Pre-Travel Stress Syndrome
Traveling with your family can be fun. Traveling with your family during the holidays can be fun, but a bit hectic. Traveling with your family during the holidays to stay with relatives for three weeks is fun and hectic, but keeping everyone entertained and happy requires a lot of advance planning and scheduling of the part of the grownups. Throw in a 14-hour flight, 16-hour time difference and 25-degree temperature difference and it can feel like you're embarking on a major lifestyle change! Which is why, for the past five days, I've found myself wide awake and alert by 6:30AM, itching to get up, with "What should I be doing today?" thoughts racing through my head. I've come down with PTSS — Pre Travel Stress Syndrome.
If you think PTSS doesn't exist, just take a look at the photo. The person bending over ungracefully on the far right is me. Only a person suffering from PTSS would allow her ass to be photographed that way.
Every day, for the whole week before we're about to travel abroad for an extended period of time, my adrenaline kicks in and I enter a state of perpetual alertness and increased brain activity. My brain goes into a "What do we need to do before we leave" cycle, and it won't stop until the airplane doors close. Writing down to-do lists or packing lists doesn't seem to make a difference; there always seems to be a part of my mind that's furiously working in the background, running through mental list, seeing what things I can cross off. Besides, there are always new items to add to the list ("Need new bathing suit to hide the 5 pounds I've gained", "Regretfully decline invitation to annoying neighbor's holiday party", you get the picture).
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