As an academic and journalist who has travelled extensively over the last 20 years – but also a diagnosed sufferer of generalised anxiety disorder – I’ve been researching the myriad triggers of travel anxiety.
Many readers will be familiar with the dread and panic that can stem from delayed transport, overcrowded streets, chaotic airports and encounters with officious bureaucrats. But there are also less obvious causes linked to ecological degradation, cultural miscommunication and the complexities of personal identity and experience.
Research for my new book, The Years of Travelling Anxiously, has led me to several writers, philosophers and psychologists whose insights offer remedies to travel anxiety. Here are four examples of common travel anxiety triggers, and tips from major thinkers for overcoming them.
1. Prioritise your urban wellbeing
In his book Places of the Heart (2015), psychologist Colin Ellard explains that those who travel in contemporary cities can be made anxious by a lack of “neighbourhood cohesion”, “exposure to toxins or pathogens”, dense traffic and poor urban planning.
In addition, the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio asserts that the modern metropolis’ turbo pace, information overload and vulnerability to technological and environmental disaster can result in psychological dislocation.
Ellard’s experiments have shown that people who traverse urban spaces experience spikes in adrenaline, blood pressure and heart rate. For our mental and physical health, Ellard claims, when arriving in a new place, we should seek out green spaces, smooth-edged architecture, good sight-lines along streets and natural light.
f11photo/Shutterstock
2. Educate yourself against communication breakdowns
Many travellers feel the pressures of what the sociologist Debbie Lisle calls “cross-cultural communication”. In my new book, I relate jittery encounters with people with identities, experiences, values and habits different to mine. Outsiders to a culture or society may make unintentional social faux pas and say things that could be construed as patronising or entitled.
Knowledge and awareness can mitigate these problems. By getting familiar with accounts such as Orientalism – literary critic Edward Said’s critique of the west’s disdainful and over-simplified portrayal of the non-western world – privileged westerners can start to “acknowledge, address and engage” with their “ethical and political responsibility to the other”, as Lisle puts it.
3. Accept anxiety as a fact of existence
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued that anxiety is a necessary condition for our freedom: “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned det Høieste (the ultimate truths of existence).”
The Royal Library of Denmark
If travel – which is often seen as an exercise of freedom – is too easy for us, with no obstacles or snags to contend with, then we won’t learn or gain meaning from it.
For the same reason, stories across human cultures devote much more time and space to the challenges a hero must overcome rather than the end of the narrative when the hero has overcome such challenges.
As Tom Waits sang, “The obsession’s in the chasing and not the apprehending / The pursuit you see and never the arrest.”
4. Address your eco-anxiety
Flying contributes to 2.5-3% of global carbon emissions yet only 4-5% of the world’s population travel by plane nearly every year. Most travellers, then, belong to this small elite, which is also complicit in the destructive over-development of tourist areas, particularly in low- and middle-income countries
As the economist Alessandro Capocchi and colleagues have argued, such overtourism brings ever more waste, pollution, soil erosion and destruction of natural habitats.
The eco-anxiety that can stem from these conditions can, in the eyes of radical ecologist Andreas Malm and philosopher Bruno Latour, be usefully mitigated by climate activism and an awareness that humanity and nature are mutually dependent.
As Latour puts it: “All the resources of science, humanities and the arts will have to be mobilised once again to shift attention to our shared terrestrial condition.”
In the travel context, these imperatives might compel us to visit sustainable tourist sites and minimise our carbon footprint, thereby reducing feelings of guilt and hypocrisy.
Anna Mente/Shutterstock
5. Remember ignorance is not bliss
Playwright Alan Bennett contends that we feel reassured when we read a work of literature that articulates “a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things which you had thought special and particular to you”. If this is true, then an awareness of the great minds who have grappled with the problem of anxiety might just help us to be a little less anxious the next time we travel.
Before you set off, here’s my recommended travel anxiety reading list: Søren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Paul Virilio’s Overexposed City (1984), Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel (2002), Debbie Lisle’s The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (2009) and Bruno Latour’s How to Inhabit the Earth (2022).
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