5 Tips for Anxious Travelers

People often avoid what they feel anxious about. The danger of this is that you cut yourself off from opportunities to experience positive emotions and build skills.

In turn, this can leave you vulnerable to depression and anxiety. (Depression relates to an absence of positive emotions plus the presence of negative emotions, whereas anxiety is mainly the presence of negative emotions, like worry.)

The best approach to managing anxiety is often to channel your anxiety into conscientiousness rather than avoidance. I wrote about this extensively in The Anxiety Toolkit. In doing so, you better utilize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

Here are five ways to do that and, consequently, enjoy leisure travel more as an anxious person.

1. Do visual research before you go.

Anxious people feel more confident when they feel prepared and when their surroundings feel familiar. Use YouTube and Google Maps street view to do visual research before you go on your vacation. For example, I recently visited a beach destination with two young children. To minimize the stress of this, I used street view to find the best parking spots, so I knew exactly where to go.

2. Read the negative reviews.

Negative reviews will often let you know about problems you can prevent and mitigate. Use them this way rather than as an excuse to avoid travel altogether. For example, ask for a hotel room on the side of the hotel away from the highway if reviews mention highway noise as a problem.

3. Utilize your strength of thinking ahead.

By thinking ahead, you can bring items with you that will make travel easier. For example, on a road trip, bring a headlamp to find items in the car in the dark. If your hotel doesn’t have a microwave, you could bring a way to heat food, like a mini slow cooker.

4. Utilize your strength of preparing for what could go wrong.

If you’re prone to worry, instead of preparing for everything that could go wrong, prepare for the worst and most likely circumstances. For example, losing your ID would be a large problem, so perhaps you bring an additional ID and keep it separate from your primary ID. Your phone running out of battery when you need it for directions could also be very stressful, so bring a power brick.

If you can envisage minor annoyances/stressors that are quite likely to occur, even if not serious, then prepare for those.

Discipline yourself to take action to prevent or mitigate: (1) the single worst, but quite likely, incident that could go wrong (think: losing your wallet rather than a plane crash) and (2) the single most likely annoyance/stressor (like your hotel room not being ready when you arrive, or a rainy day on a beach vacation) before you allow yourself to worry about other events. Build this habit rather than fretting without taking action.

5. Treat travel as a skill you build through experience.

A hallmark of perfectionism is expecting yourself to be good at a skill even without extensive practice. Think of travel as a skill you will improve through practice. Try to enjoy the process of building that skill.

In doing so, you will expand your access to a diverse range of positive emotions, like awe, positive surprise, joy, and relaxation. This will protect and enhance your mental health.

Don’t fall for the false idea that you can avoid experiencing all stress and inconvenience, even on a vacation. It’s normal for vacations to have a mixture of lowlights and highlights. Sensitize yourself to the highlights.

Minimize the lowlights. You can accomplish this by building your skills and experience, preparing, and understanding yourself well (such as knowing what you enjoy and what stresses you out most).