5 Ways to Abandon The Travel Rush While Traveling
Travel is a tremendous privilege, eye-opener, and expander of personal worlds. Those who are able to do it…
Travel is a tremendous privilege, eye-opener, and expander of personal worlds. Those who are able to do it also know that sometimes it doesn’t always go smoothly. You can miss a connecting flight, luggage can be lost, you could get food poisoning — any number of things can go mildly or teeth-grindingly awry. As with many situations, there are still things that you can control. Here are a few reminders and travel tips to put into practice whenever you’re taking on another city.
Plan out your day.
If the coordinating open/closing and applicable transportation schedules allow, do your best to schedule sites and activities by region. This may sound like a no-brainer, but sometimes your traveling eyes get too big for your schedule’s stomach. Next thing you know, you’re lugging an over-packed day bag from one side of the city to an outlying area on the other side, trying to make a 4pm last-entry time. If you can avoid überplanning at all, that’s even less daily stress you’re putting on yourself and any travel companions you may have with you.
Leave some open time.
Plan a part of a day or a whole day where you don’t have anything micro-managed to the last minute. Some amazing discoveries are made just by meandering around. It also helps you learn your surroundings more intimately and tune up your sense of direction via landmarks. Be sure that it’s an area where you feel safe and that you let someone know where you’re going.
Pack some snacks.
Being stranded between meals or being stricken with hunger or low blood sugar can cause your sense of wonder to tank with neck-wrenching speed and make a day less than fun. Sandwiches, fruit, veggies, jerky, trail mix — anything that will travel relatively compact and can keep your body from digesting itself as you traipse around parts unknown. Non perishables and dry foods tend to work best and don’t forget the water.
Pack a travel book and a map or two.
You may not have a cell phone or the area you’re going may not have adequate service if you do. Having a secondary or even tertiary map provides the ability to cross-reference in case you’re having difficulty with scale or in case the legend is unclear or a location isn’t included on the map. This especially helps if you’re wanting to reduce the amount of time you’re plugged in.
Remember why you’re there.
It’s easy to get caught up in the desire to see everything because you don’t know if or when you’ll get another chance to come back and you don’t want to miss or forget anything and you only have a few days and AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! Breathe. Take it in. Take your eye away from the camera viewfinder from time to time. Sit at a table and just look, smell, and listen. Give yourself the chances to experience the similarities and differences between this place and your regular surroundings. You travel to experience something new, so be mindful to remain open to it.
Like Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.” Be careful not to focus so much on getting the experience that you miss the experience.
Have a fear of flying? You’re not alone. Here’s how these people cope with flight anxiety.
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A recent rash of air travel incidents — from fatal crashes in Washington, D.C. and Alaska to yesterday’s crash that left a Delta aircraft upside-down on a Toronto runway — have ramped up concerns about flight safety. That’s especially true for people with a fear of flying, some of whom spoke to Yahoo Life in 2024 to share the travel tips they lean on to manage their flight anxiety. Here’s what they — and an expert trained in helping people feel more comfortable navigating the friendly skies — recommend.
Flying is an occupational necessity for travel writer Lola Méndez, but, as someone with claustrophobia, that doesn’t make it any easier. Méndez’s first experience with mid-flight anxiety was a shock. She’d already been traveling full-time for years before she started hyperventilating and crying in the sky over Papua New Guinea in 2018. At first, Méndez attributed her physical reaction to the stress of being in a small single-engine Cessna, but it quickly became a miserable pattern on both small-seater planes and large commercial jets.
“But as a travel journalist, I fly all the time, so it’s something I’ve had to learn to cope with,” Méndez tells Yahoo Life. She says it helps with her claustrophobia to board last because it shortens her time on the plane, to book an aisle seat as close to the front of the plane as possible, to take CBD before flying (if it’s legal where she’s traveling), to download content on her device to keep her distracted in the air and to bring lavender oil and Xanax in her bag as a backup. She also likes to practice Pranayama — breathing exercises often used in yoga — to remain calm.
Unlike Méndez, Emmie Newitt has always been afraid of flying, fearful that the plane might crash or be taken hostage, or that she might have some sort of health scare on board. She’s tried to conquer her fear of flying with exposure, but it’s still scary, especially after experiencing a tumultuous landing on one flight. “The plane was swaying so much that [it] hit the runway, then took off again to try the second time,” Newitt tells Yahoo Life via email.
Judy Lamb isn’t worried about the flight itself. Her dad was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force, and she loves being in the air and the physical acts of taking off, cruising and landing. For her, the anxiety comes from the “extra stuff”: navigating airports, waiting at gates and accepting the omnipresent risk of being delayed, rerouted, canceled or stuck on the tarmac. “There’s nothing more anxiety-producing than sitting on the tarmac,” Lamb tells Yahoo Life.
Lamb can’t remember the last time she flew, but believes it was around seven years ago. Thankfully, both of her grandkids live within driving distance, so she doesn’t have to fly; however, she would if she wanted to go on a vacation somewhere far away. In that situation, especially if it involved a long flight like when she went to Italy, she’d probably take a Xanax, she says.
Whether it’s claustrophobia, safety fears or the potential for logistical nightmares, most people’s flight anxiety stems from feeling out of control. But why — and what can be done about it?
Everyone experiences small trauma, and often these negative experiences can leave people feeling like they aren’t in control or can’t escape. “These non-flying situations that turned out to be not so great make the flying experiences seem strangely big, but they are borrowing power — negative power, negative energy — from non-flying traumas,” Tom Bunn, an airline captain, licensed therapist and president and founder of SOAR, Inc., a program designed to help people overcome their fear of flying, tells Yahoo Life. As the plane moves farther away from the ground, people lose more and more of the control they have over their environment, which can make anxiety and claustrophobia worse.
“You’ll find that most people who have trouble with flying have a trouble with some other similar no-control situation ([such as being in] elevators, bridges, tunnels, high places and MRIs),” Bunn explains. “It’s usually not just about flying, which tells us it not only is about the question of safety on the plane, it’s about emotional safety.”
Most anxious fliers develop personal strategies for feeling more in control or mitigating the anxiety they feel. Those personal tools can be lavender oil and breathing techniques or repeat exposure or prescription medication. Dunn also offers three tips of his own that he believes can help all fliers feel more in control and decrease their anxiety in the air:
Try to meet the pilot: “No one would go to a hospital for an operation without meeting the doctor,” Bunn says. “If you do meet that person, you’re going to feel a lot better on the flight.” To do this, Bunn encourages passengers to get to the boarding area earlier, tell the flight attendant (or gate agent) they are an anxious flier and ask if it’s possible to say hello to the pilot before taking off. This can also give those passengers who get nervous about weather conditions a chance to ask the pilot if they think the flight will be smooth or rough and how much turbulence to expect.
Try the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise: This exercise can help reduce stress, according to Bunn. “If something happens that alarms you, that feeling of alarm is caused by stress hormones being released,” he explains. “What we want to do is … stop paying attention to everything around you for 90 seconds, so you can burn those stress hormones off and get back to calm again.”
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For the exercise, people should look straight ahead. Then make five statements about what you see in your peripheral vision (a window, someone wearing headphones, etc.), five statements about what you hear (two people talking, a child laughing) and five statements about what you physically touch (the wrinkles on the leather seat, the rough edge of the seat belt strap, the smooth armrest). Then repeat the process with four things you see, hear and touch, and continue to repeat until you get to naming one thing for each sense.
Don’t rush: Bunn acknowledges that some people like to rush to the airport and keep busy before the flight, but he encourages people to prepare enough in advance so that the trip to the airport, getting through security and finding their gate isn’t stressful. This decreases the worries and anxiety that people carry with them before they board, so they feel more in control when they’re on the plane.
Another thing Bunn notes: Flying is still much safer than driving.
“People may not have control [in the air], but you can bet that captain has total control [of the plane], and your captain wants to get back home at the end of the day to be with his or her family, just like you do,” Bunn adds. “And they know how to do it.”View comments(1.1k)
Be our guest? No thanks. Why some people find staying in other people’s homes stressful.
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Allison Newman could be considered an expert houseguest. In 2019, both she and her husband quit their jobs, said goodbye to their apartment and traveled around the world for two-and-a-half years. While visiting 10 different countries — including a year in which they were stuck in New Zealand because of COVID lockdowns — and crisscrossing the United States, they were often at the mercy of other people’s hospitality. When they weren’t staying in strangers’ homes through Airbnb or CouchSurfing, they crashed with friends and family.
But they’ve cut their traveling significantly since having their first baby, who is now 18 months old. To Newman, traveling with a child and staying with someone else is no longer worth the added stress. “It’s really, really hard,” she tells Yahoo Life. “The amount of stuff you have to pack, feeling like you’re imposing because with little kids you are on very set schedules and they require a lot of additional oversight, [especially when] things aren’t baby-proofed.”
Betsy Verzosa’s kids are older — 10, 8 and 6 — and while traveling with them is getting easier now that they no longer need diapers, car seats or strollers, being a guest at other people’s houses can still be a challenge. One example: “Our kids don’t really watch TV, but I can’t tell these other kids we’re staying with that they can’t watch TV because our kids don’t,” Verzosa tells Yahoo Life. This forces Verzosa to be more relaxed about her kids watching TV, staying up late and eating food she wouldn’t normally give them.
Even for people without kids, being a houseguest can be a challenge, and it’s one that 29-year-old Samuel Hansen wishes he didn’t have to endure. He dislikes being in someone else’s space, feeling pressured to socialize and not being on his own timetable. “The only benefit of staying with someone is the cost savings. If I had a choice and unlimited money, I would stay in a hotel every time,” he tells Yahoo Life. He doesn’t even like to stay in an Airbnb because he is still staying in someone else’s space, which means there are more responsibilities. “You still have to clean up or put all of the bath towels in the bathroom or run the dishwasher or make sure all the trash is taken out. It isn’t as relaxing.”
Priyanka Blackard also thinks that it’s always a little uncomfortable to be a houseguest, but, for her, that mostly stems from the obligation she feels to alter her behavior to fit in with her host’s lifestyle. “I have trouble relaxing and almost feel weirdly obligated to just fit into the way they would live in their home and adapt to their routines,” she says, “and understand that they aren’t going to have the same stuff in the fridge that I have and follow when they eat their meals and what they watch on TV.”
It’s especially hard when her hosts wear shoes inside because Blackard prefers removing her shoes at the door. “I grew up in a shoeless household … so when I go to people’s houses where they don’t take their shoes off, it makes me really anxious and makes me feel kind of gross because you’re tracking all of the gross stuff from outside into a personal space,” she tells Yahoo Life.
All of these things — sharing space, bringing kids into a new environment, feeling pressured to socialize when you want to rest, adjusting your sleep schedule, using someone else’s bathroom, removing or keeping your shoes on, eating different types of food — can make being a houseguest stressful. But why?
According to Shawn Burn, professor of psychology at California Polytechnic State University, it’s because people are temporarily losing their primary territory. “A primary territory is a physical space central to our daily life that we ‘own’ and control, usually our home,” Burn tells Yahoo Life via email. “Primary territories support many psychological needs, including a need for control and predictability. Importantly, they are also ‘privacy spaces’ for couple and family intimacy, relaxation and recovery, emotional release, self-evaluation and personal care tasks.”
When separated from this space, people can feel stress about meeting their basic needs (such as having privacy to use the bathroom, eating different food, getting enough sleep), being unable to perform “stress-reducing habitual behaviors” (such as working out, reading, drinking a beer or glass of wine, watching a favorite TV show) and handling interpersonal matters (such as conflicts with other people, splitting costs).
To ease these psychological stressors, Diane Gottsman, modern etiquette expert and the founder of the Protocol School of Texas, suggests that guests and hosts communicate before the stay. “I think what makes everyone stressed out is what they don’t know what to expect,” Gottsman tells Yahoo Life. “From the host perspective, it’s important to let the guest know in a kind and friendly way what the guest will be experiencing. Will a baby be sleeping? Are there kids running around in the morning? Are there pets, and are the guests allergic to pets? Is there a car they can use?”
Having these types of conversations beforehand helps both parties feel more comfortable, so they aren’t walking on pins and needles for their entire visit. However, Gottsman emphasizes, guests also need to be respectful of their hosts’ house rules and routines and keep things tidy. “You want to be part of the family without being invasive. You want to fit in because you are the guest,” she says.
Newman agrees, and after being a guest in houses across the world, she has two main pieces of advice to offer. “One. Always offer and help clean up after yourself. Even if people say they don’t care, this will leave a positive message and they will remember. If you’re messy and unhelpful, they will also remember,” she shares. “Two. Be respectful and follow their ‘house rules.’” This is especially true if you ever find yourself staying in someone’s house in a different country. For example, when staying in New Zealand, a country with much higher recycling standards, she followed her host’s directions to scrub out containers until there wasn’t a speck of food left.
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It’s also important to remember that when someone, especially a friend or family member, is offering you a free place to stay, it can feel like an obligation to say yes, but you can say no. Versoza and her husband have found that staying in a hotel with her kids makes their visits to see family in the summer much more enjoyable.
