Mental Gymnastics: Managing Travel Stress
Summer! It’s travel season, especially for families with school-aged children. Historically, my boys and I have stayed home over summer break preferring to travel during the winter months to escape the cold Wisconsin weather. We’ve enjoyed our summer stay-cations filled with nature walks, local swimming pools, visits to the library, cook-outs and campfires. Usually it’s a slow and easy pace to our summer break. But NOT this year! This year we have three, one-week adventures planned. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I agreed to and committed to this summer schedule, and as you can imagine, this shift in summer plans is causing multiple planning, communication and scheduling complications. Is it any wonder that it can feel as though I am losing my mind!?
Usually, I get to feeling this way when I obsess on the details of life and each of our schedules, such as tutoring, driver’s ed, music lessons, deadlines for work, garbage day, meals and groceries. Naturally, obsessing on details can be helpful when creating a plan. It’s necessary to consider life’s details when setting tutor and music lesson schedules, meal planning, knowing when garbage can be taken out and communicating these details to all parties involved. In fact, for me, having a plan in place to keep our normal activities in place between travel weeks is comforting to me. I often notice my mind wandering off toward a detail here and a detail there, as if it’s checking to make sure my world is safe. When a plan is in place, my mind can rest easy.
But what about when, which inevitably it does, disaster strikes and details get forgotten, and music lessons get missed, calls get forgotten and the garbage piles up from weeks of just not remembering to get it to the curb?! Although no, it isn't a disaster for “real”, it sure can seem like it in the moment, when the mind is sent racing through all the reasons why this shouldn’t have happened, and how could I have been so stupid to have forgotten and now how am I going to fix it. The mind is a funny thing, at least mine is. One minute it’s resting easy and the next it’s trying to tell me my plan wasn’t good enough in the first place!
It’s times like these that I’m grateful for the enormous amounts of reading I’ve done to help me manage my mind. Over the years and through the books, I’ve learned that if I allow myself to feel the frustration, anger and inconvenience of forgetting, I can more easily and more quickly come back to noticing that a disaster is not happening and most things are okay. Yeah, it’s annoying to make additional calls, watch the garbage pile up, and push out a work deadline, but it’s certainly not a disaster and being angry for an extended period of time isn’t helpful either. I know working through the mental gymnastics of the additional stress that travel can have on my life is not always fun, but the rewards of traveling peacefully and the adventures with my boys sure is!
What are some of your travel challenges and how do you work through them?
Love,
Sara