How to manage travel anxiety
Tips from a professional security and risk consultant.
If you’re required to travel to less developed or higher-risk countries for work, you’ve probably found yourself in numerous situations where you felt well out of your depth — whether being in an alien culture, unsure of local norms, or because the destination presents a variety of risks that you’re not used to. This can be as simple as being unsure of food and drink, not being able to speak the language — through to actively being targeted for theft, assault or kidnap.
What’s more you may also be responsible for your team. All of these make it difficult to concentrate on the work, compounding stress and anxiety. It’s highly unproductive and accelerates burn out.
It doesn’t need to be this way
For the past fifteen years I’ve been a professional security and risk consultant, I work with some of the world’s leading organisations, advising their travellers and teams how to travel smarter, with a focus on enabling individuals and teams to be happier and more productive while working in complex and higher-risk environments.
The work encompasses many of the destinations you’re probably already familiar with from your own travels and others, like Somalia and Syria, that are at the more extreme end of the risk spectrum.
Often I’m the person on the end of the phone when the worst happens — a natural disaster strikes, a conflict breaks out, or individuals are under threat. This is the more reactive part of my role. I find it far more effective to work with individuals and teams before they leave for their project/expedition/assignment to help them prepare more effectively for the environment they are stepping into, and to ensure they know how to respond if or when things turn to sh*t. A big part of my focus is to help build long-term resilience, and a key part of resilience is managing the anxiety of operating in remote and / or higher risk environments.
How do you hit the ground running, and keep anxiety to manageable levels wherever your work travel takes you?
There are a range of different techniques you can use, but from my experience there are three areas that are often overlooked, and can have a significant impact on individuals and teams in the field if managed poorly.
1. Break down the origins of anxiety
Many of you have a role that requires extensive travel. For someone, say, brought up in the US or Singapore, these are likely to include travel to rural India, third tier cities in China, almost all countries in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East (and to be fair people from those countries have a similar set of anxieties when travelling to your home country). Extensive travel to new and novel locations typically increases anxiety, and is compounded by recent negative news events, job instability, and the strain of maintaining relationships over long distances. Furthermore, you’re not just managing yourself and your team, but your loved ones.
Being anxious about travelling to an alien and potentially higher-risk location is a completely normal and healthy response. It’s your internal warning system kicking in as it attempts to keep you safe. At the same time, excessive anxiety can work against you, and may actually place you at greater risk once you get on the ground.
Anxiety reduces performance, and can impinge on clear and rational thinking. It serves as a continual source of distraction, particularly if you’re worrying about the wrong things — without the proper frameworks in place everything presents a risk. Being out of your comfort zone requires you to be clear headed and fully prepared.
Some people will try to ignore the potential risks, hoping that nothing untoward will happen.
We all have different ways to manage anxiety. Some people will try to ignore the potential risks, hoping that nothing untoward will happen. If you’re lucky that approach may work for you, but it is not a viable long term strategy. It can lead to disaster when managing teams. Understanding, prioritising and rationalising risks are skills that can be learned, but it takes experience to apply these skills in different contexts.
2. Objectively assess potential risks
Having a balanced and objective assessment of the potential risks is the foundation of your planning. You should start this process before you make the decision to travel in the first place. Understand that many risks, particularly complex risks, can’t be fully mitigated. The only way to mitigate them completely is not to travel. By choosing to travel you are tacitly accepting those risks.
There are a number of different approaches to assess risk in a practical way that produces an actionable outcome. What we want to do is move beyond the theory of assessing the risks to the practice of mitigating them in the street.
As a start point, always assume a base level of risk. Risks like petty theft and vehicle accidents, for example, can happen anywhere.
Next, focus on the stand out risks for the location you’re heading to. These risks can require our constant attention and can sap team energy, for example maintaining awareness of kidnap attempts or mass street demonstrations. In our OCE masterclasses we work through practical ways to manage stand-out risks.
3. Manage expectations at home
A key factor in being able to continually travel to higher-risk locations is ensuring that those people closest to us are comfortable with it and have the right information and support should things escalate. This part is never easy, but we have a templated set of conversations that help travellers prime and manage these remote relationships.
Travel anxiety can be proactively managed using the techniques described above. There are other techniques you can use to manage your anxiety and ensure optimum performance when travelling to higher-risk locations. We use a range of techniques, for example locking in a solid communications plan, ensuring we have a soft landing, discreetly carrying cash (lots of it), building robust contingency plans, using specialised insurance, and packing our gear in a way that enables us to perform our work well.
How do you manage travel anxiety? What techniques work for you?
Thanks for reading.
My name is Grant Rayner, and I’m the founder of Spartan9. I’ve been working in the field of travel security for over 20 years, and have supported travellers and organisations through a host of complex incidents. I’m the author of The Guide to Travelling in Higher-Risk Environments, the Field Guide Series and Under the Radar, amongst other niche titles. I also design specialised bags for travellers who push the boundaries.
If you’re interested in travel security, you’ll enjoy Dangerous Travels, my weekly newsletter on Substack.
