Do you have travel anxiety?

Anxiety, is the intense feeling of fear a person experience when they are under stress. Some of the symptoms of anxiety are sweating, having an increase in heart rate, trembling, dizziness and more. Similar to anxiety, travel anxiety is a result, in my opinion, of overthinking and stress. So, what is “travel anxiety”? Travel anxiety, or pre-travel anxiety, is the fear or the uncomfortable feeling you get prior to traveling, for any related reason. For example, I used to get overwhelmed and could not sleep the night before I travel, without understanding why at the time. Therefore, I’ll be explaining some of the symptoms of travel anxiety, and how to overcome this issue (if you have it).

Symptoms before traveling

• Stomachache or loss of appetite
• Headache
• Tension or pain in muscles, when thinking of traveling
• Eating more or less than usual
• Overthinking, worry, negative thoughts (what if’s?)

How to overcome travel anxiety?

Meditation

Another way that shown to minimize travel anxiety, is meditation. I can not emphasize this enough, meditating a day before the trip helped me to relax and lowered the feeling of tension I used to have on my legs. In addition, if you enjoy a day at the spa either to meditate or to get a massage service, it could be useful; since it shifts your attention towards breathing and relaxing the muscles. Also, some people likes to do Yoga or deep-breathing sessions. In general, any effective practice of meditation that calms you down and releases stress away from your body, do that.

Physical Activity

One thing I always encourage my patients to do is walking, regardless if they have anxiety or not. Daily walking for at least 30 minutes regulates your blood pressure (which improves your cardiovascular system) reduces stress, balances hormones, burn fat and boosts energy. I believe, walking for 30 minutes, minimum, every day is essential to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Thus, if you have travel anxiety, I strongly encourage you to walk more. Also, if you find doing heavy physical activities difficult for you for some reason, such as you have a health issue that hinders you from doing physical activities regularly, walking is a sustainable method and can be very simple task to accomplish!

Writing

When you have an ocean of thoughts, whether they were positive or negative, take a pen and pour all those thoughts you have in your mind into a piece of paper. The reason why I say this is that one of the key advantages of writing is stress reduction. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, stress is actually the major cause for anxiety. Writing all the questions you have prior to your trip is a mechanism of stress relief, I tend to use for myself and my patients. It strengthen your memory, too. As well as, it lowers the tension you may feel on your shoulders and at the back of your neck, when you think of traveling.

Medication

Prior to your trip, you might experience some sort of physical pain such headaches or any other type of physical pain, As I mentioned above. This emotional affect can range between mild and severe, depending on the level of anxiety and your health status. However, just like any other issue, there is always a solution to this effect. Even though painkillers can be one of the solutions, I highly don’t recommend consuming too much of it, or taking medication as first solution. Unless physical pain is intense and you have tried other non-medical alternative methods to reduce pain, medication can be a solution here. Yet, I recommend using painkillers after asking your doctor, in case you have any medical issue.