Psychologists say post-trip “off” feelings often surface as seven odd habits — spot any in your first week back?
Every August, I come back from travel and cannot find my place.
It happened this year after Spain. It happened last year after the Netherlands and Croatia. The year before, Bordeaux.
It’s different after winter trips — January offers structure when I land. There are decorations, family gatherings, and a shared calendar that tells me where to stand.
woAugust has no such scaffolding. The city feels half-closed, people are away, and my body is still tuned to the road. My mood drops, my energy spreads thin, and the smallest tasks feel heavier than they did before I left.
I have tried to explain it as “just a phase,” but it repeats with the same pattern, so I’m naming the behaviors I fall into. When I see them clearly, I can meet them with a quieter kind of care instead of forcing myself to “snap back.”
1. I delay the ordinary because I’m still elsewhere
Unpacking sits in a corner for days. I wear the same two things, not because I like them best but because opening the suitcase feels like closing something I want to keep open.
I stretch grocery shopping into an abstract plan and keep ordering takeaway I don’t even enjoy.
My inbox grows and I answer only the urgent messages, then feel guilty. It looks like laziness from the outside. Inside, it’s a form of orienting.
Travel loads the nervous system with new routes, faces, and sounds.
When I return, executive function lags. Psychologists sometimes call this a “switching cost” — the time and energy it takes to move between contexts.
I am not avoiding life — I’m catching up with it. The delay is my attempt to find the outline of the day again, to confirm that the ground holds before I commit my weight to it.
2. I chase stimulation while ignoring what my body actually needs
In August, I open tabs for cheap flights, research applications, new courses, and even cooking apps.
I design futures with speed and forget water, protein, and sleep.
It’s not a mystery: novelty changes how reward systems fire. On the road, every street, menu, and conversation is a small experiment.
Back home, prediction becomes accurate again, which lowers dopamine spikes. The nervous system notices the drop even if I pretend I don’t.
So I keep scrolling for friction, and I call it “being curious.” The better name is “seeking intensity to avoid regulation.”
The cure is not to ban desire but to track needs in plain language: food, movement, sunlight, contact.
When those are steady, planning isn’t becomes a choice, not a compulsion like most of the things I do on a daily basis. I try to remember that appetite and meaning come back when basic care is consistent — not when I push myself into the next high.
3. I hold on to fragments and forget to re-enter the room I live in
After Spain, I left my conference notebook open on the desk for a week while I worked. The pages sat there like a running thread — dates, names, people, a few sentences underlined twice because they still felt alive.
After Croatia, the sea salt dried on my clothes, and I pretended not to see it. I loop the same playlist from the train between Tilburg and Amsterdam and keep photos too available.
These objects and screens help me tolerate the return.
In psychoanalysis, we call them transitional objects — they connect two states and make the shift less rough.
The risk is that I stop entering the present.
I can chew on a memory until it loses taste, then wonder why I feel empty in my own kitchen.
Naming the function helps: the notebook, song, and photo are signals that I miss a pace that felt right. When I treat them as signals rather than substitutes, I can integrate them — make the playlist part of cooking, put the notebook on the desk, wash the shirt, and step back into the day.
4. I become short with people I love because protest feels safer than grief
In Croatia, the return was hardest.
I noticed how easily I snapped at questions that were simply affectionate: “How was it?” “Are you tired?” “Want to go for a walk?”
I felt crowded by care.
In attachment terms, this is a protest. The system wants closeness and certainty after a long period of change, but it doesn’t trust it yet, so it pushes.
The push looks like irritation, sarcasm, or withdrawal. Underneath is grief that the trip ended and fear that ordinary life will not meet me.
When I can say that out loud — “I’m sad it’s over and scared nothing here will move me” — the protest softens. The person across from me can finally reach me.
The behavior shifts when I recognize that I’m not angry at them — I’m arguing with the gap between a vivid month and a quiet apartment.
5. I misread August as evidence that nothing matters
Summer’s end is strange.
Cities slow down, social rhythms thin out, and the shared timeline disappears. In winter, there are formal anchors — holidays and family rituals. August has fewer markers. Without them, my mind labels the quiet as meaninglessness.
Cognitive psychologists call this a prediction error: the brain expects one pattern of reward and finds a different one, then mislabels the whole field as “bad.”
There is also a seasonal influence. Heat disrupts sleep, and sleep loss inflates negative affect.
So the story I tell—“Nothing happens in August”—combines physiology and interpretation. It helps to counter with facts, not slogans: I can still meet a friend, open a book, or take a late swim.
And yet the larger insight remains: I need temporal structure.
Without it, my evaluation of life’s content becomes unreliable. It’s not that nothing matters — it’s that I need a calendar that reflects what I care about.
6. After long roads, stopping disturbs rhythms I only learned by walking
A person I care about came back from the Camino trip with a very small notebook — full of stamps, emotional notes, sketches of things he saw and names of people he doesn’t want to forget.
He showed me pictures and told me the hard parts without dressing them up: almost having to sleep in the wild, almost getting bitten by an unfriendly dog, the long walks when he barely felt his feet, fires that almost chocked him and he kept going anyway.
At home, the shape of his days is unclear. He wakes late without caring that he might be late for work. Meals feel optional. Messages sit unread. He moves from room to room and can’t decide what to start.
His smiling face is nowhere.
But I feel this isn’t a weakness.
After all, during the trip, every day on the route offered a start time, a distance, and an arrival.
Stopping removes that structure, and the nervous system needs time to reset.
I tell him what I tell myself after August returns: begin with simple anchors.
One morning start. One task that matters. One person to talk to.
Light, food, movement, contact.
He nods. Or I imagine he does.
Later, he might send a message. Maybe a picture of coffee at the same table two mornings in a row. Maybe a sentence as small as: I'm fine. Or maybe nothing at all.
I want to believe he will return to himself, that the smile I remember will surface when he finds a rhythm he can trust. But for now, the distance between us feels wider than the miles he walked.
7. I make strict rules to force normal, then break them and feel ashamed
My first impulse is still to announce a regime: wake up early, exercise daily, cook every meal, inbox zero by Friday.
I hold it for two days, slip on day three, and decide I have failed.
The pattern is predictable because sudden restriction after high stimulation often produces rebound.
Behavior science offers practical tools here — implementation intentions and friction.
I lower the friction and shrink the first step.
Unpack today. Buy groceries for one meal. Walk thirty minutes. Answer three emails that actually move something forward. One invitation this week, not five.
When those hold for a few days, I add the next layer.
This feels plain, not heroic, but it works.
The steadiness gives August enough shape to carry the parts of travel I want to keep: better attention, a kinder pace, more direct contact.
8. I question my life and imagine abandoning it, then remember this is a state, not a truth
After Bordeaux, I drafted plans to move, sell things, adopt a different schedule, ge trid of my obsessions, and reset my days.
The expansion that travel brings can make home look too small.
This is where I try to recall a simple principle from emotion regulation: mood-congruent thinking is biased. In a low state, appraisals skew negative. In a high state, they skew positive.
The evaluation is real as a feeling, but it is not stable enough to guide decisions.
So I give it time. If the same thought repeats after two weeks of sleep, food, movement, and contact, then I take it seriously.
Often it fades into a smaller adjustment — an office move, a class, a new project.
I don’t dismiss the impulse to change — I postpone the timeline until my nervous system is actually in the present.
Final thoughts
Coming back from Spain this year, I tried something different.
I named the August pattern to myself before the plane landed. I told two people I trust that the first week would feel flat and that it wasn’t a verdict on my life or on them.
I scheduled small anchors: a market run, a call, a long walk without headphones.
I let the suitcase sit one night, not seven. I kept the photos but moved them out of reach for a few days. I wrote down what the trip gave me in plain phrases — pace, contact, new ideas, a sense of capacity — and asked where those could live at home.
They didn’t vanish — they changed form.
If you feel strange when you return — especially in August — you are just moving from one tempo to another. The eight behaviors above are not character flaws. They are signs of a system recalibrating.
See them, name them, and take care of the basics.
Then add the parts you actually miss from the road, one by one, until your days carry that same quiet conviction: you start, you walk, you arrive.
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