuck to the familiar. The same conclusion can be reached by looking at the physiology of awe. Paul Piff at the University of California, Irvine, has conducted experiments sending people out to hike, kayak or just sit and take it all in at Lake Tahoe. After two minutes of gawking at the landscape, they reported a 70 spike in awe and a 33 boost in happiness, an effect Piff says he has seen consistently across locations. Awe works by shrinking the self, Piff explains, placing your private troubles in perspective against something vast and making them feel more manageable. Awe-Filled Travel Experiences Can Make Everyday Problems Feel More Manageable (Picture Credit - Pexels) Novelty pulled in the same direction. Travellers who attempted something unavailable to them at home