Why You Come Home From Vacation Needing Another Vacation

I had a conversation on the podcast this week that I haven't stopped thinking about. My guest was Kim McLaughlin, a California licensed psychotherapist who works with high achieving women on anxiety, burnout, and the habit of putting themselves last. She also has her own podcast, Feed Your Soul with Kim, and wrote a book on making peace with food. None of that sounds like travel talk on paper. It turned into one of the most useful conversations I've had about why so many of us come home from a trip more tired than when we left.

The Vacation After the Vacation Is Real

You know the phrase. Kim hears it constantly from her clients. You spend the week before a trip getting everything done so you can leave, you spend the trip half checking your phone, and you come home to a pile of everything you pushed off, plus jet lag. So where's the vacation in that?

Kim's answer stuck with me. A lot of us treat rest like something we have to earn permission for, and even when we get away, we don't actually let ourselves be gone. She told a story about picking up a work call at Disneyland. Twice. On different trips. She knew she was on vacation, and she answered anyway, because there's a piece of ego in feeling needed, and because saying "I'm out of the country, you can't reach me" feels harder than it should.

I felt that one. I'm in the travel world, so if a client of mine is traveling and something comes up, my instinct is to pick up. That's part of the job. But Kim's point wasn't really about work calls. It was about whether you can actually let go while you're away, and whether not letting go is costing you the thing you took the trip for in the first place.

Building Non-Negotiables Into a Trip

Here's where it got interesting for me, because I think about travel logistics all day and Kim thinks about the mind behind the traveler, and we landed in the same place from two different directions. She talked about building non-negotiables into a trip. A journal, a walk every day, getting to bed on time, a nap, unapologetically, while everyone else keeps moving. Eating on a schedule that actually works for her body instead of whatever the group is doing. None of that sounds glamorous. All of it is the difference between coming home restored and coming home wrecked.

When the Trip Doesn't Go as Planned

We also talked about what happens when a trip doesn't go the way you pictured it. Her husband washed a train ticket in Europe, and they nearly missed their connection going the wrong direction. Her daughter got sick their first day abroad. Neither of those are the moments she planned for, and yet both of them became the stories she is still telling years later. That's the thing about travel that a lot of people miss going in. You're not signing up for a version of your life with fewer problems. You're signing up for a different set of problems, and usually a better story.

Traveling With People Who Want Different Things

This is exactly why I always get the whole traveling party on a call before I build an itinerary. One person wants museums from morning to night, another wants three days by a pool and nothing else, and the trip has to hold both of those people without either one feeling like they gave everything up. Kim and her husband have negotiated this for years in their own marriage. She wanted a beach for a week. He wanted one night in ten different places. They found a middle that works for both of them, and she goes home with her own list of things she actually got to do, not just his.

What Transformation Through Travel Actually Looks Like

The bigger idea Kim left me with us that before you go, during the trip, and after you're home, ask yourself what you actually need to come out of this changed. Not changed in a big dramatic way. Changed like you tried the food you were nervous about, or you figured out three words in a language you don't speak, or you let a plan fall apart and found something better on the other side of it. That's what she calls leaning into transformation, and you don't need to fly to Europe to find it. It can happen fifty miles from home on a camping trip if you let it.

Your Next Trip

If any of this hit close to home, I'd love to hear which part. And if a Christmas market trip has been sitting on your someday list, I have a couple of spots left for Colmar, Strasbourg, and Germany this December. I grew up in that part of the world, and I'll be on the ground with you the whole time. Come join us in the Facebook group, Luxury Travel Advisor Sandy: Vacations, Group Trips and Hidden Luxury Escapes, and let's talk about what your next trip could actually give you.