Why You Have Bigger Balls on Vacation

Back home in Kentucky, I am the picture of routine: same diner, same breakfast burrito, same waitress who already knows to bring the Cholula.

My idea of adventure on a Tuesday is trying a different brand of coffee creamer and potentially taking a side road versus the interstate.

But put me on a work trip or vacation, and suddenly I am living like a different man.

I am ordering food I cannot pronounce, striking up conversations with strangers in airports like a politician, and signing up for things like ziplining across canyons, even though I'm not sure my life insurance is current.

The same guy who plays it safe at home somehow becomes Indiana Jones in a rental car. What gives?

The psychology of being away

Psychologists refer to it as the “fresh start effect.”

A new city feels like a reset button: no history, no baggage, no reputation to live up to. You and a clean page to scribble on.

Travel also triggers the mindfulness switch without us even realizing it.

At home, we speed by the same barns and trees like they are part of the wallpaper.

But on vacation?

We stare at a random tree for ten minutes, as if it were the eighth wonder of the world. That is not magic; that is just your brain paying attention again.

Why do we not feel it at home?

At home the brain goes on autopilot.

Same road. Same gas station clerk. Same buddy telling the same fish story for the hundredth time.

Autopilot saves energy, but it also robs us of noticing what is right in front of us.

We also care way too much about what people think.

At home, you do not want to look foolish because somebody might tell your neighbor.

On vacation? Nobody knows you. You could dance in the middle of the street wearing cargo shorts, and the only record will be a blurry photo in someone else’s scrapbook.

The trick is not to sell your stuff and move to Bali.

The trick is to break the routine.

• Take a different road to work and actually notice the houses

• Sit in your garage without your phone and watch the light shift across your dying October-infused lawn

• Eat at that hole-in-the-wall place you always drive past, if it has been there third-two years and survived three owners, a fire, and it is probably worth a plate

• Pretend you are a tourist in your own town and ask what Instagram-worthy would be if you did not live there

A Kentucky Dude takeaway

We feel braver away from home because the scene changes, but the truth is the courage was already within us.

Vacation just forces us to be mindful and notice what we routinely ignore, meaning the secret isn't buying a plane ticket…it's treating your backyard like the exotic trip it already is.