The Years of Travelling Anxiously: Surviving Fear and Panic All Over the World

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you’re convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won’t die despite being stuck with them in an ambulance in a smoky Global Southern gridlock.

Over the last twenty years, writer and academic Tom Sykes has been lucky enough to travel all over the world. But his trips have often been marred – if not ruined – by anxiety. This has led to family and relationship strains, occasional hospitalisation and frequent embarrassment – especially amongst people and in cultures where mental health remains a taboo subject. Sykes might hold a world record for the most panic attacks in the most places around the globe – from Lagos to Tokyo, Accra to Antalya, Manila to Portsmouth. Part travelogue, part wellbeing memoir, The Years of Travelling Anxiously hopes to solve a lifelong conundrum and in so doing help other anxious travellers, or indeed anyone who gets anxious about anything, wherever they go. Sykes’ ‘journey within and without’ takes him to dangerous places both geographically and psychologically. Trying to discover the root of his malaise, he is forced to question the fundamentals of his life.