You are sitting at your desk or making coffee and find yourself thinking “oh what I would give to be sitting by a lake and reading my book right now”. Truth be told, all of us day dream about travel, vacations, and holidays while attending the morning meeting or working on the fourth revision of a document. Travel and the prospect of travel are what keep the wheel moving for most of us as we go through our daily lives.
In addition to the pause it provides in our daily routines, recent research also points out that the escape from reality provides for better coping and management of stress. Travelling is an excellent way to meet new people, expand our understanding and knowledge of the world and build deeper, more meaningful connections with our friends and family. There is indeed a long list of reasons why travel is good for us. However, for some people, the prospect of traveling is not just about fun but an invitation to anxiety, stress, and many negative emotions.
What Is Travel Anxiety?
In an interaction with ABP Live, Dr Dinika Anand, Clinical Psychologist, BLK-Max Superspeciality Hospital shared, "Travel anxiety as the name suggests is the experience of fear, apprehension, and worry individual experiences at the prospect of visiting an unfamiliar place or with the tasks of planning and preparing for an upcoming trip. For people with travel anxiety, a particular aspect of travel like flying or everything about it from the planning to return may be a source of distress and anxiety".
Most people brush off the notion of travel anxiety because traveling is such a coveted thing, especially in today’s era of wanderlust but for people who suffer, it is real and painful. She further added that "all the reasons we travel - taking a vacation, educational opportunities, jobs, visiting friends and family for their important life events, and so on become inaccessible or extremely daunting spaces for someone with travel anxiety. In our hyper-connected, global world then it feels like a curse to have travel anxiety. However, managing and dealing with travel anxiety is possible".
How Can Travel Anxiety Be Detected?
Dr Dinika Anand went on to describe how one can recognise and accept that they are experiencing travel anxiety as well as how to get over it:
Firstly, it is important to recognise and accept that anxiety is a normal experience and just its mere presence is not clinical or wrong. Anxiety is our mind telling us two key things - this situation is new and unfamiliar or our current knowledge or tools are feeling inadequate. Both scenarios are perfectly normal, logical responses to the prospect of going to a new place or travelling. Thus, reading up about the place, researching, and talking to others who have travelled to the place would help us in feeling less anxious and better prepared.
Secondly, being on a holiday is fun but the work that goes into executing it is both real and significant. In case of a vacation, researching and deciding on a place, figuring out the dates, budgeting the trip, making all the reservations, taking time off from work and packing are some of the additional tasks that land on our overcrowded to-do lists. All of this effort might lead to anxiety for an already overwhelmed individual. Accepting this reality of the effort and work of taking a holiday is another important way to manage the anxiety that one might feel at the prospect of travel.
Third, for every great vacation story there are enough tales and bad experiences - from being robbed to the hotel being bad to missing flights and so on. All these bad experiences may be the culprit behind an individual’s anxiety as much as the fear of being in novel spaces without access to familiarity or past experience. Even the idea of having to adjust our food preferences can sometimes bring on a bout of anxiety and panic. Recognising our specific individual triggers and push points will help us create both mental and behavioral answers - be it getting travel insurance or traveling with your favorite paranthas and pickle.
How To Manage Travel Anxiety?
Dr Anand also said, essentially, the key to managing and dealing with travel anxiety lies in first acknowledging its presence and then letting ourselves have access to certain simple strategies which will help us to address it -
- Understand that it is okay for you to feel anxious about travel
- Identify and pinpoint what is bothering you - is it the fear of getting lost or losing stuff or the effort of tying up all the ends before your vacation so that there are no glitches at home or work while you are away
- Just as there are SOPs at work - sit down and think through your fears and plan for them. Whether it is informing your team and manager about the vacation early on or it is installing a security system at home which you can monitor on your phone - do whatever helps.
- Sometimes past experiences or incidents that happened to others can also be the cause of deep-rooted fear about taking trains, planes, or any part of travel. Work with a professional who can help you understand and eliminate these from the root
- Take your comfort with you - whether it is traveling with your own pillow or having a playlist ready for the panic that sets in at takeoff. Preparing and accounting for the presence of anxiety will help you enjoy your time away!