Okay maybe not to still take that trip around the world, but a weekend getaway would be nice. The fear of traveling can have been pretty ingrained by all sorts of events in the news. Safety and travel are therefore a topic that can be a reason for many people to stay home after all. However, this can cause you to miss out on all kinds of fun things. There are even people who do not travel with their families because they are afraid to travel. Very unfortunate, because it is precisely during those vacations that you can have great moments with your children.
So read what you can do to reduce anxiety about traveling in this blog.
Fear of travel can be due to all sorts of components of the journey. Therefore, I'll go into a little more detail about some of these components.
Fear of forgetting something
Forgetting something is very annoying when you are traveling. Of course you pay triple attention to your driver's license, debit card and passport, but besides that, you can forget so many other items that you think are important. If you don't have that one item with you, it's just a disaster.
For example, there is Mischa who was once on a road trip with friends. Somewhere near Frankfurt, panic struck. He had forgotten his swimming trunks. How was this supposed to go on that sunny vacation? He would totally be the loser lying by the pool in his unzipped shorts instead of in his awesome swimming trunks with summer flowers.
Only after friends promised that they had everything to buy there, too, and that they would shop on the first day instead of boozing and swimming was he calmed down enough to continue the trip and not reach for the wheel hysterically.
The fear of forgetting something important is unreal in many places around the world. Almost everywhere you have McDonalds, almost everywhere you have the H&M and similar stores. What you can buy here, you can very likely buy at your destination.
Is this not enough to stop the fear of forgetting something while traveling? Then a hypnotherapist can help you reduce that fear. For example, by changing your beliefs about the usefulness of your own belongings on vacation.
Fear of misunderstanding
Once you're in other parts of the country, and even more so in other parts of the world, you may suffer from misunderstandings. Have you ever heard a Groninger talking to a Limburger?
I think the best example is the conversation I once heard from a girl from Twente with an Amsterdam man. He asked "how do you get to school?" Instead of answering "by bike," she started talking about ladders. This misunderstanding took as many as 5 other versions of the question before the click was made with transportation.
These misunderstandings can create irritations, which in turn can scare you. What if that car you were going to rent isn't ready? What if you end up I a small unsafe car instead of a big safe one as reserved?
What if you accidentally offend someone?
This is another fear you generally don't have to worry about. When you are in another country, people are often happy if you make an attempt to speak something in their language. If they notice that you really don't know the language, they will often use another more familiar language such as English and even then people can still help you with hands and feet.
Once when I wanted directions in France, a woman marked out the route for me because my French just wasn't adequate.
Doesn't this help with this anxiety? Even then, a hypnotherapist can help you see where this fear originated. This can be done, for example, with regression. This allows you to go back to an event in your memory that triggered this fear.
Fear of breakdown on the road
The fear of breakdown on the road is actually a fear that builds on the fear of misunderstanding. Breaking down on the road is never fun, especially when you are hundreds or thousands of miles from home.
Even if you are with the ANWB, it still remains a lot of hassle.
For example, such an incident on the road can cause a lot of anxiety if you value your schedule and find it difficult to be flexible. For example, you have a certain hotel check-in time that you must meet?
Even then, the fear is often unreal.
You can often call a hotel and explain what happened. Then there is often very much to be arranged.
The fear of breaking down on the road can also be a form of driving anxiety. A hypnotherapist can help you get rid of driving anxiety and even the fear of breaking down on the road.
This can be done, for example, with a visualization on how to deal with breakdowns on the road. For example, do you have a blowout? Then the guided visualization will show you how to stay calm and steer the car to the side of the road. How you prepare the triangle and, when the road is calm, you remove the pieces of tire from the road so people are not bothered by it. Then it turns out that you can just easily put the spare tire on the rim. You drive quietly to your destination and make sure the front desk helps you get a new tire.
Encouraging this imaginative ability will make you believe yourself more capable of coping well with bad luck on the road.
After all, life is not always predictable, and how you live often depends more on your reactions to those unpredictable situations.
Fear of breakdown in the air
Another fear you may have is the fear of bad luck in the air. Fear of flying is something many people suffer from. This fear is not entirely incomprehensible. After all, you are in some kind of steel bird at 10 kilometers in the air.
However, if you are not afraid to walk outside, the fear is suddenly a lot more unreal. After all, the chances of dying while walking along the road or driving to the airport are much higher than during the flight itself.
A hypnotherapist can help you overcome fear of flying.
In the process, you get calming techniques that help you stay calm on the plane until you arrive at your destination. Breathing exercises and muscle relaxation exercises, such as a mindfulness body scan, can already be incredibly helpful.
Fear of missing home
Homesickness is another reason why you may have a fear of traveling. I even know the story of Pieter who lives in a village where he has not been out his whole life. When he goes away from home he gets "weird." He suffers from panic and just wants to go back to his familiar surroundings.
The fear of this form of homesickness can also make you not want to travel. It is not the trip itself that you fear, but the fear that once you arrive you actually want to go home again immediately.
Why you have such a fear of missing home can have many different causes. To figure out that cause of anxiety, a hypnotherapist can help with a socratic conversation. In these conversations, the "why" question is repeated several times. In this way, you get to the deepest beliefs you have about travel and perhaps even about how the world works.
By figuring out these beliefs, it is possible to change them, reducing the fear of missing home.
Fear of travel
So the fear of travel can have all sorts of subcomponents, such as the fear of the journey, the fear of the destination, the fear of the people you meet along the way, the fear of breakdowns and the fear of just missing your home.
For all of these fears, a hypnotherapist can help you with multiple techniques.
- Regression is a technique for tracing past events that have shaped you into who you are today and looking at them with more emotional distance.
- Hypnotic suggestions help you "install" new beliefs in your subconscious that will help you better cope with your anxiety.
- Visualizing a situation makes you feel more confident that you can handle the situation in real life.
- Relaxation techniques, such as meditation, help you minimize the impact of anxiety on the body, making anxiety less likely to take over.
- Socratic conversations help you uncover deep beliefs that may be behind the fear that don't even have to have much to do with it. Then you can do something with that in turn with the hypnotherapist.
Finally, I would like to point out that you can also confront fear. This can be done, for example, by making a list of anxious situations and less anxious situations related to travel. Then you can confront yourself with this until you actually go on the trip.
Want to learn more about hypnosis and exactly how it works? Then stop by a playshop or take a training course at the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands.
