Luke Pigott Breaks Down How to Manage Travel Anxiety Before and During a Trip

Luke Pigott, a Licensed Professional Counselor and Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor in Naperville, Illinois, treats anxiety in children, adolescents, and adults through practical, evidence-based mental health care, and he travels often himself.

The approaches below come from methods he uses in his practice, including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). The aim isn't to make anxiety disappear but to stop anxiety from deciding whether you travel and how much you get out of it.

Why Travel Triggers Anxiety

Travel brings together almost every condition that turns anxiety up. Schedules, weather, and transportation are all uncertain. You give up control because pilots, gate agents, and traffic set the pace. Crowds, noise, and time pressure pile on top of that, along with the sudden loss of routines that quietly keep many people steady, like regular sleep, familiar meals, and a predictable day.

Anxiety usually comes in two phases as well. First there's anticipatory worry, the mental rehearsal of everything that could go wrong in the days and weeks before you leave. Then there's in-the-moment stress, which can mean a pounding heart at security or tightness in a packed train station. Each phase responds to different tools, so it's worth planning for both.

Before the Trip: Planning That Lowers the Pressure

Preparing well cuts down on the open questions your mind can latch onto, and a few habits go a long way.

Make decisions early. Book seats, confirm reservations, and plan how you'll get from the airport to your accommodation well before departure. Every detail you settle is one fewer thing to replay at 2 a.m.

Build in margin. Tight connections and crammed itineraries leave no room for ordinary delays. Getting to the airport with time to spare, or keeping one afternoon open partway through the trip, gives your nervous system room to recover.

Write down a short contingency plan. Pick the two or three problems that worry you most and jot down one practical response to each: if a flight gets canceled, you'll call the airline and rebook, and if you lose your phone, you'll have a printed copy of key addresses and numbers. Seeing the plan on paper often quiets the urge to keep running through it in your head.

Aim for a realistic plan, not a perfect one. Overplanning can turn into anxiety of its own. If preparing starts to feel like checking and rechecking with no relief, stop there and accept that every trip carries some uncertainty.

How Luke Pigott Uses CBT to Address Anticipatory Worry

Cognitive behavioral therapy is built on the idea that how we interpret a situation shapes how we feel about it. Anxious thinking follows predictable tracks, and learning to spot them is one of the most useful skills a traveler can practice.

In his private practice, Luke Pigott uses CBT alongside other modalities, and its basic steps translate well to travel.

Catch the thought. When a wave of dread hits, stop and name the specific thought underneath it. "I'm going to miss my connection and be stuck overnight" is easier to work with than a general sense of doom.

Look at the evidence. Ask how likely that outcome is and what happened the last time you were in a similar spot. Most connections get made, and when they don't, airlines routinely rebook passengers.

Consider the realistic worst case. Anxiety tends to jump straight to disaster. If you walk through, step by step, what you'd actually do if the feared thing happened, you'll usually find it would be inconvenient and annoying but manageable.

Write a balanced replacement thought. A line like "Delays happen, and if mine is delayed, I know how to rebook, and I have time built in" isn't forced cheerfulness. It describes the situation more accurately, and accuracy tends to calm people down.

At the Airport and in Transit: Grounding Skills

Some of the most anxious moments happen in places you can't leave, like a security line, a boarding gate, or a full flight. Grounding and mindfulness skills help because you can do them quietly, anywhere, without anyone noticing.

Slow your exhale. For a few minutes, breathe in for a count of four and out for six or eight to help calm the body's stress response. The longer out-breath matters most.

Use the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise. Notice five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. Turning your attention to your senses pulls you away from anxious predictions and back to the present.

Anchor to something physical. Press your feet into the floor, hold a warm cup, or notice the texture of a bag strap so your mind has something steady to hold on to.

Label what is happening. Telling yourself quietly, "This is anxiety, and it will pass," puts a bit of distance between you and the feeling and reminds you that it's uncomfortable but not dangerous.

These skills work best when they're familiar, so practicing them at home makes them easier to reach for under pressure.

During the Trip: Making Room for Discomfort

Acceptance and commitment therapy approaches the problem from another angle. Instead of arguing with anxiety, ACT asks people to make room for uncomfortable feelings and keep doing what matters to them. For a traveler, that could mean noticing nerves about finding your way around a new city and still going out to explore, since you came to see the place.

One useful question is, "If anxiety weren't making this decision, what would I do?" The answer won't always be the bold option, and it doesn't have to be. Sometimes a quiet morning is the right call. What you value should set the agenda, not your fear.

It also helps to lower the bar for a good day. A trip can be worthwhile without being perfect, and skipping one attraction is part of the experience.

Protecting Your Routine Away From Home

Because travel disrupts routine more than almost anything else, keeping a few anchors in place can make a real difference.

• Protect sleep where you can. Try to keep a consistent bedtime, and give yourself time to adjust after long flights or time zone changes.
• Eat regularly. Hunger and low energy can feel a lot like anxiety, and skipped meals tend to make stress harder to manage.
• Keep a small daily ritual. A short walk, a few minutes of journaling, or a morning stretch can give each day a familiar starting point.
• Be thoughtful about alcohol and caffeine. Both are common on vacation, and both can affect sleep and heighten physical symptoms of anxiety. Using alcohol to calm travel nerves can backfire, since anxiety often returns stronger once the effect wears off. As a Certified Alcohol and Drug Counselor, Luke Pigott works with clients on exactly this kind of cycle between anxiety and substance use.

When Travel Anxiety Needs More Support

Feeling nervous before a trip is common, and for most people the strategies above are enough to make travel easier. But anxiety deserves closer attention once it starts shrinking your life, whether that means turning down trips you'd like to take, losing days or weeks to worry beforehand, or having panic symptoms in transit that leave you dreading the next trip.

Those patterns respond to treatment. A licensed counselor can help pin down what's driving the anxiety, build skills suited to your situation, and practice them in a structured way.

Luke Pigott's own approach combines listening without judgment with clear accountability, based on the idea that people make lasting change when they're heard first and then held to the change they say they want. For travel, that change could be as simple as getting on the plane, including the worry, and letting the trip happen.