Ever get back from a trip and feel like you need a vacation from your vacation? Guilty — and it took me years of traveling to understand why.

How to plan trips that support how you actually feel—not how you think you should feel

We tend to plan travel around logistics: time off, flight prices, school calendars, bucket lists. What we rarely ask—before clicking “book now”—is a much simpler question:

How am I actually feeling right now?

As a clinical psychologist, I’m careful with language around “healing” and “therapy.” Travel is not therapy. It doesn’t replace mental health treatment, and it doesn’t magically resolve anxiety, burnout, or emotional pain.

And yet—anyone who has ever exhaled a little deeper the moment they arrived somewhere new knows there’s something real happening.