Pre-Travel Anxiety | Make Your Travel Jitters Work For You

Hi, my name is Gilad and I’m here to talk about pre-travel anxiety and ways to make those travel jitters work for you, not against you.

Millennials and anxiety have a conflicted relationship. These days, we’re so uncomfortable with anxious feelings that we do anything and everything to avoid them. Avoidance shows up as mindlessly scrolling through social media on our phones or bingeing entire seasons of Netflix shows in a day. The truth is anxiety is inescapable. But it doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.

In moderation, anxiety can help us avoid danger and make smart and well-informed decisions. With travel, in particular, our pre-travel anxiety can actually prove to be a real asset. Let me explain how.

Pre-Travel Anxiety Makes You More Careful

Before making this point, it’s important to understand what anxiety is from an evolutionary standpoint. Rather than being this big bad monster that thrives on making you miserable, anxiety is your brain reacting to potential dangers. It’s a natural response to stress, usually with physical symptoms such as accelerated heart rate, quickened breathing, or a headache.

It’s kind of like an overprotective mother reminding you of a horrible and rare tragedy that she heard on a PBS special ten years ago. Just in case it applies to you.

The problem is that sometimes this well-intentioned response can spiral out of control. Some situations snowball into catastrophes to the point that it stops you from doing things, and that’s no good. It’s vital to recognize the benefits of anxiety as well as its pitfalls because it makes you more careful, which will keep you safe.

When you’re traveling, there’s great value in being careful. I’m not talking about holing up in your hostel and missing out on the entire place you’re visiting, but if you’re walking around town, it can be helpful to have your ears perked up a little bit, just in case something fishy is going on. We’ve all heard those terrible horror stories of backpackers who weren’t careful and ended up in some sticky situations. Your travel anxiety can protect you from that.

It’s not necessarily trying to keep you from living your life, but rather making sure that you stay alive. You just have to know when to utilize it.

Pre-Travel Anxiety Makes You Create a Plan

The reality of travel is that you can’t account for everything that will happen. Even if you plan your trip down to the hour, life will inevitably happen and screw with your plans. The trick is finding the right balance between preparedness and being flexible with what life throws at you. Anxiety, which will try to get you to plan every millisecond of your trip, will be useful in the preparation department.

You’ll worry about all the things that can go wrong like getting lost, getting sick, getting stuck somewhere alone, getting bitten by a malaria-infected mosquito. You get the idea. So, you’ll do what you can ahead of time to prepare for these worst-case scenarios.

This pre-trip planning usually takes the shape of doing research about your destination, getting proper vaccines, submitting your visa paperwork, downloading useful travel apps, and more — all of which are important things to do ahead of time that wouldn’t have even been on your radar if you weren’t worried about them from the start.

Pre-Travel Anxiety Gives You Direction

If you’re anything like me, then you hate getting lost. If I feel lost or at all disoriented, my anxiety sends me into some sort of primal panic mode. Because of this, I always do my best to get a lay of the land before arriving at my destination.

I’ll download an offline map of the city I’m going to and note the points where I’ll arrive (usually the airport) and the points where I’m going (usually a hostel). That way, when I land in an unfamiliar environment, I don’t spiral into a panic because I’ll generally know where I’m going.

Having that clear sense of direction and orientation really mellows me out and wouldn’t be possible without my intense fear of getting lost in a strange land.

Anxiety Can Make You Social

This one is a bit weird because it feels counter-intuitive. The idea of breaking the ice with a complete stranger is cringe-worthy to someone with social anxiety. However, on the other side of the spectrum, I also think that anxiety makes people who deal with it a lot more perceptive and empathetic to those around them.

If you arrive at a hostel, for example, and see someone drinking alone at the bar or sitting by themselves in the hostel dorm, you may wonder if they’d like the company because you know that if you were in their position, you would. Those without a heightened level of anxiety may miss this.

As a result, you may feel more inclined to push through your social anxiety and break the ice with them, leading to a friendship totally based on the common ground of social anxiety. Wild, eh?

Anxiety Will Help You Lead

Those of us who struggle with anxiety tend to wind up being called control freaks on occasion. While the name usually carries a bad connotation, it’s simply borne out of the idea that when we can’t control the world around us, we do our best with what we can control.

This can take the form of planning, knowing your sense of direction, and most other attributes on this list. However, when you’re in a totally new environment with a bunch of people who didn’t plan as much as you did, this can prove to be a really good asset.

If those you’re with don’t know as much about the city you’re in and recognize that you do, all of a sudden you have the opportunity to become the group leader. This can be an advantage to making friends while abroad because people who are in an unfamiliar environment always gravitate towards the person who knows what he or she is talking about. So embrace that inner control freak! It can help you out!

Wrap It Up

All in all, your travel anxiety is likely something shared by most if not all of your travel peers to some degree. There are very few people out there who can drop themselves in a completely foreign environment without any hesitation about what could happen to them while they’re there.

So why not embrace it? Why not use it as an ice-breaker? Why not make those pre-trip jitters work for you, rather than the other way around?

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