12 Wellness Tips From Around the World

A travel writer shares the life-changing lessons about fundamental wellness and simple self-care she's learned on the road from Jamaica to Norway.

May 14, 2021

By: Lauren Oster

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Photo By: Annie Daly

Travel Is the Best Teacher

Travel and health journalist Annie Daly knows a thing or two about well-being; she’s written for and edited some of the biggest lifestyle and wellness publications in the country.

She also knows a thing or two about how over-the-top the American wellness industry has become. After receiving a particularly gimmicky email (touting the benefits of “high-vibe” tomato sauce), she decided to make it her mission to cut through the hype. Combining her love of travel with her appreciation for simple, accessible ways to promote wellness, she hit the road to learn how other cultures stay healthy and happy. Her research became Destination Wellness: Global Secrets for Better Living Wherever You Are, a travelogue that features research and reporting, portraits of the people and places that inspired her and the time-honored tips they shared. Read on for a taste of what she learned — and inexpensive, travel-inspired ways to bring joy into your life every day.

Brazil: Lean Into the Group Chat

Daly got a firsthand taste of Brazil’s extraordinarily tight-knit communities of family and close friends after accepting an invitation to a celebration at a farm commune in Minas Gerais (above). One Brazilian she spoke with before the trip revealed that he’s in a WhatsApp group with 60 of his family members — and that they all say good morning to each other every single day. After traveling around the country and seeing that multigenerational, communal support firsthand, she gets it.

“The group text [with my family] actually has been a source of life throughout the pandemic — it is very active and very real, and weirdly reassuring, also. I didn’t [always] take so much comfort in it because there were so many other ways to talk to everyone, and see them in person. When you’re limited, you really see that texting is a powerful way to connect and it’s not just a side part of life, it is actual life also.”

Brazil: Honor Your Social Commitments

Hanging out is serious business in Brazil — so serious that spending time with others is considered a vital component of self-care. In the States, “the social truth of the moment is that saying no is the new self-care and it’s okay to protect yourself and protect your time and your mental energy and your space,” Daly says. “Self-care is also protecting ourselves by saying ‘yes.’ Even if it seems like you really just don’t want to go to that thing, reframing it in your mind as something that you’re doing to protect your health and to improve your well being is a simple and powerful switch to make in your mind.” Speaking of saying yes…

India: Allow for the Possibility of "Yes"

Daly traveled to the southern state of Kerala for an intimate exploration of Ayurveda, India’s traditional, natural medical science of life. Practiced for more than 5,000 years and prestigious in the East, Ayurveda is considered alternative medicine in the West — and that’s fine. “A lot of these lessons that I learned [in my travels] are so ancient, and they have been working for thousands of years — and so who’s to say that just because something isn't peer-reviewed in the way that we expect something to be, that means it's not true?” Daly asks. “We can all benefit from opening our minds a little more.” If you find yourself interested in supplementing Western care with Ayurvedic practices, give yourself permission to pursue that curiosity with a practitioner.

India: Pursue Personal Balance

Daly’s experience in Kerala was a far cry from American spa treatments — that is, ones she could select for herself on a whim. Her Ayurvedic practitioners prescribed treatments for her with the aim of creating balance based on her unique physiology (and then considering her mind, body, soul and senses, as well). The takeaway? Our one-size-fits-all emphasis on food fads and workouts-of-the-moment don’t leave room to pay attention to our individual constitutions. Develop a daily health routine that makes you — not a celebrity spokesperson — feel strong and supported.

Jamaica: Plant a Seed

Daly visited Rastafari farms in Jamaica to experience Ital, a plant-based lifestyle that enhances vitality through food and emphasizes the avoidance of animal products, processed foods and additives, as well as growing your own food as much as possible. It’s one thing to live that life in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains, of course, and another to try to do so in an urban setting. “When you really think about what the root meaning is of a philosophy, you can still adopt its big-picture message, and with Ital that message was that growing your own food is a way to help you disconnect from society in a small way and not support big brands that might not have your interests in mind,” Daly explains. “It’s a way to be self-reliant. And yes, in the city you can’t grow all your own food, but you have your windowsill, and you can plant a seed. And that can help you tap into that larger method that you learned when you were traveling, even if it’s not to the size or extent that it was when you first learned about it on the road.”

Jamaica: Create a "Bubble of Vibes"

An Ital chef explained to Daly that one of the simplest ways to avoid commercialization — those big brands that might not have your interests in mind — is to make your own home a refuge, with plants, home-cooked, non-processed food, and transporting music. If you want to stay put, the reasoning goes, you’re less likely to be affected by those over-the-top industrial messages and lures (like that “high-vibe” tomato sauce Daly was pitched). If you’re already a fan of reggae, as Daly is, you’re on your way to a bubble of your own already.

Norway: Turn Off the Tunes

Friluftsliv, loosely translated as “the free air life,” is a cornerstone of Norwegian identity and a point of national pride, and it does not involve playlists; instead, one disconnects and engages with nature on its own terms. “The spirit of friluftsliv is accessible to everyone, it’s literally just about ditching all of the stuff around you [and] connecting with nature in a pure form: sitting and listening to the wind. That is the definition of an ‘outdoors person’ in Norway,” Daly explains. “I grew up as such a music head, and the idea of not listening to music is crazy to me, but it did really help me listen to the wind and the rustle of the leaves and the campfire [in Norway] and it brought me to a different place. It was a lot more rejuvenating. And it did make me feel more in touch with nature in a way that having all of the extras around doesn’t.”

Learn More: 13 Wellness Trends Popping Up in Home Design

Norway: Skip the Extras

Speaking of extras, Daly also learned that Norwegian campers pack food to fuel them, tents to shelter them, and that’s about it. While American campers often pursue what she describes as “an extension of urban living that happens to be in a woodsy situation” (looking at you, glamping), her Norwegian fellow travelers made a stack of sandwiches, brewed a few urns of coffee and set up camp in order to do … nothing much, really. “As opposed to adventure, it’s more of just putting yourself in a place where you can get that deep sensation of feeling completely relaxed and at peace and content with the world by just being, and all that it takes to get there is getting yourself into a quiet place,” she says.

Hawaii: Sit and Listen

To learn about wellness traditions in Hawaii, Daly spoke to Native Hawaiians about their history — and found that the very act of sharing that history is considered an act of self-care. “Talking story” was a necessity for the elders when their language was purely oral, and it’s still a vitally important way to strengthen connections between generations.

That’s something Daly has brought back to her life on the mainland. “Understanding your roots and talking to your family about their past is such a great way to feel more connected to yourself,” she says. “And it’s a basic thing, but sometimes it just needs to be asked: Do I sit down and ask the people I love around me to just tell me their stories? The past can be so healing when you know your story.”

Hawaii: Let Life Reveal Itself to You

As Daly learned from a cultural preservationist in Maui, the Polynesians who sailed to the Hawaiian Islands more than 2,000 years ago relied on wayfinding techniques that had nothing to do with seeing land: they watched for particular species of birds, they listened to the wind and the waves, they considered the stars. “The ultimate message is that they were sitting in their canoes and silencing themselves enough to receive all of the signs that were going on around them and knowing that those signs would show them the way,” Daly says.

“To apply that to modern-day life, we think we can create our paths. In the West we are taught that we can hustle our way to our dreams and that we can pick a goal and make things happen for ourselves by following steps A, B, and C, and it will lead to D. But if we’re not slowing down enough we might mislead ourselves, and not listen to our intuition enough to trust that signs are slowly and quietly leading us to the lands where we’re meant to arrive.”

Japan: Rethink 'You Only Live Once'

Americans approach the idea that we only live once in terms of “let’s go skydiving, let’s go hot-air ballooning, we need to have big, epic adventures, YOLO,” Daly says. In Japan, she encountered another way to treasure the unrepeatable nature of a moment. “The ichigo ichie philosophy is an honoring of all the interactions you have,” she explains. “It’s rooted in Zen Buddhism and the idea that nothing is permanent. Literally, if I go get coffee every single day and I chat with the coffee barista, every single day that I have that chat it is different, because this is the only time I’ll be talking to them on this day in this precise moment when I’m feeling this way. It’s the idea of making that conversation count. My guide in Japan told me that adopting this philosophy in his day-to-day is his idea of wellness: honoring these interactions and making sure not to brush them off because we’re in too much of a rush to get to the next thing. This is the next thing, we’re only in this moment, and this is it.”

Japan: Preserve a Feeling of Presence

When Daly returned from Japan, she found herself craving the immediate engagement she had experienced on her trip — so she made a point of seeking out more of those moments with an urban tea master in New York City. The meeting revitalized her Japanese trek in particular, but the gesture represented something more. “It is more common than we realize to just leave travel as travel, like, ‘oh, I took this wonderful vacation and I felt so wonderful, and now here I am stuck back in the grind,’ but what is travel but the best teacher? The whole point of a lesson is to continue to practice it throughout your life,” she says. “Be conscious of taking lessons from your travels and continuing them at home. There are small changes to make and it’s on us to make them.”