Since childhood, I have loved being at the seaside. I didn’t grow up right next to any beach, but my family would be vacationing at the seaside every year. A few years back, I moved many kilometers away from my home region to a place where the sea is within biking distance - and I can never move back.
What is it that makes the ocean so magical? For me, it starts even before you can see the sea. You can feel it. You can smell it. It smells different than any other air at any other place on this planet. It is not comparable to the heavy city air or the forestry mountain air, which you can only experience once submerged. The ocean air, you can smell long before you even see it. Depending on which coast you are, it will be different. For me, the ocean air is that almost wet, salt-heavy breeze that you think you taste on your tongue and that flows right through your entire body once breathed in, and that intensifies the closer you come to the sea. Even catching the very first, still rather reluctant smell of it sets free a range of mechanisms in my body. An automatism of pure joy and calmness that washes all sorrows and stress away instantly and only grows stronger the closer I come to the sea.
A German newspaper journalist once wrote that humans must look at an ample space of blue water to not go insane. And I couldn’t agree more. But it is not only me and him who are of this opinion. For decades, people would travel to the ocean side, hoping to soothe their suffering, both physically and mentally. Already back in 1642, Robert Burton, a British scholar, wrote about the healing effects of the ocean side. He believed a place with wet air is the recipe for healing melancholy. Before him, it was the Romanians who enjoyed their leisure time at the ocean. Remains of villas around the coastline of northern Italy and Spain still remind us to this day.
Over the decades and centuries, the healing power of the seaside grew into an inherent part of modern medicine and research. There are studies concerned about the effects of “vitamin sea”, proving what I can only describe as personal experience. Watching the sea and my experience of relief when breathing the sea air are both explainable scientifically. At most locations, the ocean presents itself in some shade of blue, a color that has been found to have a calming effect on most people. In fact, staring at the ocean and the regular waves breaking themselves seems to alter our brain waves and can put us in an almost meditative state. And the salty ocean smell? It is soothing you because of the negative ions in the air that cannot be found anywhere but close to spaces with lots of water.
It is not only that distinctive smell of ocean water. It is the sound, too. The steady, repetitive, regular sound of waves coming in and breaking at the beach before the water retrieves itself back in the sheer endlessness of the ocean. The feeling of fuzzy, sometimes warm, sometimes cold sand under your feet and between your toes sets free a row of events in your body, improving your mental and physical health.
The best part: You don’t have to be as drastic as me and leave your hometown many kilometers behind to live right next to the ocean or the sea to experience the full power of it. A few days of vacation are enough to experience the healing effects - of course, only if you put your phone away and let the outside world be the outside world for a while.
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