Is Travelling Bad For Your Health? The Shocking Truth

Everybody talks about the must-see sights around the world.

What food to try where.

The WHITEST beaches (btw. still on the lookout for that, so if you know about any epic ones, let us know in the comments, please!).

But do you know what not a lot of people talk about?

Is travelling bad for your health??

Is the magical, amazing, wonderful, cures-all travel actually not that great, in the long run?

We are here to give you our 2 cents on this topic.

Hold onto your beach hat. It’s gonna be a wild ride (we talk about all sorts of issues in this post 😬).

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Mirka and Daniel making faces holding up jelly fish on a stick — Does eating jelly fish make you more unhealthy than sitting behind a computer screen all day long? We’ll tell you the answer

Here’s a little bit about our journey, if you are new here! If you know us, feel free to skip this part.

After leaving our old life in Scotland in March 2022 (it rains too much there), we travelled full-time for almost 2 years. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Well, it was. If you think that carrying overpacked backpacks in 45°C heat around streets that aren’t even on Google Maps is fancy. And that’s just 1% of all the fun we had! 😆

During the 2 years we volunteered in Italy and Bulgaria (free travel while learning new skills, anyone?), explored other amazing European countries and backpacked Southeast Asia. Even our secret wedding was more of an expedition than a wedding. 😅

And, of course, we researched and planned everything ourselves, because you gotta keep the budget low, right? If you are like us, you’ve come to the right place, because we want to share all the useful tips and info with you!

Excited? Good. Let’s get into it so you can go on your own adventures too!

Which group do you belong to?

To answer the question “is travelling bad for your health”, we first have to clarify what we mean by travelling.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s divide travel into 3 broad categories:

Casual travel – the holidays you take during your time off work
Business travel – being in a job where you travel for work frequently
Long-term travel – travelling for months or years, either as a full-time traveller or a digital nomad

Here is how we think travel affects the health of each group.

Casual travel

We are going to generalise here, but going on a holiday is almost always good for your health.

You get to relax. Switch off. Have something to look forward to (and work towards, if you are saving). Expand your horizons. Be more active. Spend more time outside. Spend more time not hunched over a desk, staring at a screen. Spend more time away from social media and the world of internet. Spend more time with your loved ones. Spend more time doing anything other than living your usual, ordinary life.

Yes, your health might suffer a bit even on a short holiday.

There are many dangers, such as sunburn, food poisoning, all-inclusive buffets and cocktails, hotel beds, sea urchins (seriously, wear water shoes in Croatia) and more.

But these are usually all temporary and not something that will make your health suffer in the long run.

That’s why we won’t focus on this category in the rest of the post. Sad? Don’t be. Means there is less for you to read! Onwards!

Mirka and Daniel taking a selfie on a cruise ship — Casual holidays are usually amazing for your physical and mental health (unless you sunburn, like we regularly do!)

Business travel

We don’t have any experience of being frequent business travellers, and so feel like we can’t comment on how travel affects the health of these people.

We are all about sharing tips and hacks from our own personal experience, which, in this case, we can’t.

This is why we won’t address business travel at all in this article.

That being said, if you are a frequent business traveller, you might still find the post useful – there are definitely similarities between business and long-term travel (crappy diet, sleeping in random beds etc.).

So feel free to read on!

Long-term travel

We travelled full-time for almost 2 years and so this is the category we are going to focus on in this post.

Because the more you travel, the higher the chance your health is affected by it.

Makes sense, right?

So let’s get into the specifics.

Mirka and Daniel carrying two backpacks each at an airport — Tanned and happy. What you can’t see is how tired and done we were too, while backpacking full-time

Is travelling bad for you? The long-term travel funfest

Long-term travel. The dream! Unless you’ve done it and then you know the reality of it. 😅

Here are some facts you should know before you read the rest of the post:

We did think full-time travel was going to solve a lot of our problems, including many health-related ones. Not because we are totally delulu and think travel cures all. But because our health definitely suffered when we lived in Scotland. Even trying to go full-time travelling was super challenging for us.
We made a big mistake going into full-time travel absolutely done. Tired, jaded and physically and mentally not well. We should have started our journey by relaxing for some time. Instead, we went volunteering, which we were told would be relaxing. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, because the volunteering host turned out to be awful. If you want to go volunteering abroad, but you don’t want to end up like us, make sure to check out our guide.
Despite everything, full-time travel IS a dream. We are just making sure we tell both sides of the story, because making it sound like JUST a dream is very dangerous for those who might be wanting to do the same.
We have bad luck. You might now be thinking: “Yeah, so does everyone”. But what we’ve learned over the years is that no one else around has this much 💩 happening to them. We keep asking people, and yep, it does seem to be just us. So there is a chance that all of this is actually down to our crappy luck and not travel at all.

Mirka and Daniel posing at an airport holding passports with boarding passes — Leaving Scotland – hoping all our problems stay behind

Full-time travel challenges

When we were travelling full-time, we were dealing with an awful lot of challenges. We won’t go into detail in this post, but it did make us wonder (frequently): is travelling bad for your health??

If you want a peek into the funfest that is full-time travel, here are some of the things we were battling:

We had no routine. And while you might think that that’s great, it actually becomes very tiring after some time. Constantly adapting, constantly changing, constantly being on alert, not being able to rely on anything – that really puts a strain on your health.
(Most) Humans are creatures of comfort. It’s hard to maintain a certain level of comfort when you are backpacking on a budget full-time. In fact, comfort is the first thing that gets sacrificed in the name of saving money and travelling for longer.
Our healthy diet went down the drain. In Scotland, we used to cook our own meals, so we always knew what we were eating. And we made sure it was (mostly) healthy. Full-time travelling? We ate whatever we could find. 😬
Vegetables, surprisingly, left our diet. We heard a great tip that other travellers use: order a side salad or a plate of vegetables with every dinner, so you make sure you are not just living off of noodles, meat, pasta etc. We kinda tried. Kinda failed. It’s definitely something we want to change going forward.
Carrying everything we own in backpacks, of course, meant we couldn’t take any supplements and vitamins with us. We didn’t get any tests done to see if we became deficient in anything while travelling, but we would venture that yes, yes we did.
Speaking of, aside from carrying our (overpacked) backpacks, sometimes swimming and walking A LOT, we did no exercise. This meant going from working out daily to almost 0 exercising, out of nowhere. Not great.
We were exposed to heat, dry air (planes) and air con constantly. It’s a fantastic combo for your health (*heavy sarcasm*).
We slept in a different bed every few days. That means we never knew what kind of sleep we would be getting. And some nights we had no sleep at all, unless you count sleeping on a bus, at an airport or on a long-haul flight.
We had A LOT of bad stuff happen to us. As a result, Mirka’s mental health suffered big time. In fact, she still hasn’t recovered, but it was particularly bad while we were on the road.

So yeah. It’s a fair point to wonder whether travelling is bad for your health. 😬

Don’t let this discourage you, though, if long-term travel is your goal. Just make sure you are realistic and consider the cons of it too.

If you need more info so you can decide, whether quitting your job and sailing off into the sunset is the right thing for you, you can always book a call with us where we can help you figure it out!

Daniel exercising in a gym overlooking a pool — We did go to the gym while full-time travelling. Twice 😬😅

Our health post-full-time travel

After almost 2 years of full-time travel, we decided to take a break.

From a practical point of view, we needed more stability to work on things. We wanted to plan our wedding, start a business and make more money – things we found impossible to do while backpacking full-time.

But we also felt like we needed a break for our health. To recover from full-time travel, because don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – it is tough.

Setting up a homebase

By total accident, we ended up setting up a homebase in Slovakia, Mirka’s birth country.

We thought it would be great.

We have our own place.

An opportunity to have a routine.

Do everything to recover from full-time travel.

And we did make many changes.

Here are the things we started doing to heal from the effects of full-time travel on our health:

Improved our sleep. We got our own mattress, bought all the bedding, started going to sleep and waking up at (more or less) the same time etc.
Started taking better care of our hair and skin. That means not just using whatever shampoo the accommodation gives you. 😅 And introducing things like retinol into our skincare routine. Hell, having a skincare routine in general is a new thing for us!
Working out daily. We are nowhere near as fit as we were pre-travel, but we are back to exercising pretty much every day (home workouts and for Daniel also running).
Cooking our own meals, so again being in control of what (and how much) we eat. And yes, we did up our fruit and vegetable intake!
Started taking supplements and vitamins again. Everything we were taking pre-travel and more, to compensate for any potential deficiencies (and because we actually started looking into things more and realised we could use improving certain things!).
Basing ourselves in Slovakia, in Mirka’s birth town, means we can socialise a lot more often with friends and family – more than we ever could.
We created a routine because we love things to be efficient. Batch cooking, sleep schedule, daily workouts – we have hacked everything to make sure we can make the most of our time and this opportunity of having a home base.
We are able to do many things we couldn’t do while full-time travelling: play games, have chilled out evenings, have a home bar, a big selection of tea, SO MANY CLOTHES in the wardrobe. All the stuff we missed on the road. Our joy meter should be through the roof.

A board game set up on a table — We can have friends over and play board games – something we missed a lot when travelling

The result

So we did all of the above and more.

What’s more, we are no longer facing the challenges of full-time travel, so one would think our health has improved majorly, right?

Well, as it turns out, things are not that simple.

After months of living at our homebase, we discovered shocking things:

We don’t look as happy and healthy as we did when travelling full-time.
Health problems that disappeared when we were full-time travelling suddenly came back.
We don’t feel healthier. Physically, or mentally.

Mirka and Daniel looking tanned and healthy sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant — Us during travel life vs

Mirka and Daniel sitting in a living room working on laptops — Us at a home base

What went wrong

While we were rather shocked when we discovered that not only our health isn’t better, but many things are worse, it does kinda make sense.

We think that these are the culprits:

Routine. The very routine we craved during full-time travel very fast became the routine that we can’t stand. We love the efficiency of routine, but not how suffocating it feels.
Unhealthy habits. Ordinary life often feeds unhealthy habits. Why? It’s a way to cope. So we eat more sugar. We drink more alcohol. We procrastinate more. We move less. We consume crap (social media content, TV shows etc.).
Pressure. Now that we have a home base to relax in, we aren’t able to relax. Because every day we spend relaxing is another day we are not getting closer to our goals. The home base is a temporary work station to get specific jobs done. Not our home (despite the name!).
Being stuck. We wanted a home base for a bit. To work things out. But we are also not the kind of people who are happy to just sit in one place. We are forever battling the dilemma – travel and live (and spend) vs stay at home and work on our future life (and save).
Some things just were better when travelling. The quality of food. Being outside. Moving (outside) every day. Being in the sun (and having a gorgeous tan). Not staring at a screen most of the day.
The struggle of going from the exciting life of a full-time traveller to an ordinary life of a normal person is not something that’s easy to explain, unless you’ve experienced it yourself. But it’s something that pains us every day.

Great, isn’t it? If someone had told us this when we were full-time travelling and fantasising about the stuff that would make us (and our health) better, we would have laughed and skipped off into the sunset (at the beach).