For over a decade, we’ve been sharing our journey of overcoming travel anxiety.
Our journey began in 2013, when even taking a 30 minute train to London felt overwhelming. Fast forward ten years and we now find ourselves as unlikely travel bloggers; working with tourism boards, airlines and even running our only women-only tours around the world.
It’s been an unexpected and often bumpy journey, but one that we are incredibly grateful for. Travel has been our most unlikely form of therapy; forcing us to break down anxiety’s barriers and enjoy lives full of adventure and spontaneity.
We’ve now even launched an online course dedicated to helping others overcome travel anxiety.
It’s been quite the journey.
How to Manage Travel Anxiety: Our Top Tips
Our online course aside, we’re always eager to share our top tips for helping others overcome travel anxiety.
Below you’ll find our four ‘power tips’ for managing travel anxiety. As you’ll see, our belief is that the only way to overcome travel anxiety is to travel, regardless of how nervous you may be.
It’s only by ignoring all that anxiety is telling you and instead inviting it along for the ride (quite literally) that it truly begins to lose its power over you.
1. Banana Thoughts (Managing Irrational Thoughts)
For most of us, anxiety’s calling card comes in the form of intrusive, irrational and often catastrophic thoughts.
Before we travel, these reach fever pitch: ‘what if I panic and faint on the plane? What if I get sick and can’t get home?’ They are flashing neon signs – the thoughts that we can’t ignore. They demand our attention and beg to be taken seriously. After all, they’re telling the truth, aren’t they?
Imagine you’re walking down the street and the thought ‘I am a banana’ pops into your head.
What would you do? Frown slightly before letting the thought pass you by? After all, if there’s any certainty to be had in this life, it’s that you are not a popular tropical fruit.
Or, would you opt for the alternative? Would you stand frozen in the road, stricken by possibility that your arms and legs were in fact nothing more than banana peel? Would you go home and ruminate for hours that your entire existence had been a lie?
I’m guessing not.
The same goes for our irrational thoughts – we must not believe all that they tell us.
Yes, the intrusive thought that something terrible might happen on your flight is distressing, but it’s nothing more than a thought (and definitely neither a prediction nor a fact). This thought deserves no more attention than your banana thought and is simply a collection of harmless words.
Next time you find yourself worrying over ‘what if’ thoughts before you travel, try to imagine each as a ‘banana thought’. We guarantee that they’ll soon lose their power over you.
2. Conduct an Experiment
This is a fantastic exercise when it comes to holding your travel anxiety to account.
Next time you have an anxious thought about your travels, write it down.
E.g. ‘I will have a panic attack on the plane, I won’t be able to calm down and they’ll have to abort the flight because of me’. This is now your prediction.
Next, your job is to test this prediction, to see how it fares in the real world. In this case, you’ll need to take that flight. We guarantee that it’s likely to pass without too much drama (sweaty palms and palpitations aside).
Once you’re through to the other side, you need to return to your prediction and write next to it what really happened. E.g. ‘I felt nervous and frightened at the start, but then I distracted myself and felt OK’.
This is your result.
Finally – and here comes the satisfying bit – I want you to draw your conclusion. Was your prediction right? Or was it a being a little over-dramatic? What can you learn from it?
By logging each of these instances, you’re building a valuable Book of Reason that you can turn to each time you become anxious. This is one of my favourite exercises when it comes to coping with travel anxiety and has empowered me to shelve anxiety’s predictions with increasing ease.
3. Breathing Exercises to Manage Anxiety on a Flight
For those living with anxiety, you’ll perhaps have twigged that anxiety – whether it be a panic attack or a tsunami of swirling thoughts – passes. It always passes. Nobody (that I know of) has ever been left inside the vortex of a panic attack for life.
The product of those prickly chemicals, adrenaline and cortisol, anxiety has a limited shelf life, with most panic attacks burning themselves out after twenty minutes.
So, with this in mind, why not help the storm pass a little faster? Why not use breathing exercises to manage your flight or travel anxiety?
When we are anxious, we tend to breathe in shallow gulps from our chest: something that only intensifies our feelings of panic. To counter this, we should not only breathe from our bellies, but breathe rhythmically – restoring calm and order. Rhythm breathing exercises have proven instrumental in relaxing the body and counteracting the flight or fight response. Acting as a natural sedative, they stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system (anxiety’s arch enemy) and encourage the release of nitric oxide, lowering blood pressure.
In short, if your breathing is relaxed and rhythmic, you cannot panic.
Although there are many variations of these rhythmic exercises, I tend to breathe in through my nose for a count of four, hold my breath for six, and exhale for a count of seven. I then continue this on repeat for as long as I can, often until I board my flight.
4. Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
Our final tip for managing travel anxiety is to egg it on.
To outright encourage it.
In 2014, before a trip to New York, I spent weeks stalked by the thought that I’d panic in Times Square and would end up on the floor, engulfed in panicked delirium. This intrusive thought (a classic ‘banana thought’) was persuasive and I mentioned it to my therapist.
Her solution was not what I expected.
‘Why don’t you see if it comes true, then? Why don’t you will it to happen and see if you collapse? Why don’t you ask anxiety to do its worst?’
Her response stayed with me – her challenge still front of mind as I entered Times Square just one month later.
Feeling a little surreal to finally be there, I planted my feet firmly apart and looked down, hands clenched. ‘Come on then, anxiety’ I muttered to myself, ‘do your worst’.
I waited, ready for my imminent collapse. Yet it seemed that anxiety hadn’t heard me. Continuing to stand there, I swayed a little under Time Square’s flashing lights, looking for any sign of anxiety’s arrival. Nothing.
Eventually, I gave up waiting and went to take some obligatory selfies. It seemed my travel anxiety had refused to rise to my challenge: in fact, it had made a run for it.
‘All talk and no trousers’, as my Grandma would say.
This method – let’s call it the ‘bluff’ method – is incredibly effective in combating panic disorder i.e. that relentless cycle of fearing fear. The more we cower to anxiety, accommodating its every wish and demand, the more powerful it gets. However, if we stand up to it – inviting it to do its worst – we immediately take away its very kryptonite: our own fear.
Without this, anxiety cannot operate – its tank is empty.
Whilst calling anxiety’s bluff might initially seem a little nerve-wracking, it’s perhaps my most effective tip for dealing with travel anxiety or flight anxiety.
Be brave and give it a go, I promise you have nothing to fear.
Travel anxiety is tough.
Whilst it seems that more and more of us are travelling the world without a care in the world, the anxious amongst us are left feeling in some way lacking: inauthentic travellers, perhaps.
Frauds, even.
Yet this is far from true.
Whilst travel anxiety or flight anxiety undoubtedly adds a layer of conflict to our adventures, it does not mean that we’re unable to enjoy travelling, or reap its many benefits.
In fact, learning how to deal with travel anxiety makes travel’s rewards even sweeter.
