CHAPTER 8

Ameliorating Travel Fatigue

(or I Am So Tired and Stressed I Don’t Care How Beautiful the Ocean Is!)

Jet lag is for amateurs.

—Dick Clark

Chapter Preview

The powerful negative effects that fatigue, stress, and exhaustion can play on our ability to achieve travel satisfaction are discussed in this chapter. Remedies are examined that can help ameliorate both short-term, travel-related conditions such as jet lag or temporary sleep deprivation and more general, long-term feelings of lack of well-being. As part of this examination, a brief description of the health and wellness travel movement is included, as well as an overview of what it means to deeply savor something.

Travel Fatigue

One major obstacle we can encounter when we embark on trips is the simple fact that traveling today can be quite tiring and just plain hard. This is true of both the setbacks we can face while traveling on route to our destinations and the difficulties we can encounter at our destinations themselves. All of this can be overlooked in the utopia of planning a trip and thinking about how wonderful it all will be. We ponder our upcoming vacations and imagine that we will continuously experience peace, quiet, and deep relaxation or exciting fun (Kurtz 2017). But traveling, as we all know, can involve many physical, mental, and emotional hassles, and these hassles can sometimes sap energy and turn what we had expected to be a restful journey into an exhausting challenge to endure.

Imagine, for instance, that we are embarking on a trip to some faraway Caribbean island. As we think of this trip, we see ourselves swimming in lovely aqua blue water or lying sunbathing on white sand with the scent of tropical flowers and the sound of the surf gently lulling us to sleep. Ah... wonderful. But the reality might be quite different. First, we have to get to the island of our dreams in order to enjoy it. This may involve getting out of bed in the wee hours of the night, driving in heavy traffic to an airport, encountering difficulty in finding a parking spot there, lugging heavy bags up and down curbs, waiting in long lines for check-in and security, putting up with airline schedule delays, sitting in a plane for hours in a small and uncomfortable seat, eating strange-tasting food on the plane during a time that is off our usual eating schedule, transferring at some point to another even smaller and more uncomfortable plane for the final leg of the journey, and then renting a car in a culture that is new to us. So when we finally arrive at our hotel, we are not feeling ecstatic but rather just tired and grumpy. Even though our room may be beautiful, the bed is different from the one we have at home, and the light comes into our room in the morning earlier than we are used to. Thus, our sleep patterns are disrupted. We additionally can end up eating all kinds of food that we normally avoid, and this can wreak havoc with our digestive system. We may also be suffering from jet lag or sleep deprivation caused by taking early red-eye flights that make us feel weak and slightly disoriented. Finally, even after we have adjusted to our new sleeping and eating schedules, we may still feel stressed from having to expend a lot of energy negotiating a new milieu with which we are not completely familiar. All of this is quite taxing.

Helping Us Deal With Short-Term Travel Fatigue

The above is not to say that there are not wonderful aspects to traveling, but simply to suggest that many parts of it can pose difficulties for us that diminish our well-being. Although these difficulties can’t be simply wiped away, there are things that people in the travel industry could put in place to lessen the impact of some of them.

To start with, as we talked about earlier in the book, a travel planner could work with us to assist us in organizing trips that were not over-scheduled or involved too much strenuous traveling from one location to another. For instance, on a one-week trip to Europe, it would be more reasonable for us to try to visit only two or three major cities rather than touring a different city each day. We might also be advised not to cram too many events into our daily touring outings and to be sure to insert rest periods or downtimes into our travel agendas. All of these things could work to ameliorate the fatigue that comes from having unworkable travel goals. Travel planners could also help us book flights or arrange other modes of transportation that, to the extent possible, did not involve many tiring connections and long stopovers between different legs of our journeys.

After we arrive at our destinations, travel providers there could additionally work with us to help us recuperate from other types of travel hassles. For instance, for the very jet-lagged among us, hotel staff might have flexible check-in times that allow us to access our rooms on schedules that fit our own internal clocks rather than the official time at our destination places. Staff also could extend hours for serving us meals like breakfast when we first arrive and/or make available to us light, healthy food that helps with jet lag syndromes (Fletcher 2020). To increase our comfort, discounts could additionally be offered to us for various restorative guest services such as in-room massage or aromatherapy.

Other sorts of short-term restorative situations could be created for those of us who simply need a way to recharge from the rigors of days spent touring. For example, a hotel that had a beautiful garden in the back of its property could make revitalizing garden walks available to us in which the scent of flowers, the visual beauty of plants, and the sound of waterfalls produce calming feelings. Or, for those of us who prefer more direct tactile sensations, refresh packages could be offered that include things like gentle stretching activities or soothing soaks in warm tubs filled with calming oils. The point is that environments could be structured that allow us to become revitalized in ways that best suit us.

Wellness Vacations: Promoting Revitalization

While some of us just want to recover from short-term travel fatigue or restore ourselves now and then from everyday travel hassles, for others the whole point of taking our trips is to enhance our general sense of well-being. Wellness resorts and spas have been around for a long time in many different cultures, but they are surging in popularity again today (Koncul 2012). In part, this popularity reflects a more inclusive way of looking at the nature of positive functioning (Bickenbach 2017) that differentiates between wellness as being simply a lack of disease versus a definition that emphasizes a broader wholeness and balance in body, mind, and spirit. Health, in this latter conceptualization, is not seen as being a neutral state in which illness is not present, but rather a condition in which we flourish in multiple spheres of our lives (Mueller and Kaufman 2000).

To meet the increasing interest in this kind of wellness, a wide spectrum of services are now available, including offerings that cater to those of us in different life stages who have different sorts of needs and preferences (Smith and Puczko 2009). For instance, activities in health tourism facilities can include services to enhance the wellness of our spirits (yoga, meditation, chanting), our physical bodies (massage, healing waters, physical fitness training, saunas, mud baths), and our minds (lectures, inspirational readings, group discussions). There are also resorts that offer simple pampering, or what might be called sanctuary environments for us (Stephens 2020). We can find hotels that include amenities such as private plunge pools and lanais, personal chefs, and in-room massage and beauty treatments. The choices that are available are endless in this regard, and all such services work to restore our sense of vitality and wholeness. However, to benefit maximally from them, we have to be able to savor what is offered to us. We will turn to a discussion of the idea of savoring next.

Thinking More About Savoring

Savoring entails a heightening of pleasure in something by intentionally directing awareness to it. In this sense, it is a type of mindfulness, but a kind of mindfulness in which we deliberately focus on positive, not neutral or negative events (Dube and Le Bel 2001). Savoring draws out and elongates pleasure. It involves an appreciative receptivity to the good and beauty around one (Bryant and Veroff 2007). Although savoring does not necessarily have to be accompanied by a slowing down of our behavior (we can savor fleeting instances), slowness does often add to our ability to pay attention to what is before us in a more thoughtful way than if we were more hurried or rushed in our activities (see Shulman 1992).

To think more about this idea of savoring, we might imagine what this kind of state, in fact, feels like. When we do this, we should notice that savoring is multifaceted and involves input from divergent sensory modalities, including sights, sounds, smells, and touch (Le Bel and Dube 2001; Kringelbach and Berridge 2010).

Let’s say that we were sunbathing on the beach sometime during our vacation after a tiring afternoon of museum touring the day before. As we feel the warmth of the sun on our skin, we can also intentionally attend to other sensations that would deepen our experience. For instance, we might bring into our awareness the sound of sea birds or children playing; we might take in the smell of the salt sea air; we might listen to the rhythm of the waves as they rise and then retreat on the beach, and attend to the small space between these patterns when there is a certain magical stillness. Learning to relax in a savoring manner means learning how to wallow in and soak up delight from multiple sensations that we bring into our focus as we respond to something. When we bring this kind of awareness to our situation, we say we are luxuriating in our experience. In such a state, we are simply receptive to our surroundings, not acting on them, and we are restored in a deep and satisfying way.

Of course, environments exist even in very expensive luxury hotels that are not particularly conducive to savoring. Distractions, noise, and jarring sounds impede savoring experiences. Loud colors, crowded settings, and uncomfortable climates make achieving this state less feasible. For some, a very public setting is less amenable to this sort of letting go and wallowing than more private arrangements, while for others, the public/private distinction is less important.

The above suggests all wellness settings are not created alike. What might cause one of us to delight in a particular experience and come away feeling very refreshed and satisfied may not work as well for another. Relaxation and savoring, in general, do not always come easily to many of us, and a little extra attention and thoughtful care on the part of travel providers to find situations that are particularly suited to us would be well worth the effort it might take. Experiencing savoring relaxation is the framework that allows us to dive into our later trip experiences with full zest and energy, an outcome that increases our ability to appreciate what we encounter.

Questions for Discussion

Please work with the following questions to think more about the problems of travel fatigue and the nature of wellness, and about how travel providers might work with us to reduce the former and enhance the latter. Draw both on your personal experiences as a traveler and/or any experiences you have had in the travel industry as you do this.

1. What has helped you most to get over jet lag or fatigue from tiring flights or other modes of travel on trips that you have taken? Have you ever used any restorative services or techniques similar to the ones mentioned in this chapter? If yes, describe.

2. What suggestion or suggestions made in this chapter about how to promote recovery from short-term travel fatigue were most interesting to you? Explain. Are there other things that were not mentioned that you would like people in the travel industry to make available to promote short-term relaxation and restoration from tiring trips?

3. Have you ever gone on a spa or wellness vacation similar to the ones described in this chapter, or known someone who went on such a trip? If yes, please describe and talk about what you or they liked best and least about it.

4. Consider now the concept of savoring. Many of us have difficulty savoring or relaxing easily. Why do you think this is so? Are most of the travel environments you have been in (e.g., hotels, airports and other transportation centers, restaurants, etc.) relaxing places that are conducive to savoring? If no, how could this be improved?

Notes

 

 

 

 

 

 

..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset
34.206.1.144