How I’ve dealt with travel anxiety

It took me until 2019 to get the courage to go abroad on my own. I always fancied myself as the type of person who would visit other countries taking in the culture, but some ingrained part of me thought “I don’t trust my ability to look after myself. If I’m going to go abroad I need to have someone else with me”.

My partner’s never shown much interest in travelling and if I tried to convince her to go abroad with me then we probably wouldn’t have a very good time because the enthusiasm for it would be very one-sided. The thing I’ve never understood about relationship conventions is this idea that your partner has to put up with doing something they really don’t want to do as a way of ‘compromise’. If someone doesn’t want to do something but the other does, its probably going to bring the mood down for the one that does want to do that thing in the first place.

I’m a very introverted person, so the idea of going abroad with a friend never made sense.

In 2019, I bit the bullet and booked a simple few days on one of the Canary islands. I even hired a car for myself, knowing full well that they drove on the other side of the road and I’d have to readjust. It was a huge risk for someone usually so risk-averse. It was completely terrifying sitting in the car that first time. The wheel and pedals were on the opposite side that I was used to. It felt like I’d stepped through a mirror into a different universe. Ultimately though, you’re still doing the same things: changing gears, feeling the biting point, pointing the steering wheel in different directions. It did take me a moment to realise that the lane for overtaking was different as well and I held up a woman behind me who looked confused as to what I was doing.

That holiday was quite simple. The canaries are basically like a British seaside town except people start talking in Spanish until you open your mouth and they realise “oh its another English tourist who can’t be bothered to learn the language”. I just hung about on beaches for a few days, but I started to realise that the version of me that could call himself an international traveller was actually possible, although I did recognise that this was very much international travel on easy mode.

The next thing I tried was more complicated: one of the wonders of the world. Egypt was in my budget range, so I booked a resort by the Nile in Luxor which required a connecting flight through Cairo, and then on the way back through I’d stay in Cairo for a couple of days. It took me until I was actually in the travelling process to start panicking at the fact the window the airline had given me to get to my connecting flight was only an hour and I needed to get through customs and change my suitcase over myself.

I still remember landing at Cairo after that flight and it just sort of hit me in that moment that I was now on another continent, thousands and thousands of miles from home. There was a possibility I wouldn’t make my connecting flight. Everyone around me spoke Arabic. I’d never been anywhere like this before. Roaming data on my phone cost a huge amount in this country and the airport Wi-Fi signal was bad.

I stopped in the queue for customs as the anxiety hit me in a huge wave that made me just want to collapse. My head was spinning. Breathing was heavy. I started internally yelling expletives at the anxious voice in my head telling me that I wasn’t going to make my connecting flight and I would have to find someone who spoke English and beg for a room at an airport hotel.

Turned out all the anxiety was for nothing. They stamped my passport. I found my suitcase in among the throng of security belts from inbound flights. It was more chaotic than Gatwick or Heathrow but ultimately: it was an airport. I found my suitcase, found the gate for my connecting flight and only JUST made it with ten minutes to spare. I won. I found my seat on the plane and started up my switch and tried to calm myself down by disconnecting from my surroundings.

I did feel the anxiety over the course of that week but ultimately: I saw some sights, ate some amazing food, and I rode a horse around the pyramids. It felt weird when the tour guide led us off the sandy path down onto a dual carriageway where horses and carts would ride alongside cars and vans, changing lanes as if they’re the same as any other vehicle. Cairo is a strange place. There are skyscrapers right next to ancient buildings and rural roads and people tie horses up outside KFC and Burger King. Its like three different time periods all merged into one city. It cost an arm and a leg and every single person I ran into wanted at least ten Egyptian pounds as a tip for just doing anything, but it was great evidence that I could present to the anxiety voice inside my head and say, “Look: all those things you were telling me could go wrong, didn’t go wrong. Everything worked out.”

I felt on top of the world and like I could do anything.

This was in February 2020. One month later, that thing happened that shut the world down and scared everyone half to death. I didn’t travel again for two years.

A long time later in 2022, I entered my first short film ‘The Voice’ into a small film festival in LA and managed to get in. I’d spent several months chucking it at festivals and failing to get any, and this was the first time I’d got one that confirmed it would actually screen it in a small theatre, so that gave me a great excuse to go to America for the first time. The flight was much longer than any I’d been on before, but the plane touched down, and I felt the same anxiety I had back in 2020 in Egypt. I was on another continent, much further from home than I’d ever been on my own before. I felt the lightness in my chest. My head spinning. I had an international data sim this time, so my connection to google maps was secure, so I had learned from past experience and built on it.

My flight had been held up and we landed late in the evening, much later than I had expected. My anxiety started speaking to me again. It started telling me that the hotel would have marked me as a no-show and given my room away.

I didn’t start internally swearing at my anxiety this time. This time I turned that voice into a silly little child and when it started running through all the nightmare scenarios, I responded to the anxious voice in my head in a high pitched voice and said “aww, its so cute you think that’s going to happen.”

And just like that: my travel anxiety was totally gone. The anxious voice in my head would throw out a nightmare scenario and I would just smile and shake my head and say “no!”

I got lost on the way to the car hire place, but I found it eventually and I ended up talking to two strangers on my walk to the building. Americans are so much friendlier than British people. In London: no one talks to anyone. Ever. In America, if you look lost, people will just come up to you and start talking. It was so much friendlier than I had expected.

Driving through LA in the dark and having to go through the phase of flipping the sides of the road in my head again was scary, but not unmanageable.

I felt like a God for that entire week. The voice telling me that the worst was going to happen didn’t need to be listened to anymore. The voice of anxiety was now just this cute little voice throwing out negative scenarios that it had no evidence were all that likely.

I’ve tried to apply this technique of patronising the anxious voice in my head elsewhere in life. Sometimes its correct in its doomsaying and things go wrong. Just yesterday I had something go wrong on a film shoot and it looks like we’re going to have to go back and reshoot it, but ultimately: I’m still breathing. I know what I’m capable of, and I’m not going to let that constant voice worrying me about the worst case scenario slow me down again.