Notes From a Neuro Nerd: The Science Behind Living Your Best Life
Welcome to Notes from a Neuro Nerd, where brain science meets practical tools for living with purpose, clarity, and joy. Join Monica—a certified life-purpose coach and neuroscience enthusiast—and her partner, Austin, as they explore the mindset shifts, habits, and tools that can help you build a fulfilling life.
Tune in to uncover the ‘why’ behind your thoughts and behaviors and get actionable, science-backed strategies to boost your well-being. If you're ready to design your best life, you’re in the right place!
Notes From a Neuro Nerd: The Science Behind Living Your Best Life
90. The Hidden Benefits of Living as a Digital Nomad
Come discover the road less traveled with us as we share the hidden gems of a digital nomad's life!
As nomads ourselves, we've stumbled upon a surprising kind of joy – the kind that comes from freedom!
Check out the Reddit post we're reading from for yourself HERE!
Join us as we learn how nomadic living has empowered us to establish healthier, more conscious habits. Just pure conversations and the insights we've garnered from our adventures across the globe.
Join us for an adventure meets self-love retreat in Cartagena, Colombia! Happening Feb 2nd - 6th, 2025. Sign up here to join us!
Fall is the perfect time to pause, reflect, and realign. If you're feeling stuck or craving clarity, good news! I've opened up 5 spots for my 1:1 Life Purpose Coaching Program. Together we'll dig deep into what matters most to you, tackle your roadblocks, and map out a path to a more fulfilling, purpose driven life. Book a clarity call with me to make the rest of 2024 your best chapter yet!
-----------------------------------
Schedule a free Coffee Chat with Monica!
Get access to my Trust Your Gut Decision Making Guide.
Visit me at my home on the web for more resources.
Hello and welcome to the Profitable Nomad Couple podcast. This is a show where we share all of our secrets about building a sustainable, location-independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:We're Austin and Monica. We're a digital nomad couple here to help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset, ignite your passions and develop a purpose-driven online business.
Speaker 1:Get ready for weekly insights and inspiring stories to empower you to live life on your own terms.
Speaker 2:So are you ready to unlock the nomad mindset and embrace a life of limitless possibilities? Let's dive in what is up, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. A few weeks ago, monica and I released an episode where we were reading answers on a Reddit thread to the question what's the worst business advice that you've ever gotten? And we had a lot of fun with that episode, and so after that, I put out a question into another subreddit this was the digital nomad subreddit and I wanted to know what are some of the unexpected benefits to being a digital nomad. And I ask this because a lot of times we hear of the same benefits talked about over and over again, and I'm not going to lie, they are great benefits. I definitely think that they are amazing Things like being able to travel and visit new places regularly, or having flexibility in your work schedule. Not having work commutes lower cost of living. So we love that part of being a digital nomad, but we know that there's so many other great things about it and I wanted to hear what people on the internet in this space had to say. So I posed a question and we got a lot of really, really good responses, and so we want to do something similar, where we're going to go through and we're going to read some of these answers.
Speaker 2:And the reason we're doing this now is because, if you listened to our episode that just came out last week, monica and I are launching the digital nomad Kickstarter. So there are so many people who have joined our community on Facebook who want to know how to get started as a digital nomad and just don't know the first steps to take and they aren't sure how to get it started. So in the month of May, we are doing a month-long challenge, or a month-long sprint, to help you figure out exactly that, and we're going to give you all of the tools and all the information and also like a workbook, to help you put all of it into practice and take action with it to become a digital nomad. So if you want more details on that, go listen to the episode that came out last week or visit austinandmonicacom slash digital nomad kickstarter. But this week we're going to be talking about why would you even want to be a digital nomad in the first place? All right.
Speaker 1:So, like Austin said, there are tons of expected benefits of being a digital nomad, but the unexpected benefits are quite exciting and sometimes even more beneficial than some of the expected benefits, I feel. So, without further ado, the number one comment that has the most upvotes on this question is automatic minimalism.
Speaker 2:I am a little bit conflicted on this one, to be 100% transparent because I actually like my stuff.
Speaker 2:100% transparent because I actually like my stuff and I understand like there's a lot of psychological benefits, I think, to realizing how much crap you accumulate over time and getting rid of it. And I agree, like Monica and I have gone through our stuff multiple times and every time we go back and see what we have in storage we get rid of more things because we realize we don't actually need that much stuff. Sometimes this can be hard with sentimental things and I feel like that's kind of where it is. The hardest for me is. I put a lot of sentiment into things that I get from people or things that I make and I want to hold on to that and as a digital nomad, that can be challenging. But I do agree in the sense that when you can reduce what you have to just a small space, you really are forced to prioritize and figure out what's important to you and you learn to detach yourself from things that you don't actually need.
Speaker 1:I feel like it really makes me question. Every time I see something in the market or go to the store, it makes me question whether or not it has that much value to me. I kind of Marie Kondo it. I ask if it's gonna bring me joy in the longterm, because I know everything that I accumulate has to replace something else that I already have, and so I love that. There is no mindless money spending. There's no like mindless I don't know collecting of things. I know you and I have really noticed that we tend to take up the amount of space allotted to us. So we digital nomaded out of our car for a while when we first started and we still accumulated a lot of stuff and our car kept getting fuller and fuller and fuller every place we moved. But now that we move around with just backpacking backpacks, we are very, very good about not accumulating extra stuff, and a lot of times when we do accumulate extra stuff it's to give away to other people, and I really love that aspect of it as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's definitely something to be said for simplification. One of my favorite comments on responses to this comment was a bed, a roof, a laptop, internet or internet connection, some pots and pans and toilet paper, voila. That's all I desire now, and I would say I personally am going to need a little bit more than that. But I mean, the point is you realize what you really need and what you really don't.
Speaker 1:And it really makes you appreciate the little things that you do have you and I love, love, love having a deck of cards that has so much more value to me than it ever has in my entire life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, so that was a good one. That one had a lot of comments. If you're curious about this, we can leave the link to this Reddit thread or to this post in the description. You can go read more of these people's comments, because there's some pretty good ones. The next one was a lot less exposure to your home country news and politics, for better or for worse, he said. At least when I nomad and travel, I cared less to read about news back in my home country with, which is a breath of fresh air. This probably depends on where you're traveling away from, but the fact that statistically, most digital nomads come from the States, then yeah, I would say it's for the better that you're gonna get away from those politics and those news.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing, though, is media and the news specifically runs on a negative bias. It wants you to think the worst of the world, it wants you to be scared. It wants to create these massive clickbait headlines that just totally freak you out and give you an emotional knee-jerk reaction so that you actually go in and read it, and none of us need that in our lives. None of us need that much negativity, that much stress in our lives that the media is purposely trying to cause in us.
Speaker 2:It actually made me think of some Instagram profiles that are dedicated to giving you positive news and when you follow those, then your fees are filled with a lot more positivity and it makes you feel a lot better. Monica and I follow a couple of them. I don't know them by name, so we're gonna have to go find them and then we can link those two for you so you can read them yourself. But then it fills up your whether you know you read the news in the morning or just you're scrolling through Instagram and you come across those accounts. It fills your day with a lot more positivity and happiness and it just feels better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do think it's important to be informed about what's going on, but it's not something you need to be obsessed with. I think 2020 was a really good example for that. In my life, I was working in senior healthcare and a lot of seniors in the States like to watch the news, and so I was constantly all day long, watching the news and I was filled with so much anger and anxiety and stress. That was such a rough year, and I genuinely attribute a lot of those feelings to the news that I was constantly being bombarded with. So finding ways to be informed by your choice like you, choosing to go and be informed is so much different than it, I don't know. Consensually informed Consensually.
Speaker 2:I do think it's really interesting because, like Monicaica said, it's great to be informed, but it's it's one of those things where, like, you could spend so much time looking into it and reading articles and watching interviews with different politicians or whatever it is, whatever news and politics here you want to be involved in, but a lot of the times, like, there's really not a lot that your involvement is going to do and don't take like okay, this is like a whole different soapbox that Monica and I can get on.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying like dissociate and never be involved in politics, because I think there's a positive way that you can be involved in order to make a change. But the way that I've seen like 99.99% of people be involved in politics, it's never anything that's going to change anything. It's just a way to bring negativity into your life and to complain about things that ultimately you can't control anything about. So why be so absorbed in it before? I don't know. I just think it's, um, it's an interesting thing that I feel like people get wrapped up in and I I think I agree with this person like, the more you're traveling and outside of your home country, it's just so much easier to be detached from those things, because otherwise you're just kind of naturally around it all the time yeah, I think that was really well said.
Speaker 1:I am. I definitely have been able to protect my peace a lot better while traveling and your carrots.
Speaker 2:Okay, number number three number.
Speaker 1:You hear my eyes roll through the microphone there.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness number three I thought was really great and I definitely relate with this. One unexpected benefit of being a digital nomad is never needing to do a deep clean and never really seeing dust collect in your living space. Monica and I live in one place from anywhere from one to three months usually on average, and like we'll definitely clean things up and if we're staying somewhere for three months, probably about once a month we'll do a deep ish clean where we'll go through and like spray down counters and maybe mop the floor and things like that. But most of the time we do like a general clean where we'll wipe things down and sweep and then that's kind of left to. I mean, we're paying a service fee and a cleaning fee for that exact reason for when we book things on Airbnb and other sites. So it is kind of nice not to have to worry about like super deep cleaning. We haven't deep, deep cleaned in a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I did think one of the comments on here was funny. They said as a tall person who was a housekeeping manager at one point, I disagree. Even the nicest hotels I've checked into I've seen dust on the tops of shelves or a stray hair, or I forgot a discarded item somewhere. I thought this was funny because I've definitely noticed when we've been in different countries where the average height is quite a bit shorter than we are. It is more common that we'd find, you know, dust on the top of the fridge or on shelves or things like that. But honestly I don't consider dusting deep cleaning.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so it's just kind of like a nice little perk, like you still have to do some cleaning to keep your place nice. But if you aren't someone who likes to clean and aren't someone who likes to deep clean, boom, an expected benefit. There you go.
Speaker 1:Also, you do have the potential in some places to be able to afford hiring a house cleaner. Where in maybe where the country you're coming from that never would have been a possibility for you.
Speaker 2:We've actually had a couple of places that we've rented out at a very affordable price, where part of that price that we pay is like a once a week or once every other week house cleaner.
Speaker 1:And it's been awesome. All right, this one is one of my favorites and that is the slowing down the passage of time. And then one of the top comments here just clarified that a little bit. They said two to three years. At home during COVID felt like one year. One year of traveling full time feels like two to three years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we. So I first I thought this was maybe just a business, online business kind of thing like phenomenon, where we feel like it's almost like dog years. Monica has said that a couple of times, but I feel like it's maybe a combination of being a business owner as well as traveling. So much happens and so much changes at such a fast pace. For us it feels like so many things happen and when we go back home and we'll talk to people about what's happening in their life, it's almost like nothing's changed. But I feel like we get so much extra time packed into the time that everyone else gets and it's just in the exact same time frame. I feel like we can accomplish a lot and experience a lot that others don't.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Another commenter said friends and family who stay at home always ask where the time went, and then I said they're thinking about just how much I've seen and done in that same exact time frame, and I've definitely, definitely, definitely felt this for ourselves. We get to do so much with our lives because we're in complete control of our time, and then something about traveling and being in a new place really forces time to slow down. It really forces you to be present in time, which is such a fabulous thing. That's another soapbox. I can just go on. I guess it's not really a soapbox. It's another just like rant. I could go on just about how it's not really a rant either. What's a positive form of ranting? I?
Speaker 1:don't know it's something I could talk about for a long time a TED talk that's Monica's TED talk that could be my TED talk, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, next, unexpected benefit. I feel like this is actually less unexpected and more expected, but maybe less talked about I don't know, immersive language practice on location.
Speaker 2:I think this is one of the challenges that a lot of people bring up when they travel is they don't speak the language they are going to, and that brings up a lot of difficulties and it is a roadblock in some ways, but in other ways I feel like it's so much fun to pick up on languages.
Speaker 2:I personally absolutely love learning languages and I don't pick them up quickly, but I love the history of languages. I love how different languages can teach you different things about what people believe and like, how they perceive the world. We have an awesome episode with the language coach about this, david. He is a super great friend of ours and he talked a lot about what this means and if you're interested in that, that's a previous episode We'll link that for you in the show notes. But when you are traveling somewhere and you can pick up, even if it's just a couple of small phrases, it's so much fun and people love it. If you can speak even a small amount of their language, they absolutely adore you. If you can say thank you, if you can say please, if you can say excuse me, it's unbelievable how much that small effort really goes.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Another one. Another comment that I really liked and the unexpected benefit that I thought was really cool was if you cook at home and you are price conscious, you end up using different foods. In fact, even if you are not, everything will be available. I don't mean learning how to cook the cuisine from other countries, just that you will need to start utilizing ingredients that are less familiar. And then they go on to say the majority of my Airbnbs do not have ovens and cookware is always hit or miss. It's pretty much an episode of chopped chopped every day, but with the added challenge of a horrible kitchen. I love this one, you guys.
Speaker 1:The kitchen has always been my creative space. I grew up watching food network. I grew up watching chopped with my mom for most of my childhood, and so I love I've always loved, you know trying new things, combining different ingredients. But I have found sometimes that it's really easy to get into this rut of like, oh, what do we make? I guess spaghetti again, you know. Or like I don't know what to make, so I'll just go into the same things over and over and over again. But when you move to a new place, you do have. It is an interesting challenge to just see what new vegetables you can try and figure out how to cook them or what spices Sometimes they don't have spices that I'm used to and so I'm like smelling things and I'm like, oh it smells good, like hopefully these taste good together and just throwing them together and it is such a wild ride. It is so fun and it's just a good way to be a little bit more conscientious about what you're eating.
Speaker 2:Somebody replied that and said you're either forced to be creative or eat a lot of sandwiches. If Somebody replied that and said you're either forced to be creative or eat a lot of sandwiches.
Speaker 1:If it were me, I would just be eating a lot of sandwiches.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you relate more with Monica or if you relate more with me. I am so glad I have Monica because she loves to experiment with that and play around with it. If it were me, I would probably just find that frustrating and I would just eat sandwiches every day. But I do think it is cool to see her get excited and get creative with what she's buying in the market and what she's putting together in the kitchen. And luckily she's a good cook because everything comes out great, even if she has no idea how it's going to turn out and I don't even know what's in it. But it is kind of a fun thing to watch.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say another one that's pretty similar to this one about cooking is escaping unhealthy norms and values of wherever you were before, and this is a constantly evolving one for us. I think the longer we're away from home and those unhealthy norms and values, the more we realize them and are able to kind of put into place our own healthier norms and values. I mean, I think one of the big ones that I've seen in our lives is just the immense overconsumption that happens in the states of everything but food in particular, because that's the topic we're on right now, and how much easier it is to just be really conscientious and you know, eat when we're hungry and not eat when we're not hungry, you know, and not follow that expected norm of overconsumption.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a big one, for sure. The next one that I'm excited to talk about. I don't know what number we're on anymore. So this person said this applies to full time digital nomads and just people who travel a lot. She says it's really hard to be a close minded bigot her words, not mine a closeminded bigot while simultaneously throwing yourself into new situations all the time.
Speaker 2:If you're traveling around to enough places, you just learn to accept everyone, and I love this one, monica, and I talk about this all the time and I feel like this is one of the core drives driving like reasons behind why we travel so much, and she said it in such a great way. I think it's a she. She it in such a great way. I think it's a she. She said it in such a great way, and so I definitely agree.
Speaker 2:Like when you are experiencing so many different cultures and ways of life and languages and cuisines and just ways that people approach their family and their friends and all of that, you realize that the way that you grew up is just one way of doing things and that there's hundreds and thousands of other ways of doing things. And just because it's done differently doesn't mean it's done wrong. It's the same idea of when you get married or when you get into a long-term relationship with someone and you learn that they do things differently than how you grew up, but just kind of on another scale, I guess, because you see all of these different ways of living and I absolutely love it. I don't know how else to explain it besides the way that this person did on Reddit, but I definitely think that's one of the best unexpected benefits of being a digital nomad.
Speaker 1:Kind of tying the one you just shared and the last one that was just shared together. This other person said if you have a toxic family, after a few months you're like, oh wow, creating the space between them and I is nice and you ride that high. And I don't think this just applies to family. I think everyone has toxic people in their lives, toxic ideas in their lives, toxic cultures and customs that you might not even realize have been so embedded in you. And just the more you are able to travel and to get out of that space, the more you're able to reinvent your environment, the more you're able to take in different ideas and customs and cultures and really think about what you value and what these things mean to you, and to incorporate and to evolve as a person as you are exposed to more and more and more ideas.
Speaker 2:Okay, another great one is the tax situation. So this person said the possibility of being tax free, not being attached to political screw ups they used a more colorful word and crises. Someone else brought in the foreign earned income exclusion, which is a tax benefit in the United States for people who are living outside of the United States for most of the year. I'll admit Monica and I are not tax experts. It can get complicated and, depending on your situation, there's a lot involved. So you know, for figuring all that out, we want you to go talk to a tax person. We actually have a couple within our network so we'll link to those people below. We have Marcella for outside of the US more European taxes and then our friend Crystal Pino from Nomad Tax, who's more stateside tax people. So we'll link to both of them and you can get in touch with them if you want to figure that out. But it is nice, there are ways to reduce your taxes and, as complicated as it can seem, that is a nice little bonus perk.
Speaker 1:Yep, definitely. And again, Marcella and Crystal are both lovely people who are very good at explaining these things, so don't let it be stressful for you, Just go talk to them. It's not worth it. Okay, and the last one we want to bring up is this one where they say I have friends and family in a lot of places. I get to spend real quality time around them rather than a rushed couple of days. If I only had holidays, slash weekends to work with, and Austin and I love, love, love this one.
Speaker 1:We talked to a lot of digital nomads, or a lot of maybe digital nomad critics who talk about like wanting, like not wanting to leave their families and run away from things, but that's actually totally been the opposite of our experience.
Speaker 1:Since we have become our own bosses, since we've been able to start traveling more, we get to see our friends and family so much more than we ever did when we had like jobs that we had to clock in, clock out of, when we had to request our PTO and get denied our PTO sometimes.
Speaker 1:And, for example, we get to go be there for the birth of my sister's first baby, where we never, ever would have been able to do that if we had been in our traditional jobs, because babies are so unpredictable you can't time it right, no matter how hard you try, if you're trying to time your PTO right, whereas with the flexibility that we've created for ourselves, we're going to go spend some time in oregon so we can be there, we can be flexible and we can. We can see our little niece who's coming into the world aside. No, it's the first niece on my side of the family, so my whole family is super, super excited and I'm I'm so excited for my sister. My sister and I are like 18 months apart, so we're really close. We've always been really close, so it's a really big moment that I never, ever, would have gotten to be a part of if I didn't have the time and the location flexibility that we've created for ourselves.
Speaker 2:I agree this one is really beautiful and the more that Monica and I travel, the bigger that our family gets, the bigger our friend circle grows, and it is just. It's nice to be able to be in so many places, so many different places around the world, and have friends there, and then when like Monica has already talked about when we go back home, we get, I feel, like, deeper quality time. So a hundred percent agree with that one. If you have thought of some unexpected benefits that we haven't shared already of being a digital nomad that you want to share with us, you can head over to our instagram, austin and monica, and let us know, send us a message, a comment on one of our our posts, and let us know why you want to be a digital nomad and what you believe some of the perks are. Thanks so much for joining us here on the Profitable Nomad Couple podcast. We appreciate you listening to us today.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, share it on Instagram and be sure to tag us. At Austin and Monica, together, we can inspire others to embrace a location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 2:And while you're there, we'd love to connect with you, so make sure you follow us for more tips and inspiration on living your dream location independent lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Until next week, remember that you have the power to shape your own path. So stay curious, stay adventurous and stay connected.
.png)
