Better Travel with IBS

The IBS Interrupt™ Perspective: If the anxiety of traveling with IBS has you compromising your travel plans or cancelling trips altogether, this post explores how you can travel better with IBS.
– Root Cause: How the disruption of routine and a hyper-focus on “what if” scenarios signal danger to your body, actively inducing a gut reaction.
– The Solution: Shifting from worrying about a flare-up to signaling physical safety and appeasing worry by reframing your focus.
Key Takeaway: Learning to go further and actually interrupt symptoms so you can take back control of your life and freedom is a foundational part of my IBS Interrupt™ Process and coaching.

Travel better with IBS

Many of us want to travel, but with IBS that’s not so easy. While there are no magic wand solutions to make travelling with IBS easy, here are my top IBS travel tips to travel better and enjoy your holiday more.

Why we get flare-ups when travelling

There are three main reasons why many IBS sufferers have flare-ups while travelling: the change of routine, the fear of flare-ups and the change of food. Here are some IBS travel tips to improve your experience.

1) Travel with IBS: The change of routine

Travel and IBS do not go particularly well together. When you travel you are changing your routine. Travel takes you out of your relative comfort zone into the unknown.

There are new experiences, plus general worry about “Where have I put the tickets” and being on time, as well as coping during the journey and finding toilets that are on hand..

Needless to say your nervous system takes all these as signs that it should be on alert and responsive to all these changes. If the stress button gets pushed, the chances are that your IBS will be too.

What you can do:

The calmer you can be through all this change, the better experience you will have on holiday with IBS. There are 2 quick methods you can use that may help you reduce that stress:

Focus on the WHY

Instead on focusing on the travelling, keep in mind all the fun reasons you have for going to the destination you have chosen.

Allow yourself to focus on the fun, positive reasons you are going away.

Think of the sensations and experiences you are looking forward to. Maybe you are spending time with loved ones, or discovering somewhere new. Or maybe you are just ready for some rest.

Travelling is often the boring bit.

Keep your eye on how you expect to feel once your there. the sun on your face, being out in the fresh air, enjoying yourself.

Life is for living. So brave the journey and head for the sun!

Breathe!

A second technique that readers of this blog have heard over and over is deep breathing techniques.

We all tend to default into shallow breathing when stress rears its ugly head.

A few deep belly breaths signal safety to your body – just what your IBS needs to hear.

The advantage is that you can do this anywhere or anytime you feel a little uptight.

If you can, imagine yourself already at your destination, close your eyes for a couple of seconds, focus on your belly, and take a deep breaths in.

Hold for the count of 3, then release. Do this 3 times consecutively.

This action brings added oxygen to your body and begins to close down the stress reaction. It won’t solve everything, but you should feel a little relief.

The most difficult part of this technique is remembering to do it. So if you are travelling with someone, tell them about it and get them to prompt you (you don’t have to tell them why!)

2) Travel with IBS: The fear of having a flare-up

Hands up who doesn’t worry about having a flare-up? The actual fear of having a flare-up at the wrong time can be a huge trigger in itself.

What you can do:

There are some techniques I have found very effective to reduce your reaction to fear including the NLP I use in coaching sessions.

As a quick technique, this is what you can do if you are travelling this summer:

This IBS travel tip may sound counter-intuitive, but allow yourself to have a flare-up while travelling.

Take what you need with you to deal with it in your bag, ready, with you at all times.

Make it OK, allowable, acceptable. Then relax. Let it go.

The more you push against this possibility, the more stressed you will feel about it.

Allowing for it will enable you to lower your stress levels around a potential flare-up.

And you may find that as a result it doesn’t happen as badly – or even at all.

Try this out for yourself and see what happens.

3) Travel with IBS: The change of food

As we are all worried about digesting food, then the best way around this one is to take something you digest with you for the journey. This may not solve everything, but it will be one less thing to worry about.

Once you are on holiday with IBS, you can try to make good choices, and even so you may find that something sets you off. So have anything that does you good in these circumstances with you. Just knowing you can cope with this will ease your mind.

Don’t let travel with IBS hold you back this year. Pick a destination and book it. None of us know what is around the corner. So go for it and enjoy yourself!