Tackling travel anxiety...slowly

This sloth lives in Bocas del Toro, Panama. Chickening out of our holiday plans cost me the chance to see them in person, and now it's cost me £3 to buy their handsome portrait too

We’re going on holiday again this week, but we won’t be going to the place we’d originally planned.

No Panama for us: no sloths, no red frogs, and no first chance to sample how Central America does vegetarian food.

Panama, as with all our best ideas, was a Liz suggestion. She’d put together a typically detailed plan for where we could go and what we’d do while we were there – helped more than a little by the fact she’d been to Bocas del Toro several years ago and knew a few things we’d like to do together already.

As always, she’d had my interests in mind: wanting me to share in enjoying a part of the world she’d loved visiting before, knowing how much I’d enjoy seeing animals, bugs and tropical forests that I’d never experienced, and knowing we could both use a more relaxing holiday.

Panama’s also one of the safer parts of Central America to visit, so it makes sense as a first destination for an anxious traveller. It’s a wealthy country with good infrastructure, lower rates of crime than some of its near neighbours, and the risk of picking up any bugs while travelling are low once you’ve had all the necessary vaccines.

And yet, I couldn’t go through with it when the time came to book our flights and hotels.

Why? Well, I’m not proud to say that after far too many hours on Google reading about increased levels of petty crime in Bocas del Toro, the need to take a small aeroplane to reach the islands, and a general sense of fear of stepping into the unknown, I felt too anxious about the whole idea to be able to go ahead with it. Why I felt so worried in the end is something I’m still reflecting on and is probably a topic I’ll revisit in another post soon enough.

For now, in a more settled state of mind, I’ll say that I know that the worries I had are overblown. The odds of being the victim of petty crime would still have been very low, all things properly considered, and while losing belongings abroad is more of a hassle than losing them at home, it still wouldn’t be a disaster. Panama’s flight safety record is pretty good, a couple of non-fatal incidents in recent years aside – which a more level-headed person might say shows that even when things go a bit wrong, they very rarely end in a worst-case scenario.

But as anyone who’s lived with anxiety – or related conditions, like OCD – would be able to tell you, it’s sort of irrelevant how rational the worries are. And while it’s a good idea, I think, to do more things that your inner voice is telling you that you can’t do – to develop a bit more resilience against the intrusive and repetitive thoughts that hold us back from doing the things we want to do – there’s a benefit to pushing yourself at the right pace and at the right time. And I’ll try to forgive myself for whatever feelings and ignorance caused me to bottle the Panama planning.

That’s the first point of this blog. Don’t berate yourself for feeling anxious and for being kind to yourself when you do.

The second point is to share how I’m going to try to push myself to tackle the specific travel-related anxiety that led to this experience. There were three main things holding me back from going to Panama with Liz this time: concerns about personal safety, concerns about flying on a smaller plane, and a general fear of visiting a totally new part of the world. I didn’t feel able to tackle all three at once, so I’ll tackle one or two at a time.

Liz and I are making plans to visit part of Costa Rica instead – where I’ll still be visiting a new continent for the first time, but in a place that’s easily reached by bus from the main international airport. To those keen to point out that road travel is much more risky than flying: I assure you that I already know, but that doesn’t matter until I can persuade the voice in the back of my mind that it’s true too.

We’ll stay somewhere that’s generally safe – just like most parts of Panama – except this time I’ll stay away from Googling individual reports of petty thefts too. I’m tired of hearing of people not visiting my home city through wildly overstated reports of a London crimewave, so it’s incumbent on me not to miss out on experiencing someone else’s hometown because I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole reading similar stories from there instead.

And, I imagine, I’ll have an amazing time in Costa Rica. I’ll have pushed past a mental block or two, and I’ll only have one new mental hurdle to clear the next time Liz suggests a Panama trip.

In the meantime, we’ll have a relaxing few days exploring the cities and villages in the South of France and staying in the Alps for the first time. If you’ve got any tips for our trip or questions about this blog, we’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading.