Psychology 101 | Travel Psychology

Psychology can be your owner’s manual. A practical understanding of the big ideas and concepts in psychology allows you to live better. You learn about the reasons people are happy or unhappy, what motivates people, how to overcome trauma, and how to live a more serene and joyful life. This is practical psychology, but it is not what you would find in a college course.

If you go to college, Psychology would probably be an option you never take. The students that do take Psych 101 learn about a pyramid of needs, the history of psychology, diseases and other abstract theories. You learn about schizophrenia, but not about meditation, you learn about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but don’t take any time to explore your emotions.

Travel gives you lessons in practical psychology.

While you travel you learn how hunger affects your emotions, how you need to connect with other people to be happy, how good you feel after a deep conversation when you’ve been by yourself for two days.

If you travel for long enough, you will start to recognize a difference between fulfillment and happiness. You learn that many things can make you happy but unless you are learning something, seeing yourself grow, or feeling a sense of meaning or purpose, that you don’t seem to enjoy the up’s as much. The frivolous fun you enjoyed at the start of your trip has become boring a month or two later.

Practical psychology is about applying lessons to yourself and the people around you. Travel helps you recognize and break through limiting beliefs about yourself. When you were young people started calling you an introvert, but as you travel and meet so many people and have so many conversations, you end up with no social anxiety.

While you travel, you learn that the endless moralization of groups of people as good an evil simply is never true. There are always shades of gray. The groups of people you had been told were the villains whether they be Russians, Republicans, hippies, feminists, or Catholics, are actually very similar to you and you find yourself getting along with them better than others. This lesson teaches you that the endless generalizations made about groups of people are largely ridiculous. That the commonalities we all share as humans make us much more alike than we are different; that within those generalized groups each person is unique.

As you travel, and meet more people than you have ever met before you find yourself making assumptions about people that are proved wrong over and over again. Slowly you drop the assumptions and replace it with curiosity about everyone you meet.

Instead of learning about theories on human behavior, you will be learning about what actually motivates you, and what actually motivates others around you. You gain self-knowledge about what makes you happy, sad, angry, excited, or homesick. This self-knowledge gained by interacting with all sorts of people is truly practical psychology.

The difference between any topic in school or college and a topic you learn about traveling is that travel helps you learn practical knowledge. Driven by your curiosity and interest you will learn what is most practical to you. Learning from experience is real learning; knowledge that stays with you as opposed to memorized facts from a textbook that escape your mind moments after a test. When you learn what you need to learn when you need to learn it, or when you truly want to learn it, you improve your ability to learn. You slowly turn yourself into a rifle, ready to use any new ammunition you learn, instead of being a wagon full of ammunition you’ve learned, but have no idea how to use.