Sometimes I Need a Vacation From My Own Brain

My brain never stops.

There is almost always something happening up there, and usually several things at once. Imagine that meme of the guy with equations floating around his head, crossed with the one where there are approximately 47 browser tabs open at the same time. That's me. I'm thinking about something I need to do tomorrow while replaying something that happened yesterday. I'm planning something six months from now while wondering whether I responded to an email from this morning. I can turn a relatively simple decision about my own life into an internal debate with enough arguments and counterarguments to fill an afternoon.

The strange thing is that I haven't always struggled to make decisions. Put me in a leadership role, especially when something was going wrong, and I could make them remarkably quickly. For years, I was often the person other people looked to when something unexpected happened. I could take in the information, decide what needed to happen, and act. There wasn't always time to analyze every possible outcome, and somehow I was okay with that.

I'm still pretty good at doing it for other people. Give me someone else's problem and I can usually look at it objectively, weigh the options, and tell them what I think makes the most sense. It's part of what I enjoy about being a travel advisor. Give me your vacation dates, budget, and a vague idea of what you want, and I'll happily start putting the pieces together.

Give me a decision about my own life and apparently we need to convene a committee. Suddenly there are seventeen browser tabs open, I've considered six possible outcomes (and that's probably an understatement), I've asked three people what they think, and there's a decent chance I'll still be thinking about it tomorrow.

I'm working on that.

But there is one place where my brain seems to behave differently: somewhere else.

Traveling is usually when I feel most at ease. I can be dropped into the middle of one of the busiest cities in the world, surrounded by traffic and people and noise, in a place where I may not even speak the language particularly well, and somehow feel calmer than I do during the normal day-to-day of my life at home. My shoulders drop. My brain slows down. I become more present.

I notice it most when I'm sitting at a café. At home, going to a coffee shop usually has a purpose. I bring my laptop. I order my coffee, find a table, connect to the Wi-Fi, and get to work. Maybe I'm writing a blog post, researching a trip, answering emails, or working on my business. I enjoy being there, but the coffee shop is still serving a function. I have gone there to accomplish something.

Put me at a café in another city and I can sit there doing absolutely nothing. I'll order a coffee, a glass of wine, maybe something small to eat, and just watch. I watch people walking home from work. I watch someone stop to talk to someone they know. I watch the waiter move between tables and the buses go by and the city carry on around me. I like watching how a place lives and breathes when nobody is putting on a show for the person visiting it.

And somehow, I'm completely fine with just sitting there.

That might sound incredibly ordinary, but for me, it isn't. I have a complicated relationship with doing nothing. Somewhere along the way, I seem to have internalized the idea that unused time is wasted time. If I have a few free hours at home, my brain immediately starts figuring out what I could do with them. There is always work I could get ahead on, an errand I could run, something I could clean, something I could write, something I could plan. Even things I genuinely enjoy can become another way of making sure the time was used for something.

I don't entirely know where that comes from. It's actually something I'm trying to understand better in therapy right now.

What I do know is that the thought seems to disappear when I travel. I don't sit at that café thinking about whether there is a more productive use of my afternoon. I don't need the hour to produce anything. I don't even necessarily need anything interesting to happen. I can just sit there and exist for a little while, and somehow that feels like enough.

The irony is that I am such a planner that I have started intentionally planning time to do nothing.

When I build my own itineraries, I leave empty space. Not accidental gaps because I couldn't find something to do, but actual time when there is nowhere we need to be. I might have dinner planned that evening, but there are several hours beforehand with absolutely nothing on the calendar. I protect those hours because I've learned that I need them.

Honestly, I think that's often when travel gets really good. Maybe you walk past somewhere that looks interesting and go inside. Maybe you stop for a drink because you like the table outside. Maybe you're tired and go back to the hotel for two hours. Maybe you sit in a park. Maybe you wander around without having any idea what you're looking for. Or maybe you do absolutely nothing worth reporting back to anyone when you get home.

The more trips I plan, both for myself and for my clients, the more convinced I've become that not every hour of a trip needs to justify its existence.

I'm trying to figure out why I have a harder time believing the same thing about my life at home.

I also want to be careful about what I'm saying here, because I don't believe travel is a cure for mental health struggles. I've written about this before, in a post I rather appropriately called Depression, But With a Nicer View. I've had difficult days in beautiful places. I've felt depressed while traveling. I've learned firsthand that changing the view outside your window doesn't guarantee that anything changes inside your head.

Right now, I'm going through a season where I'm struggling

with my mental health. I'm in therapy. I'm working on it. Some days are better than others, and I'm trying to give myself a little more patience while I figure out what I need.

And in less than two weeks, I'm going back to Italy.

I'd be lying if I said there isn't a small part of me hoping the trip resets something in me. I hope I get off the plane and feel my shoulders drop. I hope my brain gets a little quieter. I hope that being removed from my normal routines and responsibilities gives me some room to breathe and that maybe my nervous system gets a bit of a reset.

But I've traveled enough to know better than to put that kind of responsibility on a vacation. Italy doesn't owe me a reset. A plane ticket isn't a treatment plan (debatable), and Bologna isn't going to magically solve whatever I'm trying to work through in therapy.

So I'm trying not to ask that of this trip. What I am hoping for is much smaller. I want to be present. I want to sit outside and have absolutely nowhere we need to be for the next couple of hours. I want to drink an espresso without opening my laptop. I want to walk down a street because it looks interesting, not because Google Maps has told me it's the fastest route to something else. I want the blank spaces I've deliberately put into our itinerary to stay blank.

Maybe that's what I mean when I say I sometimes need a vacation from my own brain.

Obviously, my brain is coming with me. Unfortunately, TSA has yet to offer an option for checking it at the counter.

But maybe for a few hours, sitting at a café somewhere in Italy with nowhere else I need to be, it'll finally shut up for a little while.

Honestly, that would be enough.