How Vacation And Distance Can Help You Solve Problems

That taking a vacation helps rejuvenate the mind and the body is well documented, but new research indicates how taking a few days off and going to a faraway place also helps us solve problems that seemed impossible to resolve earlier. As Wired explains, in a new, distant place, our brain breaks free from surrounding constraints and is able to think in a new way. It is also made aware of new ideas and possibilities that were earlier stifled when working from the same place every day.

And this is why vacation is so helpful: When we escape from the places where we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we’d previously suppressed. We start thinking about obscure possibilities — corn can fuel cars! — that never would have occurred to us if we’d checked in with the office everyday.

Too often, we fail to consider the ways in which our surroundings constrain our creativity. When we are always “close” to the problems of work, when we never silence our phones or stop responding to e-mail, we get trapped into certain mental habits. We assume that there is no other way to think about things, that this is how it must always be done. It’s not until we’re napping by the pool with a pina colada in hand — when work seems a million miles away — that we suddenly find the answer we’ve needed all along.

Wired also reports of a recent experiment done by psychologist Lile Jia at Indiana University, where subjects were found to be much better at solving problems when they had a sense of distance, suggesting that a perception of distance radically opens up our brain to think of more alternatives.

Wired: “The Importance of Vacation”

image by Cayusa