Going through a heartbreak? Feeling stuck, going through grief, which you think will never end? Thinking that you are losing direction and this might be the end of the world? Going through an unimaginable burnout? My advice change the place, don’t worry not permanently, temporarily – in other words travel!
Having explored 20+ cities and 4 countries, I can honestly say every place I’ve visited has helped me let go of something. Some trips were heavy with heartbreak, others carried lingering grief, and sometimes it was even something as small, yet maddening, as insomnia. Each city offered a different kind of release, a chance to reset, to breathe, to process without expectation. And honestly? Travel has a quiet way of healing that traditional therapy sometimes can’t replicate.
If you are asking how, continue reading:
1. Change of Environment: In my opinion change of environment is change of energy. When you travel your old patterns and thoughts get interrupted by new ones. If you are someone, who lives in mountains but travels to a state of beaches, it is the functioning of the brain that you shall start thinking about the depth of the beach and get a little away from your burdened thoughts. We still get told by our parents that we should spend more time in nature, ever wondered why? Because nature calms your nervous system down, the oceans, mountains, beaches all help in making you calm, and sometimes the mountains won’t work but the beaches will, the change of environment helps.
2. Travel forces you to be present: When you are in your city of residence, you already know everything – the food order you want to give, the best restaurant, best shopping mall, but when you travel and know nothing about the place, you have no options but to be present, explore and observe, think, and execute. You observe the food, learn the language, and understand the weather. You focus on directions, movements, maps and different creatures you might haven’t seen before. Your brain rewires to live in the present and focus on now, rather than replaying the past. And before you know, this presence reduces your overthinking.
3. Meeting new people restores faith: From your usual kind of people, and knowing their stories, you move to see different bunch of people, who you know nothing about. Sometimes when you meet a stranger and hear their grief, you realise that your grief is such a small pain in front of theirs, and hence your perspective changes, you get some hope. It reminds you that your pain is not whole in the universe, there exists a vast array of people.
4. Rebuilding identity: Those few days of travel you have the opportunity to discover, discover what you enjoy, learn independence, make decisions that make you happy. Reconnect with yourself, you breathe in different views and when you breathe out you realise that there is hope and grief should be processed but don’t make it linger with you for a long time. Let it go.
The Places We Associate With Pain
There is this saying, hair holds memories. I believe it. But just like that, don’t you think the place where an incident has happened also holds memories? In my opinion it does. Some places feel like scars that still breathe. Some moments stay glued to the walls, to the roads, to the air you inhaled when your heart cracked open. You don’t just remember the pain. You remember where it lived. When you take that flight to another city and experience beyond what you experience in your residential city, something cracks open inside you. You realise how much more is there to see. To observe. To explore. To live for. You don’t realise it when you’re taking that flight. You’re just sitting there. Maybe staring out the window. Carrying the same heaviness in your chest. Thinking you’re simply showing up for your obligations. But then you land somewhere. Not because you chose to heal. Maybe you landed for work. Still, it changes you a little.
Of course, you won’t just stop hurting. Pain doesn’t dissolve because the pin on the map changed. But the process of healing feels a tiny bit kinder when the world around you is new. When you’re in Goa, with the waves, you let it go. Slowly. Softly. Salty water doing what words couldn’t. When you’re in Punjab, with the parathas, you let it go. Warm dough, loud laughter, ghee-coated comfort pulling you back into your own body. And even in Mumbai, sometimes healing looks like shopping bags, trial rooms, little distractions that make your heart unclench for a second. And you start letting go there too. You land back in your city with a different version of you. A version who let go quite a lot. Not perfectly. Not fully healed. But lighter. A heart that travelled away from the spot of the wound, and returned realising it can survive being touched by the past without bleeding every time. Travel doesn’t get enough credit. It doesn’t cure you. It simply holds your hand while you cure yourself quietly. It gives you motion when your heart felt stuck. It gives you new air when the old air felt heavy. And it gives you space to drop the weight, even if for a minute, even if without ceremony, even if only you notice it.
That minute matters.