Short excerpt from a July 27, 2023 podcast interview where Dr. Loretta Breuning and another speaker discuss how unmet needs drive happiness (e.g., thirst at an oasis) and why travel can produce feelings of ecstasy—variety, removal of home-based negative cues, and deprivation-triggered reward chemistry (dopamine).
If you're thirsty in the desert and you see an oasis in the distance, you're just ecstatic. But if you live at the oasis, then the water doesn't make you a bit happy. So it's only the unmet need that triggers your happy chemicals.
That's one reason people love traveling. They're deprived of home. When they travel, they're deprived of a lot of conveniences. I've experienced that, you know, feeling the sense of being ecstatic, because it's like, wow, life is so good. Life is so easy. And it's, you know, the weather is amazing. It's beautiful here.
Variety triggers dopamine. That's part of it. And part of it is all of your negative thought loops are triggered by cues at home. And when you travel, they're not triggered.
