five tips from influential thinkers to calm your nerves

As an academic and journalist who has traveled extensively over the past 20 years – but also a diagnosed sufferer of generalized anxiety disorder – I research the myriad causes of travel anxiety.

Many readers will be familiar with the dread and panic that can result from delayed transport, overcrowded roads, chaotic airports and encounters with official bureaucrats. But there are also less obvious causes linked to ecological degradation, cultural miscommunication and the complexity of personal identity and experience.

Research for my new book, The years of anxious travelit led me to several authors, philosophers, and psychologists whose ideas offer cures for travel anxiety. Here are four examples of common triggers of travel stress and advice from leading thinkers for dealing with them.

1. Prioritize your urban well-being

In his book Parts of the Heart (2015), psychologist Colin Ellard explains that travelers to modern cities can be stressed by a lack of “neighborhood cohesion,” “exposure to toxins or pathogens,” heavy traffic, and poor urban planning.

Furthermore, the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio argues that the turbo pace of the modern metropolis, information overload and vulnerability to technological and environmental catastrophes can lead to psychological dislocation.

Ellard’s experiments showed that people walking through urban spaces experience spikes in adrenaline, blood pressure and heart rate. For our mental and physical health, Ellard claims, when we arrive in a new place, we should look for green spaces, smooth architecture, good line of sight along roads and natural light.

2. Educate yourself against communication breakdowns

Many travelers feel the pressures of what the sociologist Debbie Lyle he calls “intercultural communication”. In my new bookI associate tumultuous encounters with people with identities, experiences, values, and habits different from my own. Outsiders to a culture or society may unintentionally make social faux pas and say things that could be interpreted as patronizing or entitled.

Knowledge and awareness can mitigate these problems. By becoming familiar with accounts such as e.g Orientalism – literary critic Edward Said’s critique of the West’s contemptuous and oversimplified depiction of the non-Western world – privileged Westerners can begin to “recognize, address, and engage” with their “ethical and political responsibility to the other,” as Lisle puts it.

3. Accept stress as a fact of existence

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard argued that stress is a necessary condition for our freedom: “Whoever has learned to stress in the right way has learned det Høieste (the supreme truths of existence)’.

If the trip – which is often seen as exercise of freedom – it’s too easy for us, with no barriers or obstacles to deal with, then we won’t learn or gain meaning from it.

For the same reason, stories in human cultures devote much more time and space to the challenges a hero must overcome than to the end of the narrative when the hero has overcome such challenges.

As Tom Waits he sang, “The obsession is with the chase and not the catch / The chase you see and never the catch.”

4. Address your eco-anxiety

Flying helps 2.5-3% of global carbon emissions alone 4-5% of the world’s population travels by plane almost every year. Most travelers therefore belong to this small elite, which is also complicit in the disastrous overdevelopment of tourist areas, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

As economist Alessandro Capocchi and colleagues have argued, such hypertourism it brings more and more waste, pollution, soil erosion and destruction of natural habitats.

The ecological stress that can arise from these conditions can, in the eyes of the radical environmentalist Andreas Malm and philosopher Bruno Latour, will be usefully tempered by climate activism and the realization that humanity and nature are mutually dependent.

As Latour He puts it: “All the resources of science, the humanities, and the arts must once again be mobilized to direct attention to our common earthly condition.”

In the context of travel, these imperatives may compel us to visit sustainable tourist sites and minimize our carbon footprint, thereby reducing feelings of guilt and hypocrisy.

5. Remember that ignorance is not bliss

Playwright Alan Bennett argues that we feel reassured when we read a literary work that articulates “a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things that you had thought especially and particularly about you.” If this is true, then being aware of the great minds who have tackled the problem of stress might just help us be a little less anxious the next time we travel.

Before you start, here’s my recommended travel anxiety reading list: Søren Kierkegaard’s The concept of stress (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 How to inhabit the Earth (2022).

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