What is Travel Anxiety?

Before we launch into the course, we think it’s important to deal with what travel anxiety is.

Firstly, travel anxiety isn’t a pre-packaged anxiety disorder. Instead, it’s a soup of multiple fears, phobias and irrational thoughts, blended together with our own negative core beliefs. For some, travel anxiety is triggered by a fear of flying or a crowded airport. For others, flying is something they enjoy. Instead, it’s the thought of managing anxiety far from home that’s the challenge. 

Couple this with the everyday stress that travel brings and travel anxiety quickly becomes a swamp of worries that can be impossible to wade through.  

Although it may feel frustrating that travel anxiety isn’t a specific diagnosis, the fact that it’s a blend of fears can be viewed as a positive thing. It’s not that you are afraid of travel in its entirety, it’s just specific elements that bother you. 

Or, to think about it differently, you aren’t allergic to the entire feast, just some specific ingredients.

This means that you can begin to break down the travel process and identify those aspects that inflame your anxiety –  instantly making it appear smaller and more manageable. 

The broad nature of travel anxiety also provides us with the opportunity to acknowledge that there are parts of travel that are, unfortunately, inherently stressful. It’s important to recognise that these aspects aren’t easy for anyone to deal with, and it’s absolutely OK to feel anxious about long security lines, or the possibility of a delayed flight. 

As such, we need to not only be kinder to ourselves about our travel anxiety, but learn how to better tolerate the uncomfortable feelings that it can provoke. These will always be part of the travel experience and the better we can tolerate them, the easier travel will become.