For too long, say researchers from the University of Surrey, we have focused on the glamour of the jet-setting lifestyle at the exclusion of its physical and mental costs, writes FinBuzz.
It used to be common to flaunt the things you had. Nowadays, we flaunt the things we do, and there’s nothing quite like travel for making your Facebook persona look like the kind of bees-knees fellow that everyone aspires to be. Meanwhile, in your professional life (however much the boundaries may have blurred), making regular business trips doesn’t half make one feel jolly important.
From stock images of gap-year students finding enlightenment in the jungles of Asia to slick television adverts of handsome and wealthy looking men being pampered by the attractive personnel of the world’s most elite airlines, travel has been glamorised as a status-defining dimension of life no matter what your income bracket.
But as with all glamourous lifestyles, the glamour of frequent travel comes at a cost. And while the financial and ecological sides of this price tag have long been understood, a recent research paper entitled “A Darker Side of Hypermobility” suggests that the human dimension has long been overlooked: as well as costing the earth and ramping up expense accounts, frequent flying can produce serious physical and mental tolls on the traveller.
Some of these, such as the dreaded deep-vein thrombosis, are well known. But the adverse effects of even the most frequently experienced travelling woes such as jetlag are, it turns out, often poorly understood.
Few are likely to be aware, for example, that the body can take as long as 11 days to get its circadian rhythms back into sync after a long-haul flight, or that medical research has linked jetlag with increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. At what the researchers call the “extreme end of a darker side of hypermobility” are arguments that frequent fliers “should be classified as ‘radiation workers’: flying 85,000 miles a year goes beyond the regulatory limit for public exposure to radiation facilities”.
There are numerous psychological ramifications of frequent air travel too. “Hypermobility”, warn the researchers, “is frequently an isolating and lonely experience”. Those that have families will be painfully aware of the strain that prolonged absence from home can cause. This kind of lifestyle has even spawned a common trope in popular culture, the “stay-away Dad” of American films who always promises to make the next school play despite being inevitably called away at the last minute.
Even those without families will be surprised to learn how psychologically disorientating constant travel can be. From the loss of “local place-bounded identities” to the “deterritorialisation of place-identity” the researchers present a dizzying list of potential psychological ailments associated with the footloose lifestyle.
Finally, for those who are sceptical of academic neologisms and prefer their research to be based on hard figures, consider the following example: in “a study of the medical insurance claims of 10,000 World Bank staff [researchers found] a nearly three-fold increase in psychological claims by business travellers (4,000 of those staff) as opposed to non-travellers”.
Business-class flights and five-star hotels are always going to be glamorous. Research such as this is as unlikely to stop the hypermobile from enjoying these services and the status gained from using them as it is to stop many of their less mobile colleagues from envying them. Yet it might just make both these types think twice about the costs of such a lifestyle.
This story originally appeared in FinBuzz.
Photo: Roderick Eime