Travel in later life often gets treated as a nice extra, something to do if the budget and body allow, rather than something worth actively prioritizing. Two studies that measured its actual effects on mind and body suggest that framing sells it short, and that getting out into the world in your sixties and beyond does real, measurable work.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2024 study by Shu Cole, Chenggang Hua, Siyun Peng, and Weixuan Wang, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Drawing on a nationally representative U.S. sample of 7,037 adults aged 51 and older from the Health and Retirement Study, the researchers compared non-travelers against local day-trippers, domestic travelers, and international travelers, adjusting for age, sex, race, education, marital status, wealth, and health limitations. Cognitive function scores climbed with the scale of travel, local trips showed a modest boost, domestic travel a larger one, and international travel the largest of all. The same pattern held for mental health: depressive symptoms and loneliness both dropped significantly with travel, again scaling with distance and effort, average depression scores fell from 2.53 among non-travelers to just 0.87 among international travelers, and loneliness dropped from 1.76 to 1.36. The researchers noted this matters given the scale of the problem it may be counteracting, over 40 percent of adults 60 and older report feeling lonely.
A second study helps show that travel’s benefits in later life may extend beyond mood and memory to something even more fundamental. In a 2022 study by Guanghui Qiao, Liu Ding, Keheng Xiang, Bruce Prideaux, and Jinyi Xu, published in the same journal, the researchers used China’s decade-long Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey to track mortality risk among seniors who had and hadn’t traveled recently. Seniors who had traveled in the two years before the survey had a 36.6 percent lower risk of dying over the following decade than those who hadn’t, and the effect showed a clear dose-response pattern, each additional trip lowered that risk further, by roughly 13.6 percent per trip. The pattern held up in two separate, independently analyzed cohorts, an eight-year cohort and a four-year cohort, each showing a similarly sized reduction in risk. Interviews conducted alongside the survival analysis pointed to a likely mechanism, travel appeared to build a sustained sense of belonging, social connection, and self-enrichment that the researchers linked to healthier aging overall.
Together, these two studies make a strong, evidence-backed case for treating travel in later life as more than a luxury. Cole and colleagues’ research shows the cognitive and emotional benefits are real and scale with the ambition of the trip, the further and more involved the travel, the bigger the boost to memory, mood, and social connection. Qiao and colleagues’ research extends that finding into something even more consequential, a measurably lower risk of dying in the years that follow, with each additional trip adding to the protection. Between the two, travel in your sixties and beyond looks less like an indulgence and more like an investment with real returns, for the mind now and for time itself later.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Cole and colleagues’ research is cross-sectional, capturing a single snapshot in time, so while the associations were strong and consistent, it can’t fully rule out that healthier, more socially connected people were simply more likely to travel in the first place, rather than travel causing the improvement. Qiao and colleagues’ research was conducted specifically with Chinese seniors, and while the mortality pattern replicated across multiple cohorts, cultural attitudes toward travel, family, and aging may shape how cleanly this finding transfers elsewhere.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely encouraging case for booking that trip rather than postponing it indefinitely. The evidence doesn’t say travel is only worthwhile if health and finances are perfect, it suggests that even modest, local trips carry some benefit, and that the more someone is able to go, the more their mind, mood, and even their longevity appear to gain from it.