The Anxious Traveler’s Guide to Seeing the World

Since I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder in 2003, I’ve had panic attacks in at least 12 countries, which might mean I hold some kind of world record.

It may seem ironic, then, that I’ve made a living from travelling to often gruelling parts of the world and writing about it for the last 20 years. But I’ve persevered because I’ve been able to conquer some of my fears on the road by facing up to them.

There are many reasons to get nervous when we travel, from culture shock to the terror of missing planes, trains or buses to the pressure put on us by officious bureaucrats in airports and embassies.

An extra challenge for me – and perhaps for others – has been the anxiety that’s triggered not directly by things that happen on a trip but that stem from unresolved issues around grief and stress.

While these might date back before a given trip, they can surface in a nasty way when you’re far from home.

I’m now at a point in my life where I want to solve the puzzle of my travel anxiety. While I’ve learned that no two anxiety sufferers have exactly the same stories or symptoms, maybe you’ve dealt with some of these same issues, too.

Here is what I’ve learned, and I hope it’s helpful to you.

The Fight Over Flights

Perhaps the most common form of travel anxiety is aerophobia (fear of flying), which up to 40 per cent of Britons suffer from. While I’m fortunate not to be aerophobic myself, I’ve known many who are.

On a plane in 2015, my photographer friend started shaking and sweating as we waited to depart from the Ivory Coast. “Most accidents happen either while taking off or landing,” he whispered haltingly.

My approach was to dose him up with facts: I told him he was scared of flying but not of driving or riding in a road vehicle (amaxophobia affects only 6 per cent of Britons), even though he was 750 times more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane wreck.

That seemed to calm him down enough to get through the flight. The Valium helped too, I think.

If flying spikes your stress, consider travelling by train.

The Tyranny Of Airports

Though I’ve generally had comfortable flights, my patience has often been tested at airports. My worst experience was travelling from London to the Philippines after the COVID pandemic.

With others, I was herded through a total of six X-ray machines, patted down repeatedly and almost missed my connecting flight due to staff shortages.

I kept sane through ‘grounding’ methods like breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth and focusing on a detail of your surroundings.

You’ll slow your heart down, take in more oxygen and reduce the flow of adrenaline.

Registering what’s around you places you into the moment, so that you’re not worrying about the past or the awful things that your agitated mind believes will happen in the future.

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A Job Lot Of Jobsworths

There are bullies and pedants everywhere, including in the travel industry. Stamping passports or printing off tickets all day can be dull, depressing and underpaid work, and I’ve met plenty of jobsworths ready to take out their frustrations on unsuspecting travellers.

I was once cross-examined for half an hour at Portsmouth ferry port by someone who didn’t even care about the answers I gave; they just wanted to lord it over me.

Even though I was waving my NUJ press card at them, they still said, “Any form of ID proving you’re a journalist?”

When they asked me which publications I’d written for, they interrupted me before I could respond to the question.

All the while, this held up the traffic behind us, annoying dozens of others desperate to get home after their holidays. This only added to my jitters.

Judge Dread

When we travel, we meet a variety of people. Some may judge us, especially if they have different cultural values and expectations from our own.

I felt ‘judge dread’ most keenly on a trip to the Philippines in 2022 to establish a partnership between the university I work for and an institution there.

Straining to give a good first impression got the better of me, and I ended up having a panic attack at a luxury resort that my hosts had taken me to.

“What did we do to upset you?” said one of them. “It’s not your fault,” I tried to assure them.

Even dining solo can feel daunting; learning to find comfort in dining alone helps.

It also helps to do your research into etiquette before you depart, so you don’t commit the kinds of faux pas I’ve made such as patting a child on the head in Indonesia (a no-no there) or laughing when my Nigerian mother-in-law warned that, if my pregnant wife spent too much time with the family cat, she’d give birth to a child that resembled said cat.

(My baby daughter was born without such grotesque features, I’m relieved to report).

Go With The Flow

I’ve been to and resided in some of the world’s busiest cities: Lagos; Jakarta; Kolkata; Manila.

Sometimes I’ve needed relief from the racket, the gridlocks, the crowds and the pollution. Distress can be reduced by encounters with nature, even little chunks of it in inner-city parks and gardens.

Other acts can deliver you, even briefly, from urban anxiety.

During one period of panic in Manila in 2024, I entered a bookshop and gazed at reproductions of the paintings of Fernando Amorsolo. His beautiful depictions of Filipino rural life in the 20th century calmed me right down as I went into what’s called a ‘flow state.’

Immersing yourself in an activity such as admiring great art can distract you from the nervous noise in your head.

You lose track of time, like you did in childhood when playing in an imaginary world.

Random Bursts

When travelling, I can suddenly get the heebie-jeebies in normal situations, amongst friends and in safe spaces.

On a cross-channel ferry in 2018 with some close and much-loved relatives, I was unable to face a delicious French buffet and instead took to roaming aimlessly around the decks and shops.

Back home, it took a lot of meditation and counselling to realise that I was suffering from delayed grief over the death of a close friend that had happened a few months before I took that trip.

Just figuring that process out has made me less prone to these random eruptions ever since.

Accepting Anxiety

Something that helped me to be less travel-anxious was accepting that travel anxiety is a fact of life. I’ve learned this from counsellors, from psychoanalysts like Todd McGowan and self-help authors like Mark Manson.

If our trips go off without any snags or hurdles, we won’t find meaning in them. If a travel experience spooks us or challenges our assumptions, we’ll learn more about ourselves and the place or culture we are interacting with.

If everything is made too easy for us – as it often is on a hedonistic holiday as opposed to a stint of enlightening travel – then we’re likely to get complacent and not do much reflecting.

This is why stories across cultures focus on a quest rather than its resolution.

As the great singer-songwriter Tom Waits put it, “The obsession’s in the chasing and not the apprehending / The pursuit you see and never the arrest.”

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Author Bio: Tom Sykes is the author of seven books. His reportage and travel writing have appeared in New Statesman, the Independent, the Scotsman, New Internationalist and numerous other titles all over the world. He is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Global Journalism at the University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The Years of Travelling Anxiously: A Travel Writer’s Search For Peace of Mind by Tom Sykes is published by Icon Books on the 26th March 2026.

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