The Pre-Travel Anxiety Bomb

Leading up to any trip of significant adventuretude, I always enjoy a pleasant few days of sweaty nervous dread. I have trouble sleeping, I get uncharacteristically moody, and I get strange images in my head usually revolving around plane crashes, roadside strandings, having the time of my life, and cobras in my bedsheets. Stuff like that. It’s pretty irrational, 100% closed-minded, and very antithetical to the supposedly liberating thing I’m meant to be looking forward to.

It’s a similar feeling to hovering your finger over the mouse before sending an important email or triple checking the safety lap bar on a roller coaster, but on a deeper, more existential level. Why am I even doing this? What is the point? I could stay home and watch MTV’s The Challenge (reruns) and be perfectly happy. Why ruin a good thing with a potentially amazing one?

I’ve read about this a lot of places, and the takeaway I usually see is a variation of “experiencing fear before doing something means you’re doing something right” or “If it doesn’t scare you it’s not worth doing.” These are sentiments that I can’t help but find simplistic at best and outright bullshit at worst. Yes, we all love a thoroughly broken comfort zone. But isn’t fear sometimes there for a reason? Like to protect you from bears? Or from getting in a Uber with a 3.5 rating? Or from venturing to places where you have to inspect the seal on water bottles before purchasing them?

So I’m not going to echo those thoughts here. I’ve experienced the pre-travel stomach helix a fair amount now. Enough to kind of know how to deal with it, to even somewhat embrace it as a necessary component of doing something even remotely thrilling. But the anxiety bomb before The Megatrip has been a different beast entirely. As of this writing, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in about two weeks. My mental state is a constant ping pong match between being the most excited I’ve ever been and googling articles on brain parasites.

So the best advice I can give on the anticipatory travel angst-kabob, is to expect it. If you acknowledge this is going to happen, you can at least recognize that it’s normal. You can at least comfortably make fun of yourself for feeling it. And hopefully, you’ll be able to remind yourself that it will be worth it, and that you won’t even remember feeling this way once you get there. That is, of course, until you find those cobras in your sheets.