Solo travel has had a rebrand with experts hailing the neurological benefits

It’s a tale as old as time. Or at least the early 00s. The burned-out office worker escapes corporate life to "find themselves" on a far-flung island. Or perhaps it’s the story of the divorcee, lost in a city of love and pondering life’s meaning to the beat of a melancholic drone. Yes, the foibles of the female traveller have long been etched into popular culture. 

A woman, typecast as the lonely soul, is swept into the world of solo travel not by choice, but by circumstance. It was a break-up, after all, that led Eat Pray Love’s Elizabeth Gilbert to discover the sweetness of doing nothing in Rome. And it was a tragedy that drove the author of Wild to walk a thousand miles along America’s Pacific Crest Trail.

A hop, skip, and three lockdowns later, the urge to fly solo is taking off once again. Searches for ‘solo travel’ rose by 761.5% last year, according to Google trend data. Meanwhile, Booking.com reports near double-digit growth of solo travellers now versus pre-Covid times. "After spending so much time at home, we’re increasingly seeing consumers booking solo travel experiences in order to maximise their personal growth and independence," says Brielle Saggese, insight strategist at the trend forecasting company WGSN. But while a pandemic spent sofa-bound is one factor driving demand, a new area of research is offering another reason to take yourself on holiday. "Solo travel is a tonic for your mental health in so many ways, from greater resilience to the freedom of being your own person away from the demands and expectations of the people you know," says Radha Vyas, co-founder and CEO at adventure travel company Flash Pack. The problem is, it has a pretty tired rep. So park your expectations and shelve the travel memoir while we bring you the ill-explored cognitive benefits of travelling solo (without the cringe).

Taking off

More recently, in June 2022, researchers from the Edith Cowan University in Australia published a paper on ‘travel therapy’—positioning tourism as a health intervention for conditions such as dementia and depression. And while there’s a time and a place for a copy-and-paste package holiday what elevates a trip from hard-earned to healthy—according to the latest buzzword in mental health research—is doing something that sparks awe. It’s thought that the emotion’s ability to trigger the sympathetic (fight or flight) and parasympathetic (rest and digest) systems at the same time triggers a physiological response matched by that of having an orgasm.

Emotional baggage

But when her friend got a long-term boyfriend, she decided to go it alone–first to Mexico, later to South America. "You feel the full spectrum of human emotion in a short space of time," she explains. "In the space of a day, I could go from feeling lonely and despairing to feeling genuinely afraid, before ending the day in awe, feeling inspired or humbled." For Hannah, experiencing the gamut of emotions when she’s away makes her a more well-adjusted person once she’s back home—when the emotional spectrum returns to a more endurable (less enjoyable) range.

Sula Windgassen, a health psychologist who has worked in the NHS, isn’t surprised by this. She explains that while the repetitive routines of quotidian life mean most of us are on autopilot until EOP rolls around, travelling alone puts you in the role of the ‘active respondent’, rather than ‘passive recipient’. "In everyday life, it’s easy to adopt familiar routines and opt for safety and comfort, which can dull the range of emotions you experience, both positive and negative," she adds. And while you don’t necessarily want to experience wide oscillations of emotion all the time, it’s helpful to engage with the ups and downs from a neurological POV. Doing so, she explains, helps your brain ‘emotionally regulate’ in a way that’s adaptive.

But while letting the good times roll is, emphatically, the goal, you can learn just as much from the challenges. A decade on from her first trip alone, Hannah believes resilience to be one of her most ignificant souvenirs. She recalls the time her credit card was stolen in Nicaragua. "They spent £1,000 (INR 1.05 lakh) that same day and I couldn’t pay for my accommodation or food," she recalls. A friend she’d met while travelling agreed to help her out and she eventually got the money back. 

"But it was a lot to process; I felt like I didn’t have anyone to turn to." Resilience, explains Dr Windgassen, refers to your capacity to bounce back from difficult experiences and is closely related to a concept called ‘psychological flexibility’—the ability to experience something in the present by taking a non-reactive approach. "Together, resilience and psychological flexibility allow individuals to navigate challenges without getting stuck in difficult emotions that arise when things don’t go to plan," she explains. 

Through these experiences, you learn that you can cope when things go wrong and begin to accept that things are beyond your control. Though researchers draw different conclusions on the topic, some studies suggest that resilience can be linked to better mental health. 

Free travel

"It’s the freedom for me," says Lauren Abbott, 30, a buyer from London, about her motivation to travel solo. Lauren was 19 when she booked her first trip alone to volunteer at an orphanage in Peru. Travel bug caught, after finishing university, she packed her rucksack and set off to Costa Rica for a week, Ecuador for a month and then Australia for a year. This sense of freedom is key to understanding why travelling alone is so good for you, says Constanza Bianchi, whose research on the topic was published in the International Journal Of Tourism Research. Professor Bianchi found that the biggest satisfaction drivers for solo travellers were feelings of freedom and independence, paired with the possibility of doing something new.

With this freedom comes a pressure to make decisions alone—and it’s this, says Lauren, that makes solo travel so powerful for her mental wellbeing. "Your decisions are usually based on self-interest in that moment," she explains. "This rarely happens at home, as I’m generally thinking of others—my partner or my dog—along with work and other plans." 

If the idea that you need to leave the country in order to put yourself first grates a little, we hear you. You don’t, of course. But removing yourself from your domestic set-up automatically means you’re less defined by the sociocultural roles imposed upon you at home; you’re also free to make decisions that are authentic to you without anything, or anyone, clouding your judgement.

Pleasure island
But there’s another reason why going away on your own is so good for you. Because while you can have a night to yourself on the sofa, you’re never more alone than when you’re on your own in a foreign country. And choosing to be there is what separates loneliness from solitude. Researchers at Russia’s Higher School of Economics explored how seeking out time alone can be beneficial for both contemplation and reflection. According to their research, people who experience ‘positive solitude’ have a greater sense of pleasure when they’re alone.

Combine that pleasure with the physical beauty of witnessing the Iguazu Falls for the first time, or the indescribable thrill of catching Tokyo’s elusive cherry blossom, and it isn’t hard to see why solo travel inspires a sense of wellbeing that’s hard to replicate at home. At the time of writing, Lauren is getting ready for a trip to India, her first solo experience since lockdown. 

Meanwhile, Hannah is heading to Tenerife, after which she’ll be staying at a co-living community that was set up by a friend she met eight years ago on one of her first solo trips to South America. Neither of them plans to find love. Or, indeed, themselves. They’re simply going on a journey, without ‘going on a journey’. May we suggest you join them?

This piece originally appeared in the January/February 2023 print issue of Women's Health