If there is one thing that I miss since the COVID Pandemic began, it is travel.

Travel has always been a passion of mine, driving me to see landmarks at the edges of the world, meet new people and explore new cultures.

And along the way, find out more about myself as well.

But not only is travel good for the soul, it is also good for our creativity.

Several research studies from 1989 and 2014 have found that traveling away from your home can result in an improvement in measures of creativity.

The impact on the flexibility of ideas people came up with after travel was stronger than improvements in originality, indicating that travel may give people a greater variety of knowledge and experiences to build on, as well as getting people out of their routine way of thinking.

Another larger study from 2009 analyzed the impact not only of traveling abroad temporarily, but living abroad for an extended period of time. This was associated with a strong improvement in creative performance.

So there we have it, evidence that travel can indeed make us more creative.

But why does this happen?

Well, one of the reasons I previously mentioned is that travel exposes us to new knowledge and ideas, which we can then use to incorporate into our own new ideas.

But another impact may be how travel improves our well-being.

Happiness is strongly correlated with creative performance. And therefore, having a good time while traveling may also result in the brain being better able to form new ideas.

All in all, just another set of reasons why I am looking forward to seeing the world again soon.

Did you know that scientific evidence shows your creativity decreases over time

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Nick Skillicorn

Chief Editor, Founder & CEO at Improvides Innovation Consulting
Creativity & Innovation expert: I help individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities, so you can develop the next breakthrough idea which customers love. Chief Editor of Ideatovalue.com and Founder / CEO of Improvides Innovation Consulting. Coach / Speaker / Author / TEDx Speaker / Voted as one of the most influential innovation bloggers.