Speaking of Psychology - Why we love to travel, with Andrew Stevenson, PhD

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Are you dreaming of your next vacation? Many people see travel as a chance to escape their routines, explore new places and maybe even ‘find themselves.’ Andrew Stevenson, PhD, author of “The Psychology of Travel,” talks about whether travel makes us happier, how technology and social media are changing the experience of travel, why we get post-vacation blues and how to approach the place where you live with a travel mindset. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Are you dreaming about your next vacation? If so, you're not alone. For many Americans, travel is increasingly viewed not as a luxury, but as a necessity. According to Investipedia's 2025 American Dream Study, 75% of millennials consider annual vacations a key part of their version of the American dream, even more than traditional milestones like home ownership. For many of us, travel is a chance to escape our routines, explore new places, and and maybe even find ourselves. But does travel really change us?

And if so, how? How does encountering unfamiliar environments affect the way we think? Does travel make us happier or improve our well-being? How are technology and social media changing the experience of travel? And if you want to travel but don't have the budget or time, is it possible to gain some of the benefits of travel

by approaching the place where you live with a travel mindset? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Stevenson, a senior lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK. He's a cultural psychologist who is interested in the way that space and places affect the way that we feel, think, and act. He is author of the 2023 book, The Psychology of Travel,

and has been quoted widely on the psychology of travel by media outlets, including The Washington Post, the BBC, USA Today, and others. Dr. Stevenson, thank you for joining me today. Hello, and thanks very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and I'm looking forward to having an interesting conversation about psychology and travel. Absolutely. So let's start with a big question.

A lot of people talk about travel as something that, changes you or broadens your perspective on life. Through the lens of psychology, is that true? Does travel change us? And if it does, how? Well, I think travel is a transformative activity. And it should first perhaps be said that it's not a universal activity because I think even in the United States, only about 50% of the population have passports. But if you think about other nations, maybe nations with less average income, travel is quite a privilege for a few lucky people. But we should think about what we mean by travel, and it doesn't just necessarily mean international travel. Travel can involve going for a walk from one village to another, and I think

any kind of engagement with your environment, whether it's local, national or international, is definitely going to influence you as a person. Let's talk about mental health. health and well-being as aspects of travel. Sometimes you just want to go on a trip to relax and recharge. Do people usually come back from vacations happier, better adjusted than when they left? The relationship between happiness and well-being and travel has been quite well-researched. It's quite a complex relationship, but I think we can broadly say that there are two types of travel mindset that people engage in when they're traveling. One of them is called hedonistic travel or hedonistic well-being, and the other one is named eudamonic

well-being. Now, in everyday English, hedonistic means pleasure-seeking, doesn't it? So a hedonist is somebody who travels for fun and sun and sea and just basically having a great time. And the other type of well-being, eudamonic, means, roughly speaking, self-improvement, travel to improve yourself and maybe even challenge yourself. And so those are two different types of happiness that many people are chasing. I think, though, it's probably a mistake to pigeonhole people and put them into one or two categories because I think anyone who's traveled probably

knows that on a typical trip, you may have a few hours of hedonistic enjoyment. And then the day after, you might focus on something a little bit more related to self-improvement. Maybe you've on a cookery course in Mexico or visiting an art gallery. So I think we can channel hop between these two types of travel, but they do have different consequences, I think. I think most of us, when we take trips, we're looking for some kind of a boost to our well-being, and we usually feel that.

But how long does a boost like that typically last? I always feel once I've gotten on the plane to go home, that somehow the happy gets sucked out of me. Is it just me or does it last longer for most people? I don't think it's just you. I think there is this syndrome called the post-vacation syndrome that people talk about. I was listening to a podcast about this morning actually. But I think there are lots of factors which might influence how much you experience that. There is some research interestingly enough to suggest that the lasting effect of eudamonic travel, i.e. travel for self-improvement, can be a little bit longer than the lasting effect of hedonistic travel. whose effects might evaporate a bit more quickly, but I think we may accept that. The other factor which might influence how long-lasting the effect of travel on us is,

is the so-called discrepancy model, which looks at the perceived gap between how good we expected a trip to be and how good it actually was. some of the best trips or the best vacations are the ones that you didn't have such high expectations of. And I think sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves and say to ourselves, this is going to be the trip of a lifetime. It's on my bucket list. And those are the ones that can sometimes disappoint us.

So I think the discrepancy model has got something to offer us there as well. Now, is there a difference between travel and tourism? I'm glad you asked me that. I've got a lovely quote here from the American novelist Paul Bowles, who wrote a famous novel called The Shelter in Sky about his travels in North Africa at the end of the 20th century. Here he talks about the difference between a traveller and a tourist. He says as follows, whereas a tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, a traveller belongs no more to one place than to the next, moving slowly over periods of years from one part of the earth. to another. In other words, tourism is usually something which has a kind of boomerang effect. It's a commodity that we buy that involves usually a return ticket. And travel can be something a little bit more open-ended and we're not entirely sure when it's going to end. And it's quite likely that it will last a little bit longer and meander a little bit more. So I think they are different but obviously related.

Travel actually make people more open-minded and less likely to be biased against people who are different, especially those who come from a different culture or who speak another language. That's an interesting question, the question of being open-minded. There is a cliche which says that travel broadens the mind, of course, and that's a bit more complex than it sounds. Going back to the idea of travel and tourism very quickly, The amusing quote about that is that somebody once said that a traveller is what we call ourselves and a tourist is what we call other people.

So that kind of amused me a little bit. But going back to the question of travel broadening the mind, clearly I think it does have the potential to do that. But there is a fascinating typology that some social psychologists came up with looking at the different types of travellers or the different types of travellers or the different types of mindsets people have when they travel. Imagine a continuum, okay? And at one end, you've got, let's call it package tourism for the lack of a better phrase. So these are trips which are extremely popular. This is a mode of travel where we often visit geographically different places,

but within a bubble of companions from the same culture as us. And we often are accompanied everywhere by a tour guide and so we don't get into too many intrepid adventures or scrap. So that you might want to call that conservative travel. At the other end of this continuum, you've got what you might call the explorers or belonging seekers who typically travel independently and are a lot more likely to, for example, visit the houses or domestic scenes of the people in the towns and cities where they're visiting, if you're a conservative travel or a dependent, you're going to really only investigate the hotels and the tourist spots. Now, of course, the missing link to this argument

is that I think the conservative travel is less likely to broaden the mind, but you might regard it as being quite a lot safer because some people might feel a bit more vulnerable when they're travelling. So it's not a criticism of that mode of travel. And there's no coincidence that it is very popular because people do want to feel safe. And especially since COVID a few years ago, I think there has been a reemergence of the kind of travel in bubbles and the conservative travel, because for a while or so, we weren't able to travel at all. I wrote this book, The Psychology of Travel, ironically, during the two years where I wasn't able to travel at all. It was kind of something to do. I think most of us would agree that travel can be stressful.

I find that when I think back on a trip, some of my best stories are about the mistakes, like the time my ex booked us to the wrong country or the aggravations, like once I missed a connecting flight in Venezuela, but then I found somebody who volunteered to drive us to our destination. Is it common to focus on the challenges of travel? And am I weird in focusing on the mixups rather than the positive experiences of a given trip? Well, historically there was a concept called travel fever. And travel fever is kind of an umbrella term for all the fears, anxieties and worries that travel can produce in us. I think quite a lot of domestic arguments revolve around holidays. And it's ironic because that's kind of the thing that you do to enjoy yourself. But psychologists have distinguished between travel anxiety, travel fear and travel worry. We can leave aside phobias because that's an irrational sort of discrete category of experience on its own. Well, let's just think about the other three.

Fear of travel is usually something which is leveled at specific experiences, particular things we're worried about. Now, that might be something like flying or it might be something like tasting food that you're not familiar with. Sometimes it's just fear of the unknown. The second one, anxiety, is a kind of undefinable feeling of just feeling unsettled when you're in a new situation. Also, that's something that you can experience. But the third one, worry about travel, can actually be quite valuable. Because if you think about it, there is quite a lot to organise when you go travelling. And it's pretty valuable and useful to worry about making sure that you book the tickets on the right.

day or carrying the right belongings with you or you're not carrying sharp objects in the wrong places. So I think a little bit of travel anxiety or travel worry is not such a bad thing. And these kind of things can be mediated or prepared for just with a bit of extra preparation and planning, I think. Things can go wrong at every step of a journey, can't they? You can have anxiety before you set off. You can have anxiety while you're traveling and you can have anxiety once you've returned if you've lost some of your belongings. But all of these things can be moderated with a bit more planning and perhaps a little bit of mindfulness, which is something we can perhaps talk about a little bit later on. What about these people who are afraid to travel but maybe they want to?

I mean, are there things that you can do to sort of prepare yourself to travel if you have that fear or anxiety? I think so, yeah. I mean, going back to this idea of conservative travel, and I think travel, it's understandable that people do worry about it, because most of the time our lives are quite routine and we take ourselves outside the routine of our day-to-day life, and it can be quite anxiety-provoking. And so I think the advice to try to reduce anxiety a little bit is to maybe just think about traveling incrementally, maybe with people who are a little bit more experienced, first of all. Also maybe think about traveling at first, the places that have got some similarities with the places that you already know about. It's basically about learning a new skill, isn't it?

When we try to learn a new skill or get to know a new person, we go into it on tiptoes at first, rather than jumping in with two feet. And I think that's one thing that can reduce anxiety by, first of all, trying familiar-type trips, maybe try and package holidays, first of all, traveling with people we know. And the third thing, and I mentioned it before, is just engaging in a little bit more planning and research before you set off. We have the luxury these days, I've been able to plan ahead, you know, and it's quite difficult these days to, in fact, visit something or a place, which is a complete mystery because pretty much everywhere is documented, isn't it?

You're sort of alluding to the technologies that enable us to plan out our trips, and we can now navigate almost around the world using Google Maps on our phones rather than getting lost all the time. How have these technologies change the experience of travel, and is it all for the better? Well, I can remember the first experience I had of traveling in, which to me was quite an exotic trip when I went over to Malaysia with my bicycle in 1999, cycled across the mainland. And I came across these things called internet cafes.

I know these are sort of obviously on the, they're dwindling at the moment. But I thought this was a fascinating place to observe people because you had people from lots of different countries who were in Southeast Asia spending quite a lot of their time in front of screens communicating to people back home. not really experiencing a village life in Malaysia or whatever. So I think we have to think about the role of technology in travel.

Nowadays, of course, as you say, it's all its GPS and its mobile phones. There has been some research done about the different experiences that people have when discovering a new place either by using their mobile phone to navigate or by asking people the way. Do you remember when we used to do that? And it was quite interesting because the people who had asked people the way and weren't allowed to use their mobile phones in this particular study, they, when they were later tested asked questions about what they remembered about the streets and the places and some

of the sensory experiences, they gave much more detailed answers than did the people who had kind of worked it out for themselves with their phone. So, I mean, I'm not a person who is a ludite who thinks that mobile phones are a bad idea, but does change the experience. And maybe there is some value in trying to re-emerse ourselves in some of the social connectedness, face-to-face social connectedness that we used to have to do, I suppose. Just one more interesting thing about travel and technology that's a recent development in the last few years is the rise of what's sometimes known as digital nomadism. which is a fascinating sort of new category of work, life, travel, balance, isn't it? On a recent trip I had, which was for work in Central America,

I stayed in an apartment block, and I noticed that quite a lot of the people staying there will get up in the morning and basically carry out their ordinary office jobs at these different individual tables, working in lots of random different IT related professions and then every two or three days they would do a bit of travelling. So what they were doing was really challenging the idea of workspace, travel and home space.

And they were making a living by virtue of the fact that they had their laptop with them. So digital nomadism for those people who are lucky enough to be able to work through their laptops, is a whole new formulation of the way that we can now travel work at the same time. We're going to take a short break. When we return, I'll talk to Dr. Stevenson about how the pressure to document and share our travel experiences on social media is changing the way we experience travel. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

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and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Related to the technology issue, a few years ago, I spent three days in Nice, hiking the Inca Trail to get to Mocetrail to get to Mocetra. Pichu, which was an amazing experience. When I got to the ruins, I was stunned by all the daytrippers

who spent virtually all their time they're taking selfies rather than just experiencing being in the place. And that kind of took away from my enjoyment too. Do you think that the pressure to document and share our travel experiences on social media is changing the way we experience travel, both in real time and then how we remember the trips. Yes, two different questions there. Both of them really interesting. First of all, I think that the way that we document everyday experience using the selfies, for example,

has changed the way we experience all of our movements and mobility, and it doesn't just apply to travel. So I think what you'll see nowadays is people at the gym, at concerts and on holiday, communicating their experiences by taking photographs in which they are in the foreground and whatever it is their experience is in the background. Now it depends how you want to look at that. If it was being optimistic, you could say, well, this is great because it shows that people are able to share their experiences and immerse themselves in those experiences.

and the technology allows them to form this kind of imagined community with their followers and friends. So that's a good thing. I guess the style of photography has changed because, of course, the skill of taking a photograph of a place has perhaps been replaced

by the desire to show yourself in that place. And that's a very different kind of perspective, isn't it? But I think on the positive side, we do use photography as a form of selective memory, don't we? These days, I'm getting a little bit older. I do take photographs of things just to help me remember them,

but I think that's always been a pretty good idea. I guess you could also say about photography is that it's a kind of unreliable witness, isn't it, of the things that we have experienced. Maybe we need that. We tend not to take the photographs of the arguments we're having or the cues that we're standing in during our trip, but we take more photographs about the things where we might call them peak experiences. I don't think cameras were ever a reliable historical document, but I just think the way that we

place ourselves in those experiences has changed a little bit as well. In your book, you write about how other people are travel companions and the people we meet while we're traveling are an essential part of the experience and that there's really no such thing as a solo trip. Can you talk about that? This was something that occurred to me when I was writing the book, actually, but the idea of solo travel. It's almost a bit of a myth. I mean, you can travel without your friends and without your family, but it's very difficult to travel without other people unless you're, I was going to say, unless you're climbing Everest, but recent photographs suggest that

Everest got quite a long queue, quite a long queue up there now. But I think one of the theories that psychologists always talk about is the theory of planned behaviour, the idea that we plan to do something and then we do it and that we're very logical using very logical cognition. But actually, a lot of our decisions are complicated by other people. And I think anyone who's a member of a family or a group of friends knows that the things you want to do in your lives, and this includes travel, are often diluted or influenced by what everybody else is doing. This can be as simple as looking through the window of a restaurant and seeing that it's empty

and suddenly deciding it might not be the place you want to eat because nobody else is eating there. So social influence has a big effect on us, but also social influence is likely to increase the likelihood of our doing something, especially as you were talking earlier about people who might be a bit nervous about visiting somewhere different. And if you see people who you think might be like-minded in a place, then that does have, it might prompt you to share some of those experiences. But there is another side to sort of social aspects of travel. And I think this is quite important and interesting in that I think it's got a relationship to the idea of prejudice and discrimination as well. because obviously in the era of the kind of cultural wars and us trying to learn a bit more about different types of people

and there is this fear of difference out there, there is a theory which suggests that when you travel to a new country, which might be a new country to you, let's say you took a holiday in Nigeria or Mexico or something like that, being in that country might influence your attitude towards Mexicans and Nigerians. And there is the theory in psychology called the contact hypothesis, which basically says, you've heard people say things like,

well, actually, when you get to know them, they're quite nice. And this whole idea that once you have contact with a group of people who previously you might be skeptical about, maybe based on what you'd read in the newspapers, some of that evaporates when you meet them face to face. But there's a lovely complication to this theory. One piece of research suggested or demonstrated actually that prejudice reduces when you meet people who are different from you only when you meet them on an equal status situation. So what I mean by that is if you meet lots of people from Nigeria, but those people from Nigeria are cleaners or people who are serving you drinks or people who are working for.

you in some way, that prejudice is not likely to be challenged. However, if you meet those people and a social situation in their houses as colleagues and equals, then it's at those situations where prejudice can be reduced by travel. So that's another nice example of travel broadening in the mind and making you a bit more cosmopolitans, a good word, isn't it? Yeah. Speaking of other people, I mean, I've done a fair amount of traveling in my life and I'm pretty sure I have some close friends. I could never travel with, and I'm not going to say who they are. But how do you know if someone is going to be a good travel companion? What are the characteristics you should look for?

I think I might have to answer this from my own experience. It wasn't something that I wrote a lot about in the book, and I don't want to step out of my comfort zone. But I'm quite antisocial. You know, I personally, I find the two people who I enjoy traveling with most are myself or my partner. And I've got lots of people who I like to spend time with, but it is quite difficult to spend a prolonged period with that person. But I would say that the best way to make a social travel trip a success is to ensure that you and that other person or those other people are doing something together that you really enjoy.

For example, if you're going on a skiing trip with some people, then the great thing about that, is, even if you don't get on with them 100%, you're all sharing an experience together. And I think that can be a really good advantage. Doing something together, it can be a great replacement for not having lots and lots of things in common generally. And I mean that in the most positive way. I mean, the flip side of that is you can travel with people who you have lots in common with, but you don't actually do anything together, and that kind of wouldn't work as well.

There's a concept in psychology called flow. It's related to well-being, and it's also related to mindfulness. And basically it's the idea that just like an artist who's painting a picture, it gets totally lost in the task, if you're traveling in a way where you experience travel flow in a positive way, you're being totally absorbed in the task that you're doing, and you almost lose awareness of where you are and what time it is. And that kind of idea of doing nice things together that you're really enjoying.

Skiing, whitewater rafting, there's been some research done on that, even walking. I think the key is have something to do which brings you together. How did you become interested in the psychology of travel? And what was the impetus for writing the book? I was surprised that this book hadn't already been written. I couldn't believe it. I mean, we're way beyond the era of popular tourism now. If you search academic journals, as I do now and again, you will find that there is quite a lot of research that has been conducted on topics related to travel and psychology.

And a lot of these relate to the questions you've been asking today, Kim. However, I was also mindful of the fact that nobody seemed to have sat down and collected all these things together and written them in a more accessible way, dare I say it. Now, I'm as guilty as anyone else of writing academic articles that most people will never read, okay, because they get published in journals and they may get read by other academics, which is great. But I thought it would be a nice idea to divide up the psychology of travel into five or six topics. And you've covered a lot of those today, social travel, health and travel, fear of travel. and to just cherry pick some of the most interesting findings from other researchers and make these into a sort of slimmer volume which travellers or people with an interest in travel would like to read about, not just academics. So there was that. And then the second factor was, as I mentioned before, there was 18 months where we just couldn't travel and needed something to do.

And this seemed to be almost like a bit of substitute sublimated travel, as Freud might call it. Speaking of substitute travel, another question I think I alluded to this in my introduction was, if you don't have the time with a budget to travel, can you gain some of the benefits of travel by approaching your life and where you live with a travel mindset or maybe reading about other people's travels or even watching videos about travel? I think definitely you can do that. And in fact, there is a school of psychology, which is kind of a mixture between literature, travel, and geography.

And it's called psychogeography. And it's a little bit of an outlier in the psychology of travel. But psychogeography began in France, in Paris, actually, in the 20th century by a literary artist called Guy de Bourne. He talked a lot about the fact that travel is something that we can, it's a mindset that we can adopt and we don't have to be a long way away from home to behave like a traveler. The most interesting things of the world are not necessarily the ones that are furthest away. And I think we all learned during the pandemic that, I don't know about you,

but I suddenly discovered lots of interesting things about my own, my own area, town village where I lived because we had to walk around and take our fresh air an hour a day. Psychogeography really teaches us that, to take a quote from another psychologist, destinations are not the only places. In other words, we can find interesting things at every point along a journey, not just at the place we're meant to be traveling to. and a nice little prank that some psycho geographers have done is to do exactly what you've just suggested there, Kim, is to maybe take an out-of-date guidebook of their own town and go and check into a hotel in their own city and try to live like a tourist for a long weekend and just see if you can re, I'd like to use the word defamiliarize yourself with your city by looking at it from

the outside. Now, I'll tell you a little anecdote from when I did my PhD in 2013. My topic for my dissertation, for my PhD, was the experience of arriving in a new place and how that feels. And I did mobile interviews, walking interviews, with six different migrants who had all arrived in Manchester at the same time from different places. And my job basically during this project was to follow them around and ask them questions about how they got to know this city, using different activities like walking, photography, shopping, eating. And it was great because I got to know my own city through the eyes and ears of people who just arrived. And I think I wrote in my PhD that I was basically defamiliarized with my own city.

And I began to see it as an outsider. That was a fantastic experience. So, yes, I think the short answer to your question is, yes, we can try to take a fresh perspective on our own city, maybe by getting to know it with someone else who's just arrived. So just to wrap up, did the research you did for this book change the way you approach travel in your own life and are you a big travel yourself? I have been a big travel myself, fortunately. I think this is ironic really,

but I think over the last few years I've kind of become a little bit more content with exploring places where I live and maybe by savoring some of the journeys that I have maybe a little bit more. I think I may travel with greater quality but not quite as frequently. And I think at times of sort of eco-referral

anxiety and climate change, some of the most meaningful or a meaningful way of making journeys is maybe to take fewer flights, but maybe to go to places where you fly to and stay there a little bit longer and immerse yourselves in those places a little bit more. So I think that's one thing I've tried to do it a little bit more is travel less frequently, but if I can, spend a little longer and try to immerse myself a little bit more in those places. Got any trips planned right now? We're off to Wales for the weekend, which isn't very far from here, but we're going to do a nice walking holiday.

Yes, so that's going to be our next trip. So that'll be lovely. Nice. Well, Dr. Stevenson, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me. And good luck with the rest of the podcast. And that's been a fantastic conversation.

Thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website, at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please follow us and leave a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Thank you for listening.

For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees? Get ahead of summer with custom window treatments like solar roller shades from blinds.com and save up to 45% off during the Memorial Day Early Access sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you. Free samples, real design experts, and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 45% off site wide right now during the Early Access Memorial Day sale at blinds.com.

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