12 Wellness Tips From Around the World

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.

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.”

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…

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.