How I Conquered Agoraphobia and Traveled the World for 5 Months 

Anxiety can create confines for where you can and can’t go, and what you can and can’t do. It creates this invisible prison that puts restrictions on your life, and as your anxiety gets worse, that prison can keep getting smaller and smaller. 

That’s exactly what happened to me. For those of you who don’t know my story, I developed severe anxiety about 10 years ago and it completely changed my life. I suddenly began having constant anxiety, panic attacks, derealization, and just about every other anxiety symptom. Over the course of only a month, I went from someone who was outgoing and enjoyed doing things outside, to being almost exclusively confined to my house. In fact, it got to the point where I’d only leave my house if it was absolutely necessary. 

To be honest, as the months wore on, I became convinced that I would be stuck that way forever. Because despite desperately searching for ways to get rid of my anxiety, I couldn’t find anyone or anything that could help me. I visited doctors, therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. I read books, blogs, and forums, anything that I could find. However, each was a dead end filled with recommendations for medications or simple coping strategies. 

But then I found the way out. I discovered how to get rid of my anxiety once and for all and return to the person that I was before anxiety. Today, I want to tell you my story of how I overcame my agoraphobia, all my anxiety symptoms, and traveled the world with my wife for nearly 5 months. Let’s get started

Alright, I’m going to reveal something that I have not ever talked about. Before I developed an anxiety disorder, I had travel anxiety. What I mean is that I would get terrible, overwhelming anxiety when I’d take certain trips. Looking back, this began when I was a very young child, like 6 or 7 years old, and it showed up in the form of homesickness. What would happen is I’d occasionally go on an overnight trip without my parents and if I didn’t feel 100% comfortable in the environment, I’d become sick to my stomach and need to have my parents come pick me up. This happened at overnight basketball and soccer camps, summer retreats, and even on a trip to my grandparent's house. What would happen though, is that as soon as my parents would show up to pick me up, this homesickness would go away and I’d instantly feel 100% better. 

Unfortunately, this continued to adulthood in the form of travel anxiety. If I traveled far away from home and I wasn’t completely comfortable with where I was staying or who I was with, there was a good chance I’d become overwhelmed with severe anxiety. This happened many times, including when I was in college and took a 2-week trip through China and when I moved halfway across the country to begin graduate school. In these situations, I’d become bombarded with anxiety. Unfortunately, what this travel anxiety did was cause me to avoid certain trips and even miss out on an incredible semester abroad in Australia with my friends.  

OK, so when did my agoraphobia start? Well, that didn’t happen until after graduate school. What happened is I was again moving halfway across the country, but this time it was to start a new job. As we moved, my travel anxiety flared up again and just after we moved into our new home, I had a string of panic attacks. Those panic attacks sent me into a downward spiral of debilitating anxiety that lasted nearly two years. 

As my anxiety became increasingly worse, my world began to shrink even further. What happened was my anxiety and panic attacks became so bad that I started leaving my house less and less often. The reason for that was two-fold. First, because I was experiencing more frequent anxiety and panic attacks, I wanted to be at my house so I could suffer in privacy and isolation. I didn’t want to experience severe anxiety while I was at the grocery store, or a panic attack while I was out to eat with friends. I wanted to be at home where I could deal with these privately. Second, I found that leaving my house and being in different situations would often trigger my anxiety. In other words, I was more likely to have severe anxiety or a panic attack when I was, for instance, at the grocery store or out to dinner. And because I was suffering so much already, I wanted to avoid triggering any additional anxiety. 

Fortunately, after nearly two years of suffering, I found the way out and I fully overcame my anxiety. I did this by following a step-by-step framework that I created to completely lose my fear of anxiety and desensitize my nervous system. At the heart of that framework is what I call the “Fearless Approach”, which I talk about in great detail in other episodes. But for those of you who don’t know, the Fearless Approach is a 4-Step response that you need to implement each time you experience anxiety. So, whenever you feel your anxiety coming on, here’s what you need to do:

1. Dismiss Your Anxious Thoughts
2. Surrender to Your Anxious Sensations
3. (Bonus Step #3) Transform Your Anxiety
4. (Bonus Step #4) Encourage Your Anxiety

If this is the first time hearing about the Fearless Approach and you want more information, simply download the 5 Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks in the link below. It’s completely free and it’ll provide the complete guide that I teach to my clients to allow them to fully recover from anxiety.

For me, I used these same steps to completely overcome agoraphobia, my anxiety, and all its strange and intense symptoms. After I did, I was not only leaving my house, but I soon started to talk to my wife about traveling the world. What had happened was that I had felt so caged up with my agoraphobia that once I overcame it, I wanted to go the completely opposite direction and see the world. Not only that but I wanted to make sure I also conquered my travel anxiety once and for all. 
So my wife and I began planning and then began a 5-month trip through 10 countries. Our first stop was rural Uganda, Africa, to spend two weeks at a small children’s orphange. As you can imagine, this was the true test of whether I could overcome my travel anxiety. Because after a 16-hour flight and the most terrifying taxi cab ride of our lives, Melanie and I found ourselves in a place with no electricity, no air conditioning, and no running water. And to be honest, both Melanie and I had anxiety when we arrived and saw our new living arrangements, which was essentially a small cot on a dirt floor. But what we did is we used Step #3 of the Fearless Approach and we transformed that anxious energy into excitement. We got excited about cooking over a fire, we got excited about getting water from a nearby well, and we even got excited about sleeping in that small cot under a mosquito net. And because we didn’t allow ourselves to become afraid of the anxiety, we had the most incredible and eye-opening experience of our lives at that small orphanage. We witnessed how the people of that small village could be so unbelievably kind and happy despite having no money, no significant possessions, and no real opportunity to change or improve their lives. They were content in the lives that they were living, and witnessing that has had a lasting, meaningful impact on both Melanie and me. 

After that, there wasn’t any situation or environment that could trigger my travel anxiety. So, after we left Uganda we went on to swim in crystal clear water in the Greek Islands, go surfing and cliff jumping in Indonesia, travel through the Philippines on motorcycles, and run races in Taiwan. We ate some of the best food and drank some of the finest wine that we’ve ever had. We got to explore this beautiful world, when less than a year earlier I could hardly leave my house. And this isn’t some miracle - I’m not an outlier. If I can do it, you can certainly do it. Agoraphobia and anxiety is 100% curable, all you need is the right guidance and direction to get there. So, take a look at the link below and make sure you are on the path to a full recovery. See you on the next episode.