How to Handle Travel Stress – 5 Travel Anxiety Tips from a Psychiatrist

Most people regard the prospect of exploring new destinations as thrilling, but many also find themselves overwhelmed with stress and anxiety about travel. This is obviously counterproductive as we often travel to get away from our mundane everyday lives, to de-stress, relax, and hit reset. If you find yourself struggling to keep a lid on stress when you travel or simply avoid traveling, you’re not alone. Perhaps more importantly, you have another option. You can learn how to deal with travel anxiety and begin to enjoy the experience of travel.

This may sound impossible, but small and incremental steps can be empowering, and will eventually allow you to live a more wholesome life. Here are five tips that are proven to lower stress levels and will help transform your travel experience, so that you can make the most out of your next vacation.

5 Ways to Deal with Travel Anxiety

Keep a Journal & Identify Your Stressors

The first step that you must take towards conquering your anxiety is to identify what causes your stress levels to rise before you travel and while you’re traveling. A good way to approach this is to keep a journal. Make notes every day, recording your thoughts and feelings, so that you can pinpoint events, circumstances, or thought patterns that make you anxious.

This may seem like a pointless exercise because you’re already quite self-aware, but it offers proven benefits and is a practice that some of the most successful people use. It gives you greater clarity and a more objective perspective so that you can deal with the stressors more effectively.

Plan Ahead to Mitigate Anxiety

For most people with stress and anxiety disorders, the uncertainty of travel is the biggest stressor. Your journaling practice that we touched upon won’t just help identify these stressors, but will also allow you to deal with them. Start by dividing everything you identify into controllable and uncontrollable stressors. Then take action to prepare for and avoid controllable stressors.

For example, you can prepare for medical emergencies by stocking up on medications from a licensed online pharmacy and you can avoid the uncertainty of travel logistics by pre-booking accommodations and transportation and creating a detailed itinerary. At the same time, accept that some things are beyond your control, such as flight delays and weather conditions.

Learn to Build Resilience to Stress

This is one of the most important steps in overcoming travel anxiety because there are many things in travel that are beyond our control. Stress reduction activities and relaxation techniques will help you to better prepare for and deal with such situations. Contrary to popular belief you don’t have to spend years learning to meditate to consciously lower your stress levels.

You can practice breathing exercises, use guided imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness, and other simple activities to clear your mind and feel more in control of your emotions. All of these techniques are proven to work in anxiety self-management and can be learnt from online videos or with free mobile apps.

Prepare for Your Return

For many people, traveling is an escape from their stressful careers, but this can also increase feelings of dread and anxiety about returning to work. Fear of backlogs and accumulated chores can severely diminish the pleasure of vacationing, making travel a lot more stressful.

You can eliminate much of this stress by creating a buffer zone between your return and resuming work so that you have time to settle back into your routine. This could mean scheduling return travel just before a weekend. You can also put in some extra time to get office work and household chores done ahead of your travel so that you don’t have to worry about a backlog on your return.

Talk to a Therapist

Talking with anyone will help to relieve stress and anxiety, but therapists are particularly skilled at guiding patients through such challenges. Just keep in mind that only licensed psychiatrists can prescribe medications, but all mental health professionals, including clinical psychologists and behavioral therapists, can empower you with the skills needed to navigate through anxiety disorders caused by travel or other circumstances.

They will make it easier for you to adopt and benefit from practices such as journaling, time management, and stress reduction. Getting help from a professional is especially important if your anxiety disorder is so severe that it is almost debilitating and prevents you from living life to the fullest.