My husband absolutely loves travelling. I, on the other hand, do not. This is most unfortunate for him, as he sends me 10 reels a night of sparkling blue seas in the hopes that it’ll ignite my sense of wanderlust. It does for a second, but then I think about the logistics, and it’s gone as swiftly as it arrived.
Instead, all I can think about is a tornado of what-ifs and potential problems: who will water my houseplants? What if I forget to pack something vital? What if we don’t get to the airport on time? Will my ears hurt on the plane? What if I leave something precious at the hotel? Can we afford it? What if we get there and all we do is worry about money? What if we don’t have fun?
The questions endlessly bob about in my brain until the thought of a holiday no longer feels appealing or worthwhile. I’d rather just stay at home, safely on the sofa, travelling vicariously through TV reality shows.
I know this might seem odd, and I think it’s probably because I have anxiety, and I like things to be within my control. So, I’ve tried to put mechanisms in place. My partner takes care of all of the logistics because he knows they stress me out, and I can’t sort them without catastrophising or freezing. He sorts the the booking, transport, money and everything else you can possibly think of. All I have to do is show up with my passport and suncream, so why do I still find it so anxiety-inducing?
When people ask me if I’m looking forward to an upcoming holiday, my answer is always the same: “Um, I think I’ll feel more excited once I’m there.” Let’s be real, the actual being on holiday part is lovely, but it’s bookended by so much stress and uncertainty in my mind that it dampens my desire to travel entirely. I simply cannot fathom how those who constantly travel, bouncing from place to place, manage to hold themselves together.
“This cascade of pre-travel anxiety is absolutely something I recognise,” says Charlotte Fox Weber psychotherapist and author. “It’s almost as if the anticipation becomes so loaded with potential catastrophe that the [holiday] feels secondary to managing the mental siege beforehand.”
Apparently, I have a tendency to transform ‘expansion into contraction’, which basically means, instead of holidays opening up possibilities for me, “anxiety narrows everything down to a series of logistical tripwires”, according to Fox Weber. I’m essentially living through multiple versions of the holiday before I’ve even left, and most of them are disasters.
Why do I feel so stressed?
“I’ve noticed this pattern tends to affect people who are naturally conscientious or who’ve had their sense of control challenged before,” Fox Weber explains. “The holiday represents a temporary abdication of your familiar systems, and anxiety rushes in to fill that void with hypervigilance.”
There’s also something to be said about the cultural pressure surrounding holidays. Thanks to our ever-online lives, there’s an expectation to have the most transformative, restorative, investment-worthy, aesthetically pleasing time, and Fox Weber says this can make the stakes feel impossibly high.
Chance Marshall, a psychotherapist and co-founder of Self Space says much the same thing: “We went on our first holiday with our little boy post-pandemic, and we were sat at the airport and we just thought, Wow, there’s so much pressure to make this the perfect trip! But actually, it’s OK to let it be a bit rubbish. It’s OK if we don’t visit every restaurant. I wrote five pages of pre-holiday research because there was so much intensity to get it ‘right’, but in the end, we spent the first few hours sleeping, and I’m glad we did. It didn’t need planning, and once we took the pressure off, we ended up discovering things we might not have otherwise. I think there’s so much pressure to do everything that we sometimes don’t come back from a holiday feeling rested, which is the whole point.”
Social dynamics can also be a source of holiday anxiety, Fox Weber adds, as you might feel vulnerable in an unfamiliar place, even when with people you generally feel comfortable with. “The vulnerability of being in unfamiliar places where you can’t predict how things work, leads to this feeling of ‘peak experience pressure’, [where you feel like] you have to optimise every moment because you’ve spent so much to be there.”
How can I stop feeling anxious?
For the spiralling thoughts, Fox Weber suggests holding a series of ‘anxiety appointments’ with yourself. “Give yourself a designated 15 minutes each day to mentally rehearse the worst-case scenarios, then firmly close that mental door until the next appointment. While it sounds counterintuitive, it often defuses the background hum of worry.”
The practical side matters too, she says, “Create detailed but flexible lists, book things in advance that can be booked and have a ‘good enough’ standard rather than seeking perfection. Sometimes the antidote to anxiety is simply lowering the bar for what constitutes success.”
Finally, Fox Weber says her most “essential” piece of advice is to “internally permit yourself to enjoy a moment, wherever possible. Because the world won’t do it for you.”