Why You Can't Relax Until the Trip Is Already Over

[0:00] Picture the best possible version of a trip. Somewhere you've wanted to go for years with perfect weather and living your best life. And somewhere in the middle of all that, part of your brain begins to drift away from the present. You're thinking about an email that you

[0:17] You try to bring your mind back to where you are in the present and you may succeed, but most of the time it keeps spiraling into other places. Vacation and travel are traditionally marketed as the way we find relaxation, but you don't actually relax on that trip until it's over. Not while you're actually there.

[0:42] I'm saying these with a question mark at the end because we're going to jump into why later in this. But the real relaxation happens once you've returned home and you've begun to resolve those outstanding items in your mind that you drifted towards while you were abroad, and when you're looking back

[0:59] through your photos in your camera roll, telling someone else about it, that the relaxation in the trip actually lands. And that's a strange way for something to work. Feeling backwards from what we've been told about vacation, and there's real research on exactly why this happens and it has almost nothing to do with the destination itself.

[1:21] I'm Kiara and this is Put the Guidebook Down. We plan trips assuming the good part is basically guaranteed the moment we physically arrive somewhere nice in our final destination. Book the right place, get yourself there, and enjoyment follows automatically. Like, it's the setting's job to produce it. Although,

[1:40] if you watched my episode of Your Trip Started Before You Left, then you know that there are a lot more elements to the trip than actually being on vacation. Except plenty of people come home from genuinely beautiful trips and describe the whole thing with some version of, it didn't really hit me until I got back.

[1:58] Which is a strange thing to say about an experience you were by... every measure physically present for. You were there. Something about actually being there just wasn't where your attention was. There's a specific, well-documented reason your mind checks out of an experience it's supposedly having,

[2:16] and it turns out to have nothing to do with whether the experience is good or bad. To be clear, we're not talking about the whole I need a vacation from my vacation feeling in this episode. That has some relation to the frameworks we will be covering,

[2:30] but it is something else entirely that we will not talk about today and we'll revisit in a later episode. When it comes to travel, we're always talking about the wandering soul, the wandering spirit, just being a wanderer. We don't really talk about the wandering mind of travel and why presence isn't automatic. In 2010,

[2:50] psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert built a smartphone app that pinged thousands of people at random points during their actual days and asked two questions. What are you doing right now? And what are you actually thinking about? Now to some of you who have listened to some of my other recent episodes,

[3:09] you might be like, that sounds familiar. Isn't this the same study? Okay, yes. Killingsworth is also behind the anticipation research from a few episodes back. And yes, both studies work by pinging people throughout their actual day. But this is a different study about asking a different question entirely.

[3:29] Across a quarter million responses, people reported that their minds were wandering, thinking about something other than their current activity, 47% of the time. Not just during boring tasks, okay? This is across almost every activity they measured, including the ones people rated as most enjoyable, such as being with friends or family, traveling, doing their hobbies.

[3:52] Now here's the part that matters most for travel specifically. The researchers didn't just find the mind-wandering and unhappiness show up together. They found the order. Mind wandering came first and lower mood followed more consistently than the other way around. People weren't wandering because they were unhappy. They were getting less happy because their mind had wandered.

[4:18] Which means that view, the one you traveled a long way to actually stand in front of, is competing with whatever your mind wanders to by default. Logistics, a nagging email, tomorrow's schedule, and it's not a fair fight. Mind wandering doesn't announce itself as a distraction. It just quietly takes over and the view loses more often than you think,

[4:41] without you even registering the loss in the moment. This happens to me all the time because I'm a huge multitasker, for those who know me. And I'm one of those people whose brain is always just running and thinking of the next thing,

[4:54] no matter how hard I try to just keep it on the one thought in front of me. It's something that I've challenged myself to improve on when it comes to travel by being more in the mode. Putting my tech away has helped, but meditation practice has helped me bring my focus and intention back to

[5:12] where I am and what I'm doing. However, the biggest personal example of this experience was when I was budget traveling and backpacking. Which has a lot of great fun things that come with it, but the downside is the worries over logistics and making sure not to miss your train and the next city.

[5:51] Those types of thoughts just began to consume my experiences during those types of trips and then started making the spiral of thinking towards what's next, what I'm going to be doing in X city, what am I doing tomorrow, rather than being present. It brought more stress to the moment when I was supposed to be feeling relaxed

[6:12] and enjoying my vacation, which is exactly what this framework is referencing today. And as mentioned earlier, kind of contributes to that whole I need a vacation from my vacation feeling. But we're still not covering it in this episode. So now you may be wondering, what can I do to resolve this?

[6:29] How do I actually bring myself into the present moment and to actually be appreciative of where I am and to not have that missed vacation feeling or relief of coming back home at the end because your vacation was so stressful? Don't worry, I got you.

[6:47] So if the problem is a wandering mind pulling you out of an experience, the obvious fix sounds like, try harder to be present, which is the kind of advice that's true, but also entirely useless since telling your mind not to wander. So there's a better answer, and it comes from a 2008 study by psychologist Jaime Kurtz.

[7:11] She had college students, twice a week for two weeks, write about their day-to-day college life, but split them into two groups. One group was prompted to think about graduation as something far off, still a long ways away. The other group was prompted to think about it as close, right around the corner, ending soon.

[7:30] The group primed to feel that their time was almost up at college reported doing more of the things they actually valued about college and their college experience and rated their day-to-day satisfaction with it higher in real time while they were still living it, versus those who thought they had all this additional time in front of them

[7:49] to have those moments. The mechanism is often called temporal scarcity and the logic transfers directly to a trick. You don't fix the wandering mind by fighting it. You fix it by making the present moment harder to ignore, and one of the more reliable ways to do that according to this research is

[8:07] to actually let yourself register that the moment is finite. Because it feels like it'll make you sad. Being like, oh no, my trip is gonna end. Like naming that this specific afternoon on this trip ends in a few hours is one of

[8:23] the things that makes you have more, I need to be in the moment, because of that as a result, and is one of the few things shown to actually pull attention back into the room instead of out of it. Those people had more appreciation for the experience and easier time to recall

[8:40] in a later memory, we're more relaxed when returning back from their trip. I had mentioned in the earlier example that I'd begun meditation to help bring focus and intention, but this is more for my day-to-day, which then as a result showed up in my travel a little bit. But when it comes to travel,

[8:56] this is the approach that I began to adopt with my recent trip to Greece. I tried to keep my attention at bay by reminding myself that I was only spending this allotted amount of time in this location of Greece and therefore I need to be more grateful and, for example,

[9:12] I was watching the sunset at the Temple of Poseidon one day. I had started the day on a day trip tour that made several stops along the way and the Temple of Poseidon was my last stop for me on that day trip and also my last day in Athens before heading to Crete.

[9:30] And it's like a big thing to go up to the Temple of Poseidon for foreigners and to watch the sunset, and I was super excited for this whole experience, but once I was there I kept catching myself several times from the moment we began walking from the buses up the hill to standing and waiting for

[9:49] the sunset, thinking about my flight the next day. How I was going to get to my accommodation once I landed in Crete and what I was going to do that first day I was there. Needless to say I had a very big wandering mind and that began taking away

[10:03] from my moment in the present and watching the sunset. I was actually frustrated. To bring myself back to the present moment, I would remind myself of the finite time a sunset has being a sunset and my time in the Temple of Poseidon.

[10:13] And actually, what I added was a further layer of this to do some observational grounding and so it's kind of like a different technique, but it's helped me bring more appreciation to where I was. So when I say observational grounding, I was noticing the way the sun hit the surface of the water, creating a twinkling glow,

[10:49] or watching families and couples around me share the moment together. Making an active effort to read the inscriptions on the side of the pillars and find the famous names of past visitors. The art of noticing helped me alleviate my wandering mind and to bring me back to the present.

[11:06] But you have to find what works best for you. So the mind wandering isn't a verdict on the trip at all and what you had for an itinerary. It's just what minds do, regardless of the view. And the one lever shown to actually pull it back isn't trying harder to focus.

[11:23] It's noticing the clock on purpose while there's still time left on it, then finding what technique works best for you. But if you haven't watched one of my older episodes on the art of noticing and observation, I'm telling you, this really works and helps you have better recall at the end of the trip.

[11:40] I'll be honest about where this actually lands for me. If presence has to be manufactured on purpose using a trick about scarcity, that's a strange thing to accept about experiences we spend real money on and real vacation days trying to have. We assume that the moment does the work on its own. Like getting there,

[11:59] it's a magical moment to be in a different location, whether it's abroad or domestic, and therefore we're just going to be relaxed automatically. But apparently the moment needs help. So I don't think that this wandering mind is actually bad news when you sit with it. It means the disconnect people feel,

[12:17] the it-didn't-hit-until-I-got-home thing, was never about picking the wrong trip or not being grateful enough or any of the other explanations people usually blame themselves for. It's just what a wandering mind does on vacation, exactly like it does at your kitchen table, at the office, with your friends.

[12:38] The fix isn't a better destination. It's a five-second habit you can actually use on the trip, in your day-to-day, and not just hoping that the next one is going to be better. It's just something that you need to take the time to practice with your mind and learn to incorporate in your own travels.

[12:56] So try this on your next trip. Or honestly, this afternoon if you got nothing else going on. Somewhere in the middle of it, stop. And actually say to yourself, out loud or in your mind, that this specific moment ends soon. Not to make yourself sad about it. To make it harder for your mind to leave the room.

[13:14] You might actually get to enjoy the trip or whatever you're doing while you're still in it, instead of a few weeks later when you're scrolling through your camera roll. That's more appreciation. That's better memory recall and a better experience overall. I'm Kiara. This is Put the Guidebook Down. Guidebooks tell you where to go.

[13:32] We're here for why you went. I'll see you on the next one. Bye.