163. Travel burnout

Thanks for tagging along. If you have been following me on Instagram following my travels recently, you'll know that I decided to take two months off and just really like go on a holiday, somewhat of a holiday. Some of it was for work, but mainly for like kind of like leisure and pleasure and you know, just to kind of see new things. I feel like a lot of us are at this moment making up for the travel that we couldn't do during the pandemic, especially if you're

in your twenties or even your thirties. There are so many people right now who I think are feeling almost like so many of their initial plans for what they wanted in their twenties were interrupted by COVID, by the pandemic. You know, naturally, people were super sick, people were dying. We did know what was going on. Everything was kind

of shut down. And the thing is is that each of us individually had a plan during that time that maybe involved some form of travel, and that plan was restricted, it was interrupted, And so now we're kind of like making up for that time that we missed and like flocking overseas in our thousands, myself included, I went to the US for four weeks with my sister and then Japan for five weeks, the first week with my family, which honestly, traveling with family has its own unique psychology

that is for another time, another day. But I then did the last remaining four weeks with my boyfriend. Well that was the intention, but we actually ended up leaving a week early, and the main reason for that was because of travel burnout and travel fatigue, which I didn't know was possible. I had never heard of this happening. And travel burnout, I have since learned essentially occurs when you have been traveling too hard for too long. You

become incredibly tired, anxious, indecisive. You maybe resort to sleeping a lot more than you like to, avoiding parts of a city, crying a lot, more, an array of different symptoms, And I think what happened was that I pushed myself too hard. It was by far the longest trip I have ever done, almost double what I had done before, and I I was hit with basically what I can

only describe as just intense mental, emotional, physical exhaustion. And I hit like a fork in the road, you know, stay and struggle and maybe not enjoy this, or leave and maybe resent my decision, but at least I'll be back home in my routine where I can kind of switch off for a few days before getting back to work. That was another component of it. We were like, we're gonna go on this like two month trip and then we're gonna go back to work two days later. You know.

It was just like very I think for someone who loves routine and for someone who is such a planner and who really needs rest and who needs time for kind of like a mental reset, it was too much and we decided to leave early. Obviously, that is a very serious conclusion that we reached. But I think it really got to the point where because I had ignored so many of the signs and early indicators travel burnout. There really wasn't another solution. I just let so many

small grievances build up. I didn't take time to rest. I wanted to just really soak as much of the trip up as possible, and I just didn't have the travel experience to know that you could overdo it, right, Like, holidays and travel are always something in our minds to look forward to, but that kind of means that we forget like the key principle of everything in life, which is that balance is key and even too much of

a good thing can turn bad. And it's honestly given me such a new found appreciation for the people who can travel for months, even years at a time, living out of a backpack in hostels. One of my best friends, Gracie, is like one of those restless, roving spirits, and it just gave me like a complete new respect for what she does, how much mental energy it requires. Travel burnout got me really good, and I want to talk about it. It felt like at the time that my fatigue was

like the ultimate ingratitude, you know. It was like feeling weary of this experience felt so almost like shameful and like embarrassing. I'm seeing a world that people dream about on like a once in a lifetime trip. But I'm also just so tired that I cannot even get out of bed. I cannot even enjoy it. Everything almost feels

like a form of punishment. And I think with any experience like that, any emotional experience that seems a little bit contradictory or confusing, there's always going to be some interesting psychology and kind of perspective on it. There's always

going to be an explanation. Of course. I went looking for it, and I was not disappointed by I think what some of the science reveals about our deeper human need and how that kind of translates into why we have this experience of being burned out from too much of a good thing. So I say we get into it. Firstly, I want to say one thing loud and clear before we begin. Travel is an absolute, without a doubt privilege.

It is also just genuinely really good for us. Like I know in this episode we're going to be talking a lot more about the negative side of it, but really, if you can travel, if you have the ability, there is no reason why you shouldn't. It has been shown to improve so much about our lives and our self development, our resilience, our confidence, our happiness. It even lessens anxiety to an extent. It's a really big list of the benefits. It's obviously been lauded and celebrated for years. Is like

a really amazing thing. It creates adventures, it creates new memories. I don't think I need to go on. There's no denying those things, right, And I think it goes without saying that I am incredibly grateful just for the opportunity to be able to consider travel as part of my life. So many people don't have that option. And maybe you're thinking, Okay, we're talking about travel burnout, when you know there are millions of people suffering the world. And my biggest problem

is that I have too much travel. I have thought

about that extensively, trust me. But I also believe that that acknowledgment of the innate privilege of travel, and the subsequent guilt for not valuing it entirely even when you're exhausted, actually contributes to a deeper level of fatigue and a deeper level of I think, just overall exhaustion because you don't want to take it for granted, so you force yourself to endure a lot of situations and stress and experiences that actually maybe aren't that glamorous or aren't that

good for you. Secondly, when I was thinking about this thing of like, is travel burnout even worth talking about considering that there are so many bigger problems, I think minimizing emotions by saying people have it worse or different does nobody any good. We know that, and when you're in the moment, in that moment of like really carrying some big emotions, someone else might have it worse. They probably do, But that doesn't in any way less than

your discomfort. It doesn't change your situation. It can still be subjectively hard. So we are going to move forward with just an acknowledgment that what we're talking about is based on something we are incredibly lucky to be able to do. But there are still hard moments. There are still hard points that impact us psychologically and mentally. So travel, going overseas, going on a going on a vacation, embarking on like this once in a lifetime adventure, seeing different

cultures and environments, new people, new scenery. I think in our day and age, is one of those like quintessential experiences that many of us really want to have in our twenties. For many of us, it's part of that dream, the dream, the idea of the glamor that we perceive this decade as having. You know, it's this time to travel, It's this time to experience the world before life gets too big and too busy and there's children, and there's mortgages,

and there's obligations. Our twenties are quite frankly, I talk about this a lot sold to us as a decade of freedom of adventure, and a core component of that is getting out there, seeing as many places as you can. And I think that comes in a bunch of different forms, a bunch of different versions of this stream, whether that is going on a gap year that's a huge one, studying abroad, or like the Big Trip is what I call it, like six months or more of backpacking, something

of the sort. And I think there's a few main reasons why these kinds of g and adventures have really been romanticized. Firstly, a big part of it comes back to our parents. We think about the stories that they told us of their travels when they are our age, and we want that for ourselves. It looks really amazing, it looks really cool, it looks really identity for me, or if we had parents or families who didn't necessarily have the opportunity to do that. We kind of want

to break that chain. We want to be the one who shows I don't know the world, that we can do it, Like who says that it doesn't matter if my family didn't grow up doing this, like I still have I still have a right to have this experience. We also see a lot of content these days about travel all over social media, friends, influences, celebrities. All of it is incredibly glamorized and it looks amazing, and I

think that's what we want for ourselves. But anytime we base our expectations on someone else's experiences, I think we are unfortunately going to fall short of what we desire. I don't need to tell you that, but a lot of what we see online is far from the full truth. And with the stories that are passed down from parents and friends, they are told from the point of hindsight, and hindsight always makes everything look so much more beautiful.

The stories are always going to be more golden because we only really remember the good things, so what we are basing our expectations on when we go traveling, when we embark on this huge trip of a lifetime or whatever it is that you're planning or doing. We base our expectations on a false narrative at times, and when reality is different, I think we can be really disappointed.

And because it is so romanticized, we have so many expectations, not just in terms of the quality of the trip, that's one part of it, but also the quantity of ex experiences and how much we should be doing. We want to do everything. We want to make sure it's

worth it. It's also because travel is expensive, you know, Like I have this problem where I can never justify rest days when I'm traveling because I've flown so far paid for such an expensive ticket, especially being from Australia, that it would be a waste to not finish every day with like twenty things ticked off my bucket list. But I think the downside of that is twofold we think that this is going to make our trip better.

It can actually have the inverse effect. When you overplan a trip, I think you miss some of the best moments that are like hidden in the times in the place is where you take it easy, like the serendipity of taking a day to just walk the city like a local. One of my favorite days when we were in Curator was honestly when we were just like, we don't want to go to another temple, Like we don't want to stand in another queue of thousands of people,

thousands of tourists. So we just explored. We just wanted We had nowhere to be, we had nowhere to go. We didn't use maps, and we saw the most beautiful, beautiful things. We found the most beautiful restaurants, And I think we would have missed that if we had stuck to the schedule, if we had let ourselves be really, I think held up by the fact that we needed to do all the things that everyone was recommending us.

I think secondly, though, you also exhaust yourself to the point where you cannot even enjoy the experience anymore because you are doing too much and you are mentally drained. And then you feel guilty for not enjoying the experience because you have drained yourself from doing things every day. But that's the paradox, right, because the more you do, the more exhausted you are. The less you want to do, the more guilty you feel, the more you feel you

need to do. Like it's a whole cycle where because we feel so much privilege around being able to travel, because it is such a glamorous experience, because it has sold to us as being this like life defying, like identity forming, incredible experience. Like if we're not getting everything, every possible morsel out of it, we're doing it wrong. And I think right there we have highlighted probably one of the main reasons we experience travel burnout. Quite simply,

you are doing too much for whatever reason. Maybe you only have a short amount of time in each location. Maybe it is that guilt we were speaking about. You're with a big group of people who just want to cram everything in whatever it is. You will hit a mental wall and you'll probably hit a physical and an emotional wall pretty soon afterwards. Here is why that happens. Travel is so different to our daily kind of status quo. In your daily life, you would not be doing as

much as you do whilst you're on holiday. I actually was thinking about this and I was talking about it with a friend. You probably do a maximum of three things you wake up, you have breakfast, you go to work, You come home, maybe you work out, maybe you see friends, you go to bed. That's about five days of a week if you're working full time, right and then on weekends you might do a little bit more, but it's only two days of a week, so you have time

to recover. Then, when we are transported into kind of like our travel versions of ourselves, we are hitting multiple tourist attractions. We are shopping, we are walking twenty thousand steps a day. We are eating new food, meeting new people, people who might not speak the same language as us.

We are learning a new city, a new environment, jumping from this place to that, and then you are jetla like onto that and things go wrong that At home, you would have time to deal with if your wallet got stolen, you got a nasty flu, you would know what to do, You would know what medications to buy, you go to the doctor. You have a safe space your home to come home to unrest, and we don't have that. When we're traveling. Everything is kind of uprooted.

You are like turning the dial of your life from like ninety percent to like one hundred and fifty percent, Like you're just turning it all up. And it's really interesting because one of the only real papers written about travel burnout that is in the world, it explored that exact thing. When we are away from home, our sense of self efficacy is naturally lowered. So self efficacy is this concept in psychology that basically refers to our belief and our ability to solve problems, in our ability to

overcome challenges. If you have high self efficacy, you have a strong belief in your ability to kind of exert control over your behaviors, your choices, your emotions, your environment. You feel mentally capable of dealing with things. And that self efficacy is bolstered by familiarity, by repetition, by practice, by confidence. But when we are away from home and the structure that it provides, that ability to solve problems is lowered once again because everything is so new to us.

And I think that it is that novelty and all those new experiences that also becomes emotionally taxing after a while, each of us has an inbuilt limit around what we can tolerate, how much change we can tolerate, how much novelty, how much activity. It's different for everyone, but everyone has a limit here and after a certain time, maybe it's after three weeks, maybe it's after two months, six months, whatever it is, we are hardwired to crave home and

to crave what we call creature comforts. There's been some really interesting research on this concept of a creature comfort, and basically one article it was written like almost ten years ago. What it explored was this kind of this safety that is provided by home, and it found that humans naturally need a space that is familiar to them.

They are soothed by an environment that feels safe and normal, and at some stage we will want to return to that domestic environment for even a few days, because in that environment there is nothing new, there is nothing scary, there is nothing to be alert to. Everything is comfortable, and some people can suppress that urge, but it's still going to be there. The desire for routine, for familiarity, for security, that is always going to be something that

is kind of contained in our DNA as humans. The call of home is kind of going to get louder. I also found it. I found this quite interesting though, because when I was looking into this, there are some people who sometimes just don't feel that way. As extremely rare as they are if you've ever seen the film Into the Wild, I would greatly recommend great it's amazing. But the main character, Chris, is actually a really good

example of this. Some people I don't know whether they were born, whether they were made to be like almost nomads, they don't need a place to call home, but they are such rare individuals. And I think something I always say, and it doesn't just relate to travel burnout or travel or whatever, is that you can't force yourself into a

version of you that belongs to someone else. So there are people out there who can live a nomadic, crazy like adventurous lifestyle, never needing to have a place to call home, always on the road, And you might like the idea of that, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you are that person. I think that it can still be incredibly lonely, and anybody that you talk to who has been traveling for a long time will tell you that it's not picture perfect, like they will have hard days.

The second reason, though, that travel burnout will eventually hit kind of anyone who is on a long term, long term travel holiday experience is because when we are traveling, our brain is naturally working harder because it is constantly being exposed to so much new stimuli, new smells, new sounds, new scenery, everything in our normal life, we are used to what is around us in our in our everyday routine, and that means that we can use these things called

cognitive shortcuts. So these are basically like automatic ways of thinking that we use to make make decisions. So it makes it so that when you see something and you need to make a decision around it, you're a lot more efficient because you're accustomed to the environment in which you are receiving information. I'll give you an example, So think about your commute home from work. I bet you that if you've done that a few times, like you might be at that point where it doesn't even feel

like you know what's happening in your surroundings. It is so automatic, it is so procedural to you. I was talking to a friend and she was like, sometimes I drive home and I literally get home and could not tell you a single thing I saw on the road. It's because your brain can kind of switch off because it's so used to the environment. Whereas when you are, for example, in a new country and you're trying to drive in a new country or navigate public transport. Your

brain is so switched on because everything is new. We have to use a lot more about mental energy in those situations as well, because we cannot rely on the cognitive shortcuts that we use in our day to day life. We cannot rely on that repetition and procedural memory, you know, that procedural automatic memory. When you are doing that for days on end, constantly being exposed to so many new things,

it is going to be draining. And mental energy is exactly like physical energy in that it can become depleted, and when it becomes depleted, you need time to refill that source. Let's also account at this moment as well for the lack of routine. You are probably not sleeping as much as you do at home. You're not exercising in the same way or as much. You're not eating meals at the same time, you're not even eating the same foods that you normally would. You're not operating on

the same scale that you do as home. So we know that routine reduces stress, it lessons anxiety. Without it, you know, chaos can feel like fun for a while, but you're definitely going to crave that normalcy that we've talked about again and again and again. You're gonna crave things that feel familiar, you know. Honestly, I was so excited to get home and just like eat vegetables and go into the office and like wake up and a

normal time. There was honestly a point when we were in Tokyo where I went to a convenience store and I bought and ate a whole bag of cabbage. I just ate it like on the street, because I was like, I just need to eat something that I'm used to. Didn't mean that I wasn't enjoying all those other experiences, and it's just that I feel like I am like a broken record here. But you do need a sense of stability. No human can operate as nomadic as we

think they can. And often I think we think of our holiday as an escape from the routine, you know, escape from the monotony of daily life. But there are some elements that we shouldn't neglect, especially making time to decompress or do things that you would do at home to bring some sense of stability. And that stability also allows us to return to mental homeostasis, so a mental place of balance of security. One final experience I think is also important to touch on, especially for my long

term travelers out there, my gap year babies. Maybe is homesickness, Like I can't like this is such a huge factor when we talk about travel fatigue, so homesickness. I don't even feel like I need to give you a definition of what this feels like, because if I asked you to close your eyes and think about what homesickness felt like, I think all of us would be having a very similar feeling. It's that longing in your chest. It's what

the Greeks actually called an nostalgic reaction. It comes from a place of love and attachment, the same way that grief does as well. But it also causes a disruption in our present environment if we let it infiltrate too much of our everyday experiences, if we let it take us away from living in the moment whilst we're somewhere new. And there is a lot of research behind why we experience that kind of profound longing for the place where

we belong. Home and belonging and community is really precious. It's like, I think one of the main things that humans need to not just survive, but to thrive. And when we don't have that, and we also have a low perceived control over our environment, when we are constantly being exposed to novel, new things, it can actually manifest

in quite a few physical somatic symptoms. So they see this a lot actually in research with young children at boarding schools who have all of these like ailments and illnesses of an unknown origin, sow stomachs, fatigue, irritability, constant crying, They complain about like aches and pains, and obviously when you have a bunch of children who are suddenly ill and in pain, it's something that you want to look into.

And what they found was that a lot of these kids actually have no most of them have no physical signs of pain or trauma. It's actually their emotions having a physiological impact on our bodies. It is our emotions trying to communicate with us like something is wrong, something is missing, something isn't right. It's almost like a homing beacon, like it's telling us, like go back to what we know. This is causing discomfort because emotionally I'm not feeling stable

and that creates a physical instability as well. So I think those are the major contributing factors to travel burnout. Number one. Obviously, sometimes you're just doing too much and you're going to deplete your physical, mental, emotional resources. Number two is the novelty of these new experiences actually takes a lot more. It is a lot more taxing for our brains because we cannot use those cognitive shortcuts that we normally use at home. And finally, it's homesickness. It's

a craving for what they call our creature comforts. I think that is all fine and good to understand, But a deeper question you probably have if you are listening to this episode is what do I do about it? What can I do? My mom my dream trip, I'm my gap year. I want to go home, but I don't want to go home, like I just feel this need. What is there to do? What is the solution? Well, I want to talk about that and more after this

short break. One of the worst things you can do when I think you're feeling any kind of negative emotion is to shame yourself for it. Obviously, you don't want to be feeling this way. If you had a choice about it, you would not be, do you know what

I mean? Like, I feel like something that I find quite frustrating is when people shame other people for an emotion that they actually don't have control over, where if they had the solution, if they had the antidote, they would gladly take it, They would gladly move on from this feeling. And I think travel burnout is one of those feelings where we feel a lot of anger at ourselves almost for not enjoying our trip. But I don't

want that to ruin it for you. I think that whilst you can't control the physical, mental emotional reaction you're having, you can control your response to it. And I think it is a mindset that you can get out of, that you can recover from. But it is going to take like some actual steps. It is going to take you actually suppressing what your guilt is telling you to do by doing the things that are actually going to

help you. I think if we sit too much in the feeling of like keep trying to keep pushing, trying to push through exhaustion to a point of like I don't know, catharsis, or like to a point of like greater mental clarity, like it's actually not going to work. When I was going through this, I actually talked to

quite a few friends who are very seasoned travelers. The kind of psychological research on this is pretty sparse, it's kind of non existent, actually, So I'm going off of a lot of anecdotal and observational evidence about like the main things that you should do to get yourself out of this, like travel fatigue, travel rut. The first one every single person said to me was to take a fricking rest day. I know it sounds so obvious, but

just let yourself be. You don't have to be a verb all the time, you don't have to be doing things all the time. You can just relax. That's part of the experience. Like I think every single one of us goes into like a holiday or goes into like a vacation or whatever, like with wanting to get something different out of it. None we cannot get any of the things we want to get out of it if we don't actually give ourself time to process the things that we're getting out of it. Do you know what

I mean? Like you could have had the most profound life changing experience yesterday, but if you are forcing yourself to like continue doing new things and like pushing yourself and pushing yourself, like that experience isn't going to get the time it deserves to actually like consolidate and to actually like be processed. Slowing down I think can bring just as much joys as trying to overplan and speed

up and seeing everything. It is in those slow moments that I think the most beautiful things happen, the same way that beautiful things happen in our daily lives when we are peaceful, when we are just taking things easy. Like I really can attest to this fact that you are not going to have a life changing experience when you're going to like the top ten tourist destinations of

the places you are traveling to. Maybe if you're like, I don't know, going to see like an amazing cathedral and you're like like a spiritual awakening, maybe, But I would say most of the time, if you are trying so hard to jump from one thing to the next, you actually don't have time to really appreciate what you're seeing,

what you're feeling, what you're sensing. So as well as taking a rest day firstly and actually planning them, someone said this to me, like often we like make itineraries and we never ever like in our itineraries put a rest day in there when it's really important, so obviously do that. Don't have a plan, and get out of the tourist areas as well. Those bright lights, those huge crowds.

That is stimulus overload, that is information overload. Our senses are just totally bombarded with so much content that our brains just cannot manage. It cannot shift through it all. It's honestly like mentally dizzying. So if you're already feeling the effects of a bit of fatigue, one of the best things to do is to instead of going to all the hot spots, instead of ticking things off like the list, to be like, oh yeah, I went to New York and I did this. Of course I saw

the Rockefeller Center. Of course I saw the Statue of Liberty. Like everyone is doing those things. Try and just like explore your neighborhood a little bit more and take some time to actually get into nature. This is a big one that I learned when I was traveling. If you have listened to our episode on the Healing Power of Nature, you will also be well informed that spending time outdoors

is a natural anxiety reliever. We are consistently seeing find out of like the ecopsychology field, that exposure to natural spaces for just fifteen twenty minutes a day really improves so much about your mood. So if you're at a point of like exhaustion and you need like a mood booster, yes, rest day is great, and nature day is also amazing.

And intentional nature exposure like actually spending a good solid time at the beach in a park somewhere beautiful, just with your thoughts, not needing to do anything, not needing to go anywhere. I think those moments creates such deep mindfulness.

It's like a natural meditation. It's an easy meditation to just like kind of like the like kind of like the charm and the beauty of like a natural environment just wash over you, like all of your warriores and your thoughts and your fatigue kind of like float away with the wind. I think that's really important. The next thing I would say to do, I would say, this is a good from other people that I'm just like

absorbing and used and regurgitating. But create some routine, have like the same wake up time, try and eat like the same breakfast. It will recreate some of the comfort and the familiarity of home. Make sure that you call friends. It's easy to feel like when you're traveling you're in like a little bit of like a holiday bubble. I find this a lot as well, where I'm like, ah, my friends are probably busy, they're out doing other things,

Like I don't want to bother them. It feels like we're living in two different worlds at the moment, Like I'm on my holiday, they're at home, they're on their holiday. Those kinds of things. Actually, you shouldn't go that long without seeking familiar reconnection, whether that's with family or friends, like calling someone who you can actually just be a

little bit uninhibited with. Obviously, like when you're traveling, especially if you're doing hostels, you might be meeting a lot of new people, but a lot of those people you don't have a deep connection with. They don't know you as well someone who's known you for a long time. So make sure that you continue to prioritize those relationships. I think it will also prevent you from feeling like poemo.

Sometimes that's a huge part of why we're like, oh my god, I want to go home, is because I feel so disconnected from everyone, and I feel like I'm not getting anything out of this experience anymore. So I may as well be able to make experiences with these people. We can avoid that by not letting those relationships suffer while we're traveling. And I also think that journaling, I know,

it's like such a cliche. We're all about mindfulness here, you know, like we're really What we're really trying to do here is when you're addressing your travel burnout, is to get you out of your your body, get you out of your mind, and to like a more clear place, a place of like mental clarity where you can really process your emotions without feeling guilty, without feeling overwhelmed, without feeling like you need to make some like drastic decision.

And I think embracing like the small moments of your trip that might not be like completely stand out and like life changing, but still are really beautiful is really good. So I would say by journal, if you hopefully you've already brought one with you, if you're a loyal listener, hopefully you have your journal or your like notebook handy, But ask yourself some of these questions, what did you do today that was memorable? What is something that you

did today that you wouldn't have done at home. What is part of my day that is a story I will tell in the future. Who did I meet and what were the kind of stories they were telling me? What was something in my day that just like made me smile that spark joy? I think, take yourself out of this big need and expectation that every day of your trip needs to be a huge, upending, entirely transformative experience.

You can still find joy in small moments. You can still find joy whilst resting, while stepping away from the schedule, whilst not going to tourist locations. Like, there is so much beauty just in things that are different, even if they're not like incredibly profound. So take a step back, let yourself rest, and don't feel guilty because you're not

enjoying every single moment, you know what I mean? Like, the guilt is what keeps us in our fatigue, in our negative emotions, because we don't feel like we can address the problem enough to actually do something about it. We feel so shameful about what we're feeling that we don't actually verbalize it or bring it to the surface and examine it and kind of peel it back and open it up and see what we can do about it.

I will say one more thing. I obviously on my trip, I left early and I was like talking to my boyfriend about it, and I remember being like we were in this hotel room and I looked to him and I was like, I need to talk to you about something, and he was like yes, and I was like, I need to leave, Like I was in tears. I was like, I just really need to leave at this point, like this is the best solution for me. Like honestly, it

wasn't even that we were leaving like right then. We stayed like for another two and a half weeks, almost like two weeks. It was just like I can tell that I'm already so tired now by the time we finished this trip, I'm going to be absolutely miserable. And I don't want to look back at this experience and not want to come back to this country. I don't want to project the fact that I am tired or anything to do with where we are, anything to do with this experience, like anything to do with you. I

just realized. I was like, I've made a mistake. I've pushed myself too hard, and I don't I have this saying where it's like you can either waste your money or you can waste your money and your time. And so like a big part of me was like, I've already paid for this ticket, Like, oh, I've already taken all this time off, like all these things. I was so stressed about it. It was making me even more exhausted.

And I just stopped and I paused, and I was like, yes, but I also will be wasting my time if I stay here longer, if I stay for this final week, I'm not going to enjoy it. I'm going to just push myself maybe to a place that's going to be harder to recover from. So if you need to leave early, you're allowed to leave early. Maybe you've already gotten what you need out of this experience. It doesn't make you a coward, it doesn't make you ungrateful. You're just doing

what is best for you. And I think it was so strange, but I was so worried that of other people's opinions of me. But everyone who I talked to about this was like, oh, I totally get that. Like when you said you were traveling for two months, I was like, how is she going to go, Like, I just think that no one really, no one thinks as harshly about your decisions as you do. So do what

is best for you. But also take some time if you're feeling like really in the midst of it right now, to just chill out, just like take a rest day, find some small moments of joy, get away from the tourist areas. If you're in like a hostel, book like a nice hotel for a night, if you can afford it,

it will make all the difference. And like put on your headphones and go for a walk, like just try and break out of like this space of negativity, break out of this space of like guilt or of just like fatigue and feeling like you need to find the solution right now. Like it's okay, it's okay. If your trip is like not going amazing, it's okay if like it isn't meeting your expectations, like you're still doing the thing.

And in hindsight, I promise you, like the experience will be important and we'll teach you something and we'll give you something that you will take forward in your life. So I really hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you got something out of it. I feel like it was a lot more anecdotal. I just wanted to share my experience from you know what I've been doing travelers gamar so much in our twenties, but I feel like we never talk about the other side of it.

We never talk about how it's not always picture perfect. So hopefully this kind of pulled the veil back a little bit, revealed more of the behind the facade of the picture perfect twenties that all of us expect. As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to share it with someone who might enjoy it as well. Make sure that you give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening. It really helps the show to grow and meet me and meet reach

new people. And if you have an episode suggestion or you have feedback, you have thoughts on this episode, you disagree with anything, please follow me at that Psychology podcast and shoot me a DM. We would love to hear from you. We will be back later this week with another episode.