Published on: Mon Oct 12 2026
By Gregory Harmeling, Psy.D., LMFT

Why Therapists Are Paying Attention to Travel in Men’s Healing: A Deeper Look

A lot of the men who end up in my office have tried talking before. Some sat across from a therapist for a few sessions and quietly stopped going. Others never made it that far, because the idea of describing their feelings to a stranger for fifty minutes felt about as appealing as a root canal. Then, a few months or years later, something cracks: a relationship ends badly, a marriage turns out to have been something very different from what he thought, or he simply realizes he hasn’t felt like himself in a long time.

When those same men tell me about the moments they started to feel better, the story often happens somewhere else. A long drive up the coast. A week walking through a city where nobody knew his name. A morning on a trail when, for the first time in months, his mind went quiet.

Earlier in this series I wrote about the science behind travel as a healing tool, why solo travel in particular helps after trauma, and what getting a little lost can teach you about yourself. This article takes a step back and asks a more basic question: why are therapists paying closer attention to travel when it comes to men specifically? The answer has as much to do with how men heal as it does with where they go.

Why the Therapy Room Doesn’t Always Fit Men

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth for my profession. Traditional talk therapy wasn’t designed with most men in mind, and the research shows it.

A systematic review in Clinical Psychology Review looked at how traditional ideas about masculinity affect men’s willingness to get help for depression. The researchers found that the more closely a man holds to those norms (stay strong, handle it yourself, don’t show weakness), the less likely he is to seek help at all, and the more those beliefs shape which kinds of help he’s willing to accept (Seidler et al., 2016).

That second part matters. Many men aren’t opposed to getting better. They’re opposed to a format that feels foreign to them.

A follow-up review by the same research group pulled together what clinicians have learned about actually engaging men once they show up. The authors note that men often arrive feeling unsure about therapy and are more likely to drop out early. The approaches that tended to keep men involved shared a few qualities: they were collaborative and transparent, focused on clear goals, and built around action rather than open-ended talk. Even small adjustments, like using metaphors and language that fit a man’s own world, made a difference (Seidler et al., 2018).

Put those findings next to what a well-planned trip asks of a man, and the overlap is hard to miss. Travel is active. It has a purpose and a shape. It gives him problems to solve and decisions to make. And it often creates the kind of side-by-side, low-pressure setting where men find it easier to think honestly about their lives.

Healing That Happens While You’re Doing Something

Researchers who study stress have a useful name for what restores us: recovery experiences. These are the specific things that help the mind and body bounce back from strain.

A study in the Journal of Travel Research looked at four of them in the context of leisure travel: relaxation, mentally detaching from everyday pressures, mastery (the feeling of learning or accomplishing something new), and a sense of control over your own time and choices. All four were linked to higher life satisfaction after the trip. The researchers also found that even a weekend getaway helped people recover, while longer trips simply offered more room for these experiences to happen (Chen et al., 2016).

For the men I work with, two of those four stand out. Mastery is one. A man coming out of a relationship where he was constantly criticized has often lost track of what he’s good at. Figuring out a train system in a language he doesn’t speak, finding a decent place to eat in an unfamiliar town, or finishing a hike that scared him a little all rebuild that sense of competence in a way no pep talk can.

Control is the other. If you’ve spent years with a partner who decided where you went, who you saw, and what kind of mood the house would be in that day, simply choosing your own breakfast can feel strange. Travel hands those decisions back to you, one after another, all day long. Over time, that repetition starts to rebuild a belief that your choices are yours to make again.

Getting Out of Your Own Head

Almost every man I’ve treated after a toxic relationship describes the same habit. He replays conversations at two in the morning. He rehearses arguments he’ll never have. He combs through the past looking for the moment he should have seen it coming. Psychologists call this rumination, and it’s one of the main things that keeps people stuck in depression and anxiety.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tested whether a change of scenery could interrupt that loop. Participants took a 90 minute walk, either through a natural setting or along a busy urban street. Those who walked in nature reported less rumination afterward, and brain scans showed reduced activity in a region linked to that kind of negative, self-focused thinking. The urban walkers showed no such change (Bratman et al., 2015).

This is one reason I encourage men to build time outdoors into any trip, even a trip to a city. A morning hike, a long walk along a river, an afternoon somewhere green and quiet. You don’t need to fly across the world for this. You do need to give your mind a different place to rest.

The Part Nobody Puts on a Postcard

If you’ve ever come home from a great vacation and felt like your old self again within about a week, you’re not imagining it.

A meta-analysis in the Journal of Occupational Health pulled together the research on vacations and well-being. Time away did improve health and well-being, though the effect was modest, and those gains faded fairly quickly once people returned to their normal routines (de Bloom et al., 2009).

I share this because it explains why therapists approach travel the way we do. A trip on its own is a break. A trip connected to the work you’re doing in your life can become a turning point. The difference lies in what happens before you leave and after you get back.

If you go away hoping the trip will fix everything and then return to the same patterns, the same relationships, and the same thoughts, the benefits will likely fade on schedule. If you go away with an intention, pay attention to what shifts in you while you’re gone, and bring those lessons back into your everyday life, the trip has a much better chance of lasting.

How to Make a Trip Part of Your Healing

You don’t need a big budget or a month off work. Here’s how I talk with clients about making travel count.

Start with a purpose. Before you book anything, ask yourself what you’re hoping to feel or figure out. Maybe you want to prove to yourself that you can handle things on your own. Maybe you want space to grieve a relationship without everyone watching. That purpose will shape where you go and how you spend your time.

Build in a challenge you can actually meet. Pick something that stretches you a little: a hike, a city you’ve never navigated, a solo dinner in a busy restaurant. The goal is a win you earned yourself.

Leave room for quiet. Plan less than you think you should. Some of the most useful moments of a trip happen in the unscheduled hours, when there’s nothing to do but notice how you feel.

Write things down. A few lines in a notebook each evening will help you remember what you learned once the trip is over and the details start to blur.

Plan the return as carefully as the trip. Think about what you want to keep doing once you’re home, whether that’s daily walks, more time alone, or saying no more often. If you’re working with a therapist, bring what you noticed into your next session. That’s where a lot of the real progress gets made.

Be honest about avoidance. If the trip is a way to run from a hard conversation or a decision you know you need to make, it may feel good for a while without changing much. Getting away works best when you’re heading toward something, not just away from it.

If talking about your feelings has never come easily, that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It may simply mean you heal better while you’re moving, doing, and figuring things out for yourself. More therapists are starting to recognize that. A thoughtful trip won’t replace the work of recovery, but for many men it becomes the place where that work finally starts to feel possible.

References

Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567–8572. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510459112
Chen, C.-C., Petrick, J. F., & Shahvali, M. (2016). Tourism experiences as a stress reliever: Examining the effects of tourism recovery experiences on life satisfaction. Journal of Travel Research, 55(2), 150–160. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047287514546223
de Bloom, J., Kompier, M., Geurts, S., de Weerth, C., Taris, T., & Sonnentag, S. (2009). Do we recover from vacation? Meta-analysis of vacation effects on health and well-being. Journal of Occupational Health, 51(1), 13–25. https://doi.org/10.1539/joh.K8004
Seidler, Z. E., Dawes, A. J., Rice, S. M., Oliffe, J. L., & Dhillon, H. M. (2016). The role of masculinity in men’s help-seeking for depression: A systematic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 49, 106–118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.09.002
Seidler, Z. E., Rice, S. M., Ogrodniczuk, J. S., Oliffe, J. L., & Dhillon, H. M. (2018). Engaging men in psychological treatment: A scoping review. American Journal of Men’s Health, 12(6), 1882–1900. https://doi.org/10.1177/1557988318792157
Photo by the Greg Harmeling