wellness tips
Travel jitters:
How to navigate anxiety during travel
Barbara Kamholz | April 8, 2025
Travel jitters:
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Travel opens the door to new experiences, but it can also bring moments of anxiety. With the right strategies in place, you can manage those feelings and focus on what matters most—discovering different places, learning, and making lasting memories.
Barbara Kamholz, PhD, is the Director of Behavioural Health at EF Education First. She’s board-certified in behavioural and cognitive psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). Before joining EF in 2022, she spent 20 years as a public health leader, social justice advocate, educator, and clinical psychologist—and she has many insights to share about travel anxiety and mental health.
This three-part series written by Barbara was adapted for our EF Tours Canada travellers. This month, we’re focusing on how to navigate travel anxiety during your trip. Next month, we’re looking at how to deal with anxiety after your trip.
Read part one here: Managing travel anxiety before your trip
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Does this sound like you?
“I have so much travel anxiety and can’t seem to calm down or enjoy myself, because I’m scared I’m going to be late to the next meet up with my group!”
Or
“Being part of a group all the time stresses me out, because I don’t know if I’ll fit in with them. I’m more on the shy side but don’t want to travel alone.”
You’ve probably been thinking about overseas travel for weeks or months, and you’ve likely had some fears along the way. So, first off—congratulations! You’ve already faced a bunch of fears, and are now on the trip!
Now for some hard news. You may have thought that once you got on the plane, all your concerns would melt away. But now you’re facing a lot of new situations—like rooming with people you just met, navigating group dynamics, and exploring unfamiliar places—and you may feel more anxious than you expected.
Being anxious about new places, schedules, and people means that it’s important to you and you’re not sure how it’s going to turn out. If you’re an introvert, being around people all the time may be especially taxing (even if you want to be there).
Bottom line: Most people are going to experience some anxiety on a big trip. Here are some things you can do to address anxiety when you’re on the road.
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Remind yourself that anxiety is just information and can be useful.
Anxiety and worry may feel bad, but they’re not dangerous. Some anxiety is useful for helping us focus and address important tasks, and some worry can help us solve problems. But anxiety and worry can get in our way when we keep spinning on something, when we’re convinced we’re the only people who feel like this, or when we’re anxious ABOUT BEING ANXIOUS.
Here are some quick reads on helpful vs. unhelpful worry:
3 Ways to Tell if Worry Is Helpful
5 Signs That Your Worry Is Not Helpful
Take steps to address the thing you’re worried about and see what happens.
Worried about oversleeping? Set an alarm on your phone to wake you. Also, talk to your roommates and ask them to nudge you if you don’t wake up from your alarm.
Nervous you’ll mess up the schedule? Write it down as a list or in your phone calendar. That way, you’ll have it with you, and you can easily edit it when inevitable itinerary changes happen.
If you take steps to objectively address your worry and it doesn’t go away (or at least decrease), it’s probably not realistic. Shift to the other tips in this list to help.
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Remind yourself that the people around you are most likely also experiencing some anxiety.
A smart person once said, “Don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.” Even if someone else looks like they have no anxiety, difficulties, or challenges, they may well be grappling with their own internal struggles. (And if they aren’t right now, they have experienced difficult feelings at some other time!)
We may feel special, but humans are actually very similar. We all want to be safe and to belong, and we all feel some anxiety when there’s uncertainty about those things. This is because: Darwin. Over generations of human evolution, living in groups and being connected to others was important for survival. And some amount of anxiety when we were outside the routine, or the pack, was useful to keep us close.
Of course, there are variations across individuals. But the lone human living thousands of years ago who wasn’t ever anxious about belonging in the group, starving, or being eaten by predators, generally didn’t live very long!
Challenge your thoughts.
Our brains are busy. Every day they produce over 6,000 thoughts (and some estimates go as high as 70,000). So, it’s understandable that not all our thoughts are accurate, and some of them may be way off base. These off-base, inaccurate thoughts are called “distortions.” When we feel particularly anxious (or depressed), our thoughts are more likely to be distorted, so it’s useful at these times to notice your thoughts and challenge them.
Two kinds of thought errors are often associated with strong anxiety: all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing. See the chart below to learn how these thought errors impact you.
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For more information on thought errors, see these resources:
Stinking Thinking: How Our Thoughts Determine How We Feel
What Is Stinking Thinking and How to Manage
It’s normal to have some anxiety during a big trip. But part of what makes travel exciting and valuable is getting outside your comfort zone.
Remind yourself that you’re not alone, practice some strategies to manage your anxiety, and see where the road takes you!
Wander without worry
At first, it might be scary to land in a new destination. But there’s lots to love about travel, and you’ll never forget the lessons you learn.
