End of Module Activities: What is Travel Anxiety?

Now that we’ve covered just what travel anxiety looks like (and the fact it’s largely a reaction to a perceived and mistaken threat) we would like you to begin to think about your own brand of anxiety.

We want to bring your travel anxiety sharply into focus, to wade through the fog of sensations surrounding it and see it for what it is – a cluster of unhelpful thoughts, sensations and behaviours. 

Importantly, these exercises are not necessarily geared towards ‘curing’ your travel anxiety symptoms (more on this later), but about giving you an understanding of what is really driving it.

Exercise 1: Identify Your Travel Anxiety Triggers

You’ve been reading about the typical triggers associated with travel anxiety, so we’d now like you to take some time to consider your own. 

Grab a pen and paper, and ponder where your anxiety around travel is rooted. What is the phobia or fear sparking it? Are there multiple fears? Is it a fear of external factors, or a preoccupation with your own ability to cope in an unfamiliar environment? 

Try to be succinct as possible and remember –  these fears can be as big or small as you like. 

Exercise 2:  Identify Your Intrusive and ‘What If’ Thoughts

A. Intrusive Thoughts

We’d like you to begin by firstly identifying if you are experiencing intrusive thoughts, or not. It’s important to be able to pick these out from a ‘thought line up’ as ultimately, these are the thoughts that we don’t want to engage with (unlike, say, the thought that you need to go and collect your child from nursery). 

To help you identify these thought baddies, look out for the following characteristics:

• They sometimes appear without warning
• They incite sudden emotions such as fear, shame, dread or distress
• They demand your attention (they are loud and shouty) 
• They lead to rumination (you’ll keep turning this thought over and over – and it feels ‘stuck’)
• You have no clear answers or solutions to these thoughts

Try writing down the intrusive thoughts that you have, and allow these to simply ‘float’ rather than interrogate them. You don’t need to engage with them, but can simply label them as ‘intrusive thoughts’ (or ‘banana thoughts’).

We know it’s hard, but starting a dialogue with them will only increase their power and presence (a bit like starting a conversation with a drunk person on the train).

B. What If Thoughts

Next, identify your common ‘what if’ thoughts (which are often intrusive in nature). These are the thoughts that often keep your anxiety ‘alive’ – that give it a voice and a character –so try to get as many down as you can on paper. 

Once you have them down, look at these thoughts for what they really are: just a collection of words and nothing more. It’s your anxious reaction to them that truly brings them to life. 

Exercise 3: Identify Your Behaviours Around Travel Anxiety

Consider your response to the above ‘what if’ thoughts and beliefs. How do they make you feel? What symptoms do they produce? And what behaviours do they elicit? Do you avoid travel, for example? Or do you lean on safety-seeking behaviours to get you through?

Try and identify your responses and get them down on paper, noting which are fuelled by anxiety. 

Exercise 4: Get Up Close and Personal with Your Travel Anxiety

‘Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will’, (Stephens, 2021)

Now that we have the blueprint of your travel anxiety down on paper, let’s finally try and bring this anxiety to life, in full, gloriously-anxious technicolour. 

We want you to try and give this anxiety a colour, a texture, a shape and a feel. Where does it tend to sit in your body? Is it heavy, or does it flutter? If it had a voice, what would it sound like? Try and make this comical.

If you want, give it a name.

My own travel anxiety, for example, has the voice of Michael Scott from the US Office. It’s nervous and clings to me like a tearful toddler, just below my heart. It is, however, separate from me – it’s a bundle of thoughts that looks, speaks and thinks differently to me.

By giving it this character and treating my anxiety with curiosity, I’ve now achieved a degree of separation from it. 

Try and be as curious as possible and lean into your travel anxiety so that you really experience it. We want you to understand it for what it is: a host of sensations, thoughts and psychological reactions and nothing more.