Travel Anxiety: Signs, Causes, & Tips for Overcoming

What Is Travel Anxiety?

Travel anxiety is the body’s stress response reacting to a travel-related stressor – the thought of being in a new place, planning your travels, and/or engaging in travel activities like driving or flying. Before and during the trip, this anxiety can manifest as swirling negative thoughts, feelings of overwhelm, physical sweating or struggling to breathe, irritability, restlessness, and difficulty concentrating.¹ Sometimes, this also manifests as avoidance of travel altogether.

Some people only experience anxiety related to travel, while others experience anxiety every day and find that travel amplifies or triggers their anxiety more than usual. There are several types of anxiety disorders, and each person will be impacted by their anxiety differently. Taking note of your overall anxiety levels and symptoms, and the environments in which they occur, can be a great foundation to build upon if you’re looking to manage your travel anxiety.

Signs of Travel Anxiety

There are some signs to watch for that can indicate someone is struggling with travel anxiety. Taking note of these behaviors and noticing when they come up, which ones come up, and whether they arise during non-travel-related issues as well can help you begin working on a management plan on your own or with a professional.

Signs of travel anxiety include:

• Sleeping problems leading up to your departure date
• Feeling restless or on edge in airports or train stations
• Racing thoughts
• Running through worst-case scenarios that could happen during travel
• Repeatedly and excessively checking things – your bags, ticket, flight time, etc
• Increased irritability leading up to/during the travel
• Excessive forgetfulness with important travel elements – leaving your bag or ticket somewhere, forgetting what airline you’re on after checking multiple times, etc.
• Difficulty regulating your emotions during the travel – crying, panicking, angry outbursts
• Avoiding the travel altogether

Common Forms of Travel Anxiety

Feeling stressed during vacation is incredibly common – a recent study estimated that 92% of Americans find travel to be nerve-racking.² While it’s common for people to find travel to be stressful, there are several different ways that this stress and travel anxiety can manifest.

Some different subtypes of anxiety can include:

• Fear of flying: Fear of flying, clinically called aerophobia, is when a person has a debilitating fear of flying in an airplane. This can lead to people panicking during flights and avoiding flying altogether – even if they have to take extreme measures to do so. It’s estimated that aerophobia impacts about 25 million people in the US³
• Claustrophobia: Claustrophobia is a phobia that is specifically focused on the fear of being in tight or enclosed spaces – such as an elevator, subway train, or airplane. Being in these spaces can sometimes trigger a panic attack.
• Fear of driving: Clinically called amaxophobia, fear of driving or riding in a vehicle can apply to personal vehicles, buses, or other vehicles. This can also make a person become anxious when they are a passenger as well.
• Anticipatory anxiety: Anticipatory anxiety is the fear and worry that something bad could happen in the future. This can show up with travel anxiety by a person mentally rehearsing losing their ticket or luggage, a natural disaster happening on their trip, getting a travel delay, or something bad happening during their trip.

Causes of Travel Anxiety

There are many things that can contribute to developing travel anxiety. Some causes of travel anxiety can include having past negative traveling experiences, having an untreated anxiety disorder, and seeing news coverage of travel catastrophes and crises. Understanding the cause of travel anxiety is a crucial first step in managing and overcoming debilitating travel anxiety.

Common causes for travel anxiety include:

• Having a stressful travel experience – such as flight cancellations, getting stranded in an airport, losing important documents, being in an accident
• Seeing news coverage of travel catastrophes, such as a crash.
• Having a panic attack while in a new or unfamiliar place
• Struggling to manage racing and worst-case scenario thoughts during past travel

8 Tips to Cope With Travel Anxiety

While travel anxiety can feel overwhelming and be debilitating, there are things that you can do to help cope with anxiety. The things that work for you to cope with travel anxiety will be specific to you, so continue to try other things if something doesn’t end up being helpful immediately. There are specific things you can do to target travel anxiety, but it’s also important to make sure you use more general emotional regulation tools as well.

Tips to cope with travel anxiety include:

1. Mindfulness: Mindfulness can help because it will help you to notice as soon as anxious thoughts and feelings begin to come up, which makes it easier and more likely you will be able to manage them and stop a mental spiral before it begins.
2. Identify your triggers: The better you know your anxiety triggers, the more likely you are to respond to them quickly when they begin to happen. These can include specific things that happen during your travel, feelings, and thoughts that come up before/during/after travel.
3. Plan ahead: If you know that you typically experience anxiety while traveling, make sure that you’re doing what you can to set yourself up for success. Having your tickets printed before you go to the airport, making sure anxiety medication is within reach for your travel, and anything that would help you to feel reassured are worthwhile things to prepare before you go on your trip.
4. Anchor yourself with helpful thoughts: Preparing helpful statements and realistic thoughts before you leave can be something helpful to cling to when you’re in an anxious moment while traveling. Remind yourself of the things you’re looking forward to when you arrive at your destination, that travel cannot and will not last forever, and the most realistic outcomes with your travel. If you think you may struggle to remember these at the moment, write them down and keep them within reach during your travel.
5. Return to deep breathing: Anxiety is, essentially, your body activating a stress response; the quickest and most efficient way to override that stress response is to do breathwork. Key things to focus on are to hold your breath for a few seconds between the inhale and exhale, exhale longer than you inhale, and make the breaths as deep as you’re able and comfortable to do.
6. Channel your anxiety: Sometimes, you may still feel excess anxiety, despite breathwork and other regulation tools you’ve been using. Having an object to “channel” this excess anxiety into can help your brain feel like you’re processing that extra energy from the anxiety. This can be anything from squeezing a stress ball to repeatedly turning a coin over in your pocket – any object will do.
7. Distraction: A huge struggle with anxiety is that there is a kernel of truth to the concerns it brings up, which can’t really be regulated or reasoned away. It can also be helpful to make sure that you bring things to distract your mind and keep them occupied during your travels – such as a sudoku puzzle or having movies downloaded to your device.
8. Ask for help: Travel anxiety is incredibly common, and you’re often surrounded by people who are pros while you’re traveling – such as flight attendants, customer service reps at the ticket counters, or guides at destinations. Tell airline employees upon arrival if you have any concerns or if there is anything that they can do to help you make it through your travels. Most professionals are happy to help, and appreciate your communication.

Treatment for Travel Anxiety

While travel anxiety is extremely common, it can be difficult to overcome without professional help because the consequences of this phobia can range from embarrassment to more pervasive relationship and career restrictions.⁴ Luckily, there are several professional treatment options available that are focused on coping with and eliminating the feelings and symptoms associated with travel anxiety.

Treatment options for anxiety include:

• Cognitive behavior therapy: CBT for anxiety could help because it focuses on noticing, challenging, and reframing the unhelpful thoughts that anxiety likes to latch onto. It also helps to overcome avoidant behaviors that actually make anxiety worse over the long term.
• Exposure therapy: Exposure therapy is the therapy modality of choice when it comes to treating specific phobias⁵ because it works to reduce the body and brain’s stress reaction to the phobia trigger over time.
• EMDR: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy could be a helpful treatment because it helps to reprocess and reduce your body and brain’s stress system response when a trigger reminds you of a traveling traumatic event you experienced or witnessed.
• Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: MBCT helps to bring a person’s focus into the present moment, detach from unhelpful thought patterns, and to develop a new relationship with uncomfortable thoughts and feelings.
• Medication: Sometimes, a person’s symptoms are too intense for them to be able to effectively implement coping skills and tools without adding medication to help. Specifically, benzodiazepines have been shown to be helpful with anticipatory anxiety and to aid during the initial stages of exposure therapy⁶; many people find reassurance just having a medication option with them, even if they do not decide to take it.

When to Seek Professional Help

If you have started to notice that your travel anxiety has become severe, and this has caused you to avoid or consider avoiding important travel because of the anxiety that comes with it, it could be time to consider working with a professional to reduce your travel anxiety and symptoms. If you feel ready to begin your journey, an online therapist directory or online therapy platform can be helpful places to begin searching for a professional who can be a good and qualified fit, and there are online psychiatrist options if you think medication may also be helpful for you.